Re-affirming Jewish Connection Through Holy Eating

I grew up in a kosher home, and that was no small feat in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  We had to drive an hour over a mountain to Albany to get kosher meat, or rely on the once-a-month deliveries to our synagogue, and of course there were (and still are) no kosher restaurants in the Berkshires.

Although there were times in my young adulthood when I was not so involved in Jewish life, one thing that I have done consistently is maintained my connection to kashrut, the Jewish dietary principles.  Eating, a seemingly mundane activity, is deeply associated with who we are. My daily re-commitment to holy eating kept me Jewish even though I was not otherwise so attached to Jewish institutions and the rest of the 613 mitzvot / commandments. 

Parashat Re'eh contains a captivating passage (Deuteronomy 14:3-21), one that I often reviewed intently when I was a boy. It's the list of animals that can and cannot be eaten (later to be termed "kasher", appropriate, although this word does not appear in the Torah). I have always been drawn to this list for its stark simplicity: these are in, these are out, thus says the Lord.  There are clear lines, at least regarding the specific animals and categories mentioned.

What makes this so fascinating is the series of messages that can be derived from this list.  Among them:

א.  As temporary residents of God's creation, some parts of nature are off-limits to us.  From this we learn that we must have respect for and carefully steward our planet.

ב.  We must be vigilant regarding what goes into our mouths.  It is just as important as what comes out.

ג.  Boundaries, whether instituted by God, a parent, a teacher or a partner, are healthy, and an essential part of proper living.

You are, it is said, what you eat; this can apply nutritionally as well as spiritually.  The limits of kashrut pay off not only theologically, but also in many other spheres.
בתיאבון! Beteiavon! Bon apetit!

Where are your lines? - Shemini 5772

Two weeks ago, on the first night of Pesah, I did more or less what I do every year.  I went to the evening service here at Temple Israel at 6:30 and then went home to begin the seder with my family.  By 7:45 we were knee-deep in salt water and the rabbis of Benei Beraq.

At that time, about 18 miles away at Madison Square Garden, a seder was concluding, and the Exodus to the auditorium was about to begin.  You may have read about this in the New York Times: a family of Bruce Springsteen’s most loyal Jewish fans, unable to reconcile the inconvenient scheduling of Mr. Springsteen’s MSG show with nightfall on the 14th of Nissan, opted to hold a rock-and-roll themed seder at a restaurant above the Garden.  Thus they could fulfill their obligation to recall the departure from Egypt with matzah and maror and still worship at the altar of the hard-driving guitar  anthems of E Street.  And, in true Passover fashion, they did not delay the evening’s ritual, so that they could make it to their seats within the 18-minute margin.  You might say that they were “born to run.”

Now, I must confess two things: first, although I will always have a soft spot in my heart for rock & roll, and for big concerts, I have never been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen.  Second, that this is not within what I understand to be an traditional celebration of the Festival of Freedom, for several reasons.  But while the family’s loyalty to Springsteen is indeed impressive, I must say that their loyalty to Pesah is even more notable.  Why?  They could have skipped the seder altogether.  My decade of experience as clergy has taught me that in the choices that modern Jews make, the secular activity almost always wins out over the Jewish one: youth sports trump Shabbat, work trumps minyan, the PTA meeting trumps an adult learning class.  

Had they not held the seder, there would be no story here.  But they chose to mark their liberation from slavery with the traditional meal and discussion, even inviting the band members to join them (one did: saxophonist Jake Clemons, nephew to the late, legendary Clarence; he read from their original, Springsteen-themed haggadah, which they had created for the occasion, stumbling over the word “haroset.”  By the way, in the wake of the story in the New York Times, the Museum of Jewish Heritage requested the haggadah for their collection of 20th/21st century Jewish artifacts.)

And all I can say is, “Kol ha-kavod.”  All glory is due to this family.  Even though I would not do it this way, even though others might say that they were mocking tradition, this family stuck to their principles and ate their Hillel sandwiches in the way that made sense to them.  They had their matzah and ate it too...

