As Jews, this is not a concept foreign to us. Just think of the term Oneg Shabbat. When we say that word, we understand it to mean the cakes and cookies we share after services. Technically, it means: “Joy of Shabbat.” As Jews, we celebrate with food, we make a point to say that God’s abundance, which nourishes and sustains us, should also bring us joy and a sense of connection to God and to a spiritual life.
Over the last year, as many of you are aware, I have reformed my relationship with food. By being on a very strict diet, I pay much closer attention to what is on my plate than ever before. It used to be that as long as it tasted good, it was good to go. Nowadays, I take care with, and pay attention to, carbohydrates, proteins, sugars and fats. I read labels in a way I never used to. These practices are practical, of course, but they also give me a real sense of mindfulness about my eating. At the same time, I had to break up with the Food Network. It wasn’t them, it was me.
I also began to change the channel every time a commercial for food or a restaurant came on the TV. It was actually shocking how often I had to change the channel in those early days. Now, the commercials don’t bother or entice me. But there was a moment when I recognized the ubiquity of food in our culture and the ease with which we are able to obtain it. On the one hand, how wonderful that food is so easy to come by. On the other hand, what has this done to our relationship with food and our bodies? How different this modern age is than the age of our ancestors, whose lives and stories are shaped by the availability of sustenance, or lack thereof.
Let’s take a moment to consider just a few examples from our Torah of when food plays a prominent role. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are given free rein to eat any of the fruits in the garden, except for one.[1] Already, in the first story, there is a sense that God puts limits on what we are and are not allowed to eat. Abraham and Sara have to flee Canaan because of a famine, or lack of food.[2] When the visitors come to see Abraham and Sara to announce the birth of Isaac, Abraham hurries to prepare them a meal consisting of butter and cheese, followed by a choice calf from his flock.[3] Later, Jacob buys Esau’s birthright for a bowl of lentil stew.[4] Joseph interprets a dream about years of plenty and years of lean and saves Egypt from terrible famine.[5] And this is just in Genesis, and this is not an exhaustive list.
Food in the ancient world was equivalent to survival. It was hard to come by and hard to hold onto. Food was so important that the abundance given proved to be the backbone of many religious sensibilities, including our own.
Each of the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Festivals, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot were tied initially to the harvests, and were celebrated by making sacrifices to God to say thank you for the yield, and please can we have it again next year. Regulations about what God allowed us to eat and what God forbade us from eating were an integral part of ancient Israelite culture and continue to this day. And finally, how we share our food and our yield with the less fortunate becomes a backbone of the morality God asks of us. Food in Judaism is therefore, worthy of praising God, worthy of regulation by God and worthy being used to define our relationships with others.
Today, the ease with which we acquire food and consume it has stripped food of any of the mystery and sense of what it takes for food to arrive on our plates. Food is so easy to come by. If we wanted to, we could all take out our phones and have pizza delivered here in less than 30 minutes… It’s so easy to come by that we often forget how thankful we ought to be for it. It is so easy to come by that we often forget how much effort and energy goes into the farming and transporting, the stocking and shelving of the items that fill our carts as we wander up and down the aisles perusing the seemingly endless choices for every item we could hope for.
Our connection to food has undergone a substantial change in the last century as farming technologies and genetic engineering have made food plentiful and consistent. We no longer take enough time to appreciate the true miracle that is having food on our plates every day at every meal. And it is precisely this appreciation of the miracle of food that has, for centuries, been the backbone of Jewish food culture.
Now, when we talk about Jewish food culture, we’re not only talking about pastrami sandwiches on rye, or matzo ball soup, but about the ways we sanctify and make special those moments of nourishment. Jewish food culture involves separating and categorizing, knowing not only when we are supposed to eat, but when we are not. Jewish food culture has for millennia included what we are supposed to eat, and how and when we eat those things. It involves knowing and understanding where our food comes from and where our food goes.
Beginning with the commandments of Kashrut in the Torah, Judaism has separated and categorized food. We are told what animals we are allowed to eat and what animals we are not allowed to eat. We are given both categories and specific species. This mammal ok, that one not. This category of birds ok, this other not. Insects no, except two kinds of grasshoppers. The commandment not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk, from which the separation of milk and meat is derived, appears just after instructions about sacrificing first fruits as part of festival offerings in the book of Exodus, a few chapters after the revelation at Sinai. This prohibition appears twice more in the Torah, once more in Exodus and once in Deuteronomy. We also categorize food by way of our blessings, separating and reciting specific blessings for, among other things, fruits from trees, fruits from the ground, fruits of the vine and grasses of the fields. In this way, Judaism reminds us where our food comes from and how it came to be on our table and on our forks, and ultimately the sustenance of our lives.
