Some Jews Think Sharpening Knives Needs Magic

San Francisco CA

Description

The Northern California Jewish Weekly is advertising a magic knife sharpening service, for those Jews whom manage to fit magic thinking and their genius intellect into the same brain: S.F. knife store whets kosher appetites with region’s first kosher knife sharpening service Bernal Cutlery is now certified kosher by Sunrise Kosher: the Vaad HaKashrus of Northern California. According to Rabbi Ben-Tzion Welton, head of the Vaad, it is the first knife store and sharpening service in the area to do so. Owned by Jewish couple Josh Donald and Kelly Kozak, the store, on Valencia Street in San Francisco, has long been known in the Bay Area food scene as the go-to place for restaurant chefs to get their knives sharpened. Bernal Cutlery also sells very high-end knives, mostly from Japan. But during Covid, “we’ve seen a huge rise in the number of non-chefs bringing us their knives to be sharpened that come from Bed, Bath & Beyond,” said Kozak. They also get a diverse population, including Muslims doing their own halal slaughter and Jews who sometimes do their own kosher slaughter. As it turns out, it’s very simple to offer the service for kosher knives, as whetstone sharpening, which is the method the store uses, does not heat the knives to the point where the kosher knives could “absorb” the treyf status of nonkosher knives sharpened with the same stone. Oh, c'mon. Enough of this bullshit. Metallurgy is a well established science. Degrees of hardness are also well-established. Sharpening a knife is simply a matter of bringing the knife into contact with something harder than the steel that was used to create the knife. Sharpening with a whetstone is centuries old. There are lots of different whetstones. Rough whetstones. Smooth whetstones. Whetstones with carbide in them. Whetstones made out of ceramic. More important than the whetstone, perhaps, is the lubricant. If you use oil on your whetsotone, you mustn't use water. If you wet your whetstone with water, you mustn't use oil on it. If you're not using a lubricant with your whetstone, then it's possible that you don't actually know what you're doing, and are just making it up as you go. There's a lot of that, these days. OMG! Is the lubricant kosher, too? Better check on that, wizards. Oops. "We'll have to bill you separately for kosher lubricant..." Ceramic rods are favored by professionals. The ceramic is harder than the steel. The rods usually come with a holder that keeps the rods at the correct angle. Or you can just use one rod - ceramic, or steel - to sharpen both sides evenly. No lubricant required. No real cook or kitchen professional outsources their knife sharpening to another person. That's absurd. That's just the rationalization of a bunch of lazy Jews with too much money. They are probably afraid they will cut themselves. There's the REAL problem: physical incompetence. The reason the knife shop sells high-end knives from other countries is because they can mark them up more and because you are unlikely to travel to those countries and see just exactly how much these simple kitchen tools were marked up. The real reason the knife shop offers "kosher knife sharpening" is because the gig, selling marked-up knives from other countries, isn't working too well, and because this gets potential customers into the store. It's a sales gimmick. The idea that a rabbi would involve themselves in such a stupid business as magic knife sharpening that removes the invisible "treyf hobbits" through some sort of absurd temperature control is just so much bullshit. You can prove it, yourself, easily: just go watch the people at the knife shop sharpen knives and see if they are actually checking the temperature of the steel, as they sharpen it. Are they monitoring the sharpening process with a FLIR camera? Or maybe a laser thermometer? I doubt it. Wouldn't that slow things down, to have to stop, check the temperature, do some more sharpening, then stop, check the temperature, again? Doesn't sound very cost-effective. It's sad to see the Northern California Jewish Weekly writing puff advertising pieces, for cash, and then pretending that they are nobly representing the Jewish community, rather than just Jewish shop keepers. Good luck managing that magic "treyf". Let me know when you find proof it exists.