This is the nature of Judaism: we all make choices.  And while there are people in the Jewish world who claim to speak for God, and will say, “It must be done THIS way,” and will be quick to point out all the “rules” that this family broke, the reality is that we all in some sense make the rules, based on a complicated, subjective mix of text, tradition, communal expectation, and personal autonomy.  As the Talmud tells us (Bava Metzi’a 59b, quoting Deut. 30:12), “Lo bashamayim hi.”  The decision for what is kosher is not found in heaven.  

****

Our parashah this morning, Parashat Shemini, captured a range of ideas in a few short chapters, and there are two items to which I would like to call your attention.

1.  Nadav and Avihu, two of Aaron’s sons, are swallowed up in fire because they did something wrong in performing priestly rituals.  In the face of their sudden, violent deaths, the Torah goes out of its way to point out that their father Aaron, the High Priest, is silent, and his silence seems to speak volumes.

2.  Chapter 11 contains a long list of animals that are kosher and not kosher, what we can eat and what we cannot.  As many of you know, the mammals and the fish have particular features -- split hooves and a rumen, or fins and scales -- that make them acceptable, while the birds are not given blanket rules but are merely mentioned by name as being “pure” (tahor) or “impure” (tamei).

What both of these stories teach us is that our lives and behavior are shaped by God-given lines - some things are in and some are out.  Rashi’s theory about Nadav and Avihu is that they were drunk, and God schmeisted them for a serious transgression, which the Torah describes immediately after Aaron’s notable silence.  But that is only one theory; the Torah does not really tell us.

There has been much ink spilled over the kashrut rules (some of which appear elsewhere in the Torah): one possibility, promoted by Maimonides, the 12th-century physician, is that the “pure” animals are healthier to eat, and that’s what they told us in Hebrew school when I was growing up, although I’ve never bought that.  Noted sociologist Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger (1966), points to the Torah’s interest in clear categories.  We are allowed to eat what is easily defined, and animals that do not fit neatly into one category or another are forbidden (like the pig, which has a split hoof but no rumen, or the camel, which has a rumen but no split hoof).

So yes, the Torah gives us lines.  But there is also a good deal of human interpretation involved with where these lines fall.  The “why,” the reasoning and/or spiritual justification for various mitzvot, is virtually always up for debate.  The “what” is less so, but still the 2,000 years of rabbinic interpretation have yielded various positions, some of which contradict each other.  

****

All of which brings me back to the Springsteen seder.  Faced with the challenge of two seemingly conflicting loyalties, The Boss’ biggest Jewish fans created a ritual that straddled the line between honoring Jewish tradition and living in the modern, secular world.  The latter has virtually no boundaries; the former has many.

And as I have already pointed out, that is what we ALL do.  Particularly here, in the Conservative movement, where fealty to tradition is greater than in Reform, and immersion in the wider world is greater than in much of Orthodoxy.

But there is something even more here.  The Torah’s lines are as much about food as they are about the human spirit.  On some level, whether conscious of it or not, whether we heed our internal moral guideposts or not, each of us wants to be good, to be holy, to be pure.  The message that the Torah sends, regardless of what we eat, is as follows: you have within your hands the power to make the right choice.  Leviticus (and the other material of Priestly authorship elsewhere in the Torah) urges us to separate the positive from the negative, the light from the dark, the good from the bad.  

Some of you know that I have a good friend and colleague, Rabbi Antonio di Gesu, who is the rabbi of the Jewish community of Japan.  (There are actually three rabbis in Tokyo -- the other two are both Chabad rabbis, one of whom is a messianist and the other is not, and they don’t speak to each other, much less to my friend.)  Japan is a particularly irreligious place.  There are some Shinto traditions and some Buddhist, but these do not really give the average Japanese person the guides to life the way that Judaism does.  

So Rabbi Antonio, in addition to serving the Jewish community, mostly expat Americans and Israelis, also serves a good number of non-Jewish Japanese seekers, people who are looking for something that their tradition does not offer.  They come to services, they come to his office with questions, they try Judaism on for size for a while.  Some stick around.  Perhaps what draws these typically young Japanese adults to our tradition, so alien to them, is the lines that we have, the physical and spiritual lines that are our guides to making us better people.