As Jews, we make moments of nourishment sacred by recognizing God for the abundance we have by blessing the food at our meals before we eat, and by thanking God for the meals after we are done eating. As Jews we recognize where our food should be going. The harvest we gather is for us, with a portion given to God. But the corners of our fields and the gleanings on the ground are left for the less fortunate.
Remember the story of Ruth, which we read on the Festival of Shavuot, a time of the grain harvest. Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi are destitute and must rely on the gleanings on the threshing floor to gather enough grain to survive. These commandments inspire us to give of our abundance, as we do with our Island Harvest donations each year.
Food culture was so ingrained in our forebears’ lives, because it was the work of survival. Recognizing its importance rendered food and eating worthy of praising God. The laws of Kashrut, the rules of food preparation and the mandated blessing were all ways to turn the very instinctive and important act of eating into a holy moment. To recognize that it is thanks to God that we have food to eat. Food, and the way we eat that food, is central to the lives of Jews.
If food is so important to Judaism, why did the earliest Reformers make doing away with kashrut one of the hallmarks of their re-envisioned modern Judaism toward the end of the 19th century?
Reformers did it for a couple of different reasons. First, the dietary laws set us apart. The cooking of goats in their milk was a common practice of the idol-worshippers, we learn from Maimonides. This prohibition, therefore, was meant to set us apart. And yet, this becomes a problem for modern Jews in modern contexts. The Reformers believed that Jews would surely not be able to eat in the modern world if they held firm to their kashrut standards. By maintaining sets of dietary laws, Jews maintained a status as other. Early Reform Judaism came about at a time when the goal was to blend in, not stand out.
An additional reason why the early Reformers decided to do away with kashrut had to do with a new vision of what religion meant. For them, ethics was the name of the game and ethical practice governed their actions. If a ritual or an observance was merely that—ritual—if it didn’t serve an ethical purpose, if it bordered on the superstitious, if it was too much about the body and not enough about the mind, well, then, it was not acceptable to the early reformers. To them, kashrut was a remnant of the old Judaism, focused on what the body did, not how the mind thought.
As a congregation which prides itself on having a more traditional outlook, we maintain a certain level of Kashrut, though it isn’t clear exactly what that means and whether our current standards are in keeping with how we hope to understand the food that we eat. We consider the labels on the foods we bring in, but is that enough? We separate meat and dairy, but often, as has been pointed out, there is only one sponge in the kitchen. Do we care about more than just the label Kosher?
Recently, the Ritual Committee of this congregation took up the task of revisiting our Kashrut policy. The discussions were vibrant and many opinions were shared about what we can and cannot bring into our Temple. I believe this element of the discussion is important, but I also believe, and I believe Judaism asks us to consider, that there is more to having a spiritual and God-centered food practice than worrying about whether or not someone else deems the food fit for Jewish consumption.
Food culture was so ingrained in our forebears’ lives, because it was the work of survival. Recognizing its importance rendered food and eating worthy of praising God. The laws of Kashrut, the rules of food preparation and the mandated blessing were all ways to turn the very instinctive and important act of eating into a holy moment. To recognize that it is thanks to God that we have food to eat. Food, and the way we eat that food, is central to the lives of Jews.
If food is so important to Judaism, why did the earliest Reformers make doing away with kashrut one of the hallmarks of their re-envisioned modern Judaism toward the end of the 19th century?
Reformers did it for a couple of different reasons. First, the dietary laws set us apart. The cooking of goats in their milk was a common practice of the idol-worshippers, we learn from Maimonides. This prohibition, therefore, was meant to set us apart. And yet, this becomes a problem for modern Jews in modern contexts. The Reformers believed that Jews would surely not be able to eat in the modern world if they held firm to their kashrut standards. By maintaining sets of dietary laws, Jews maintained a status as other. Early Reform Judaism came about at a time when the goal was to blend in, not stand out.
An additional reason why the early Reformers decided to do away with kashrut had to do with a new vision of what religion meant. For them, ethics was the name of the game and ethical practice governed their actions. If a ritual or an observance was merely that—ritual—if it didn’t serve an ethical purpose, if it bordered on the superstitious, if it was too much about the body and not enough about the mind, well, then, it was not acceptable to the early reformers. To them, kashrut was a remnant of the old Judaism, focused on what the body did, not how the mind thought.
As a congregation which prides itself on having a more traditional outlook, we maintain a certain level of Kashrut, though it isn’t clear exactly what that means and whether our current standards are in keeping with how we hope to understand the food that we eat. We consider the labels on the foods we bring in, but is that enough? We separate meat and dairy, but often, as has been pointed out, there is only one sponge in the kitchen. Do we care about more than just the label Kosher?