You see, we have a rich tradition of story and song, of text and context, of law and custom.  It is so much more than eating matzah and singing Dayyenu once a year.  We have the Torah, the Mishnah, the Gemara, the midrashim, the commentators, philosophers, poets, payyetanim / liturgical poets, hazzanim, and on and on.  We draw inspiration from writings that span millennia.  

Part of that body of text is law, yes.  There are many parts of the Jewish world for whom halakhah, Jewish law, where those physical lines are drawn, is the ultimate expression of their relationship to God.  Some might look at this parashah and see only what you can eat and what you can’t.  But the goal of Judaism is higher than that.  Ramban, aka Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, aka Nachmanides, the 13th-century Spanish commentator, urges us to extrapolate from what is stated in the Torah to what is not:  

“In matters about which God did not command you,” says Ramban, set your eyes to “do what is right and good in the eyes of God” [Deut. 6:18]... It is impossible to mention in the Torah the entirety of human conduct with neighbors and friends, in all business activities and all the improvement of society and of the state.” (Ramban, comment to Deuteronomy 6:18)

And after listing many explicit mitzvot / commandments, he continues, the Torah tells us to make good choices about the unstated things, says Ramban.  It is up to us to determine what the laws of kashrut imply about the rest of our choices.

That is our stock in trade as Jews.  Not kashrut, per se, but the wisdom and discipline that come with boundaries.  Our tradition, through its many channels and historical currents, offers the lines that we need, physical and spiritual.  How we relate to others.  How we honor our parents.  How we treat our business partners, our clients, our patients, our vendors. How we respect ourselves and our loved ones.  These things are as much a part of being Jewish as what we eat.

As we sail into the openness of the future, of the growing secular wave of American society, I challenge each of us to draw on our tradition to help us navigate.  There will always be a tension between attending the concert or the seder, the Shabbat haMishpahah service or basketball practice.  Let’s hope that we all find ways to bring some holiness into our lives, balancing whatever we need to balance to make it work.  Let’s make Ramban proud, and make the choices that are “right and good in the eyes of God.”  Where are your lines?

Shabbat shalom!

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson


(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 4/21/2012.)

"Rabbi, Is There a Blessing for a Curse?" Making Food Holy Again - Ki Tavo 5771

It seems that I have been left with no choice but to talk about God. Again. Those of you who were here two weeks ago might recall our discussion of theodicy, that is, various theological approaches to why there is suffering in the world. And some of you may have seen a short piece I wrote right before Hurricane Irene hit, about how storms, floods, and earthquakes should not be understood as punishments from God.

But here we are in Parashat Ki Tavo, where the dominant theme of today’s Torah reading is two lengthy litanies of blessings and curses, reflecting the Torah’s central theological stance, which is:

א. If we do what God asks of us, then we will receive blessings from on high.
ב. If we do not do what God asks of us, then we will be cursed.

Simple, right! Reward and punishment, right there on the parchment in black and cream.

I have a great deal of trouble with the idea, as the traditional theology might suggest, that my parents both contracted forms of cancer because they did something wrong, or that the righteous victims of the Holocaust were reincarnated souls of our ancestors who had sinned in building the Molten Calf at Mt. Sinai, as was suggested recently by former Israeli Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef.

Many of us struggle with this theology; the biblical character Job struggled with it, the rabbis of the Talmud, which is the primary source of the rabbinic commentary that more or less created Judaism as we know it, struggled with it, and I do too. The rabbis point to evidence that suggests that the world simply does not work this way.

Or does it?

Sometimes our actions yield results that they deserve. I think that there are some things that actually work according to what the Hindus call karma, the idea that what goes around, comes around. We also find the kernel of this idea in Jewish tradition. In Pirqei Avot 2:6, we read the following:

 אף הוא ראה גולגולת אחת צפה על פני המים; אמר לה, על דאטיפת אטיפוך, וסוף מטיפייך יטופון

“[Hillel] saw a skull floating on the surface of the water, and he said to it, ‘Even if they have drowned you because you drowned [others], those who drowned you will themselves be drowned.’ ”

What goes around, comes around. Sometimes we get what we deserve, says Hillel.

Returning to the blessings and curses in today’s parashah, it is worthwhile to note that many have to do with food. For example, among the blessings we find:

“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.” (Deut. 28:5, Etz Hayim, p. 1149)
“The Lord will give you abounding prosperity in the issue of your womb, the offspring of your cattle, and the produce of your soil.” (28:11, p. 1150)

And among the curses: “If you plant a vineyard, you shall not harvest it. Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it.” (28:30-31, p. 1152)
“Though you take much seed out to the field, you shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it.” (28:38, p. 1153)

And others that are barely mentionable in polite company. In the world of our ancestors, food was life. If you had a good harvest, you lived well. If you had a poor harvest, you starved. Hence the gravity of these statements.

****

I am teaching a class in the Youth House (our Hebrew High School) this fall, a class for which I have been in some sense preparing for at least 20 years. It’s called, “Food for Thought,” and it is an examination of issues surrounding food today and how these issues are connected to Judaism and Jewish principles. The most obvious connection between food and Judaism is that of kashrut, the dietary laws, but that is a secondary consideration of this class. There is so much more to talk about - like the following Torah commandments:

Bal tashhit - Do not waste (Deut. 20:19-20)
Tza’ar ba’alei hayyim - Prevent cruelty to animals (Deut. 22:6)
Lo ta’ashoq sakhir ani ve-evyon - Do not oppress a poor and needy laborer (Deut. 24:14-15)

We read all of these from the Torah within the last two weeks, and there are more. These are principles that should be considered in food production and consumption, and the point of the class is to raise awareness of how these issues play out today. We are so far from where our food comes from that it is easy to forget that it does not appear magically in supermarkets, neatly bagged and shelved. The story behind the food, however, is a part of the meal, and arguably references the blessings and curses I just mentioned. We will conclude the semester by producing a well-considered meal for the Youth House banquet in December.

In preparation for the class, I have been reading all sorts of interesting things about the food we eat. But a funny word crossed my desk this week, one that gets less funny the more you think about it. That word is, “shmeat.” As in, “Meat, shmeat.”

Shmeat, a contraction of “sheets of meat,” is a meat product that is cultured in a lab from animal cells growing in a nutrient broth, essentially the carnivore’s answer to in-vitro fertilization. So-called “tissue engineers” have done this, and are refining the product such that it might be in the near future a product that could be eaten, just like actual meat. But it will be healthier than meat, since its chemical composition can be carefully controlled, and will not come with any of the ethical problems that some people have with eating meat from animals.

The idea of shmeat appeals primarily to scientists who are looking for solutions to the problem of how to feed the world’s population, and also sounds good to environmentalists who are concerned about the problems that mass food production creates, like greenhouse gases that cause climate change, contamination of groundwater from pesticide runoff, and the breeding of resistant bacteria from agricultural overuse of antibiotics.

Let me tell you something that may alarm you: In 50 years, the world’s population will be 9 million people. In order to feed all those people, we will need to produce 70% more food than we do today, on the same amount of agricultural land.

Already, we live in a world of mass production of food, where chickens are bred to be mostly breast and thigh, where tomatoes are picked green and artificially reddened, so that they will make it to the store shelf and still look good, and where the standard banana breed, the Dwarf Cavendish, is in danger of being wiped out by an incurable banana blight.

But let’s face it - the idea of consuming meat grown in a laboratory hardly sounds appetizing. The technology of shmeat is not yet ready for mass production, but it probably will be in a few years. (It will be an interesting question regarding whether or not there can be kosher shmeat; I'm not ready to deal with that yet.)

Why am I telling you about this? (Other than to raise the question of whether shmeat is a blessing or a curse?)

I am telling you this because I’d like to raise in your minds this question: As consumers and as Jews, what are our responsibilities vis-a-vis food production as we sail into an overpopulated, underfed future?