Recently, the Ritual Committee of this congregation took up the task of revisiting our Kashrut policy. The discussions were vibrant and many opinions were shared about what we can and cannot bring into our Temple. I believe this element of the discussion is important, but I also believe, and I believe Judaism asks us to consider, that there is more to having a spiritual and God-centered food practice than worrying about whether or not someone else deems the food fit for Jewish consumption.
What do we think about the food we bring in? What are we concerned about when we eat as a Temple community? Are we equally concerned with the ethics of the food we eat – how it was raised, farmed and cultivated, the wages the workers earned while harvesting, the effect on the environment? Are we equally concerned with the health standards of the foods we bring in – do we serve enough whole grains and vegetables? Do we adequately consider the safety of our congregants as relates to allergies? Do we adequately provide alternatives for those whose diets are limited due to health restrictions or disease?
All of these questions ought to be asked of our community and we ought to take the time to learn more specifically and in depth what Jewish tradition teaches about food, how we can understand food and how we can relate to food. Over the next year, I am tasking the Ritual Committee to take up Food – not just Kashrut, but Food, to work toward a comprehensive food policy for this congregation moving forward.
The current policy is a great place to start, but we deserve a policy that takes all factors-kashrut, ethics, health, safety, inclusion-into account. We deserve this because as people of faith, whose are created in the divine image, we ought to treat the food we put into our bodies with respect, care and diligence.
All of these questions ought to be asked of our community and we ought to take the time to learn more specifically and in depth what Jewish tradition teaches about food, how we can understand food and how we can relate to food. Over the next year, I am tasking the Ritual Committee to take up Food – not just Kashrut, but Food, to work toward a comprehensive food policy for this congregation moving forward.
The current policy is a great place to start, but we deserve a policy that takes all factors-kashrut, ethics, health, safety, inclusion-into account. We deserve this because as people of faith, whose are created in the divine image, we ought to treat the food we put into our bodies with respect, care and diligence.
And I invite you to join us. If you care about how we eat and how we relate to food, join us. If you care about the ethics of food, join us. If you care about the standards we set as a community as they relate to food, join us. If you like to cook, join us. If you’ve ever helped out in the kitchen here, join us, and give us your input and your opinion about food. It’s good to know what the sages teach us, but it is equally important to know what we care about and how we relate to food.
This year, 5775, is what’s known as a shmittah year, literally a year of release. This is a sabbatical year for the land of Israel. This means that all farming in the land of Israel, with some exceptions, must cease. No plowing, planting, reaping or harvesting from this Rosh HaShanah until the next. Seven years ago, the last Shmittah year, was the year I spent in Israel. Because of the religious obligation to the land, to allow it to rest in the same way we do on Shabbat, prices of produce went up, as more had to be imported and many fruits and vegetables were quite scarce. Everyone in Israel talked about it, because the connection between food and Judaism was so apparent. Even those who didn’t know or care about Kashrut, had no choice but to know about how Judaism was affecting the way they ate.
Let us take this year, 5775, to pay tribute to food. Let us recognize the importance of food in our lives and cease to take it as a given. Let us rededicate ourselves to making eating a holy act, an act worthy of praising God again, an act worthy of the struggles of our ancestors.
This year, 5775, is what’s known as a shmittah year, literally a year of release. This is a sabbatical year for the land of Israel. This means that all farming in the land of Israel, with some exceptions, must cease. No plowing, planting, reaping or harvesting from this Rosh HaShanah until the next. Seven years ago, the last Shmittah year, was the year I spent in Israel. Because of the religious obligation to the land, to allow it to rest in the same way we do on Shabbat, prices of produce went up, as more had to be imported and many fruits and vegetables were quite scarce. Everyone in Israel talked about it, because the connection between food and Judaism was so apparent. Even those who didn’t know or care about Kashrut, had no choice but to know about how Judaism was affecting the way they ate.
Let us take this year, 5775, to pay tribute to food. Let us recognize the importance of food in our lives and cease to take it as a given. Let us rededicate ourselves to making eating a holy act, an act worthy of praising God again, an act worthy of the struggles of our ancestors.
The Talmud (Berachot 55a) teaches that while the Temple was standing, the altar and the sacrifices atoned for Israel’s sins, but now that the temple is gone, a person’s table atones for their sins. Do our tables atone for our sins? Are our tables worthy of that responsibility based on the food we put on them and the way that we consume that food? Are we maintaining a standard that allows our tables to be conduits for the holy and the divine?
Bon Appétit.
Bon Appétit.
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