Furthermore, since both our tradition and our culture emphasize the importance of food and its spiritual and emotional power, how can we as Jews face the coming wave of manufactured, food-like products, or the food science methods that have produced factory farms, bypassing the traditional agricultural integration that farmers have used for millennia, or the overfishing of our seas, or the fact confirmed by law-enforcement officials in the State of Florida, that there is outright slavery, that’s right, forced labor taking place in the tomato plantations there? (Google “tomato slavery” if you don’t believe me.)

Are we not taught that eating is a holy act? That food preparation requires adhering to a set of Jewish laws called kashrut that elevate our food? Do we not say berakhot / blessings before and after eating for that very purpose? I do not have time to address those questions in depth.

But I do have one suggestion that might be helpful: We have the power to turn curses into blessings. We have within our hands the ability to make choices that change the karma, to alter the cause-and-effect cycle.  If we support a system that favors the bottom line at the expense of respect for God’s Creation, we’ll get what we deserve.

If however, we make educated choices about consumption, and work within the system to produce positive change, then we may be able to honor the complexity of the natural order and still take on the challenges of feeding the billions of new neighbors that will be joining us in the next few decades.

So how do we accomplish this?

1. Consider where your food comes from, how it was produced, how it was harvested. How far did it travel to get to your plate?

2. Strive to find sources that are sustainable, that minimize human impact on the Earth, that seek to lessen the collateral damage. When possible, buy fruits in vegetables in their proper seasons, when they come to you from nearby farms rather than from Mexico and China.  Join a CSA ("Community Supported Agriculture" program) if possible.

3. Remember also that while we all love low prices, that supporting sustainable growers costs more of our personal income, but lowers the cost to the world. Paying extra pays into the future, benefiting not only the people who grow and harvest our food, but also enables local, organic, and fair-trade producers to expand their crops and compete with the conventional growers. The real cost of a tomato is far more than what we pay at the supermarket.

We have to, quite literally, put our money where our mouths are.

The holy moment of berakhah, before and after eating food, is intended to raise our awareness. Hamotzi lehem min ha-aretz - Praised are You, God, who brings forth food from the Earth - this is a reminder that eating is not just about us. It’s also about the partnership with God.

Seek the holy choices. We can thereby turn a few curses into blessings. This is the lesson of Parashat Ki Tavo, and the lesson of the upcoming High Holidays as well: that we have the power to change outcomes.  What goes around, comes around.

Let me add that, as the fall unfolds, I will be putting web-based resources up on my blog so that you can read and learn more about these issues. Watch for it.

Shabbat shalom.

(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat morning, 9/17/11.)

Thursday Kavvanah, 3/24/2011 - Seeking Holiness

Holiness is an elusive concept. The Hebrew, qadosh ("holy"), means that which is set aside from the daily, routine sphere of our lives.

Among the items found in this week's Torah reading, Parashat Shemini, is a list of animals that we are permitted to eat and those that are forbidden. We know of this concept as kashrut, that is, foods that are "kosher."*

But what is the reason given for kashrut? It is not that the permitted animals are cleaner, or healthier, or better-behaved. Rather, it is only that these are the ones that God has indicated are within the bounds of holiness. See Leviticus 11:45:

כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה, הַמַּעֲלֶה אֶתְכֶם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, לִהְיֹת לָכֶם, לֵאלֹהִים; וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים, כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אָנִי.
Ki ani Adonai hama-aleh etkhem me-eretz Mitzrayim lihyot lakhem lelohim; vihyitem qedoshim ki qadosh ani.
For I the Lord am He who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy.

The point of kashrut, as well as all the rest of the mitzvot (commandments), is to help us to find the holy moments. It's not just about food - it also includes everything we do. And sometimes, all you need to do is focus, to look beyond the day-to-day mundanities, to find those parts of your life that are fittingly set aside.



* The Hebrew word is "kasher" (accent on the second syllable), meaning "fitting." Our English word "kosher" comes from the Yiddish/Ashkenazi pronunciation of the Hebrew word; the French, however, pronounce it like the Hebrew: cachère.