I grew up in a steak house. It started as a drive-in called “Richard’s” built by my grandfather. He and my father, the Richard, then built a restaurant next door: Lutz’s Restaurant and Lounge. I never understood why they hadn’t named it Barry’s. I guess that was the start of my troubles. But that is a story for another Shabbat. I spent many hours of my childhood at the end of the bar eating maraschino cherries and olives while my dad tended bar and waitresses hurried in and out the kitchen bringing all manner of steaks and hamburgers and prime rib to the customers coming in for lunch from the Samsonite factory up the street or for dinner with their families.
In his office at the back of the kitchen my dad had a picture of a bull of some sort that he and my grandfather had purchased at one of the National Western Stock shows that takes place each January. There are my dad and my grandpa standing proudly next to some large piece of livestock wearing some sort of a blanket that says, “Lutz’s restaurant and lounge.” After looking at that picture for quite some time I finally got curious. “Dad,” I asked as I bit into my hamburger, “whatever happened to that bull?” He just looked back knowingly at my hamburger. “Oh,” I said. After pondering this fact for sometime, curiosity got the best of me once again. “Can I see how it all happens?” I asked my dad one day. “Barry,” he replied, “If I ever took you to a slaughterhouse you would become an instant vegetarian.” Well, vegetarianism was not so de rigueur in the mid-sixties and besides, I wasn’t about to give up on a nice, medium rare New York strip … and so I took him at his word.
As you all know, I didn’t follow in the family business. Instead I went in an unimaginable direction. And so now, instead of buying cattle at the National Western stock show to be served up to hungry customers, I read each year the book of Leviticus – with it’s most graphic description of the slaughtering of animals at that most ancient of slaughter/steakhouses, the great Temples in Jerusalem. It’s almost enough to make me a vegetarian … almost … but I get over it pretty quick. We read of descriptions of the sweet smell of the sacrifice and while we might crinkle our nose and scrunch our shoulder at such a notion, who are we kidding? There’s nothing like a warm summer night, sitting in the back yard and catching a whiff of whatever is cooking on the barbecue.
Nonetheless, let’s be clear what almost all of this sacrifice was about: it was a great bit barbecue. To be sure pieces of the choice animals brought to the Temple were offered to God. But most sacrifices became groceries for the Levitical priests and the Cohanim who served in the Temple. After all they had to eat but they had no land. So the community had to bring them food. The great genius of our tradition is that in the manner in which food was provided to the Temple’s priests, the process of eating was elevated from the purely physical to a spiritual act that reflected the deep seated morals and values of the community.
When I read of these rituals in the book of Leviticus and of the close connection of ritual sacrifice and eating, I am reminded of that most often joked about relationship between Jews and food. We laugh about how we sit at one meal and discuss what we will eat at the next. Food is even a part of our description of the course of Jewish history: they tried to destroy us, we won, let’s eat!
But food has a much more serious side … Abraham, still healing from a very late in life circumcision, rushes to cook a choice meal for the three strangers who show up at his tent. Esau gives up his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. (What a soup that must have been!) The Israelites in the wilderness yearn for the vegetables of Egypt and are given manna whose flavor delights them and sustains them through the course of their 40 year journey. Our own Jewish journeys are also defined by food. From apples and honey to latkes and hamantaschen. And now, we find ourselves at that Shabbat which follows the celebration of Purim, called Shabbat Parah, which marks the beginning of our preparations for Passover – a holiday inextricably tied to the foods we ingest and the symbolism contained within those foods. You can smell Passover can’t you? You can almost taste it:That mixture of hard boiled eggs, gefilte fish, horseradish and haroset not only excite our tummies – but also stirs our souls. It is once again time to relive the story of our freedom, once again time to remember those still enslaved and our obligation to bring freedom to all those suffering the pangs of slavery. We don’t just read these ideas, we ingest them. We taste the bitterness and swallow the tears. In the crunch of the simple, plain matzah we are called back to basics, urged to move past the fluff and yeasty impertinence of our daily lives and focus instead on that which is essential, that which is as basic and central to our souls as flour and water is to our bodies.
Mindfulness about what we eat is not, of course, built just into our holiday celebrations. It is built into the day to day, meal to meal life of the Jew. There is motzi . Rather than simply stuffing food unthinkingly in our mouths, this simple act forces us to stop and thankfully recognize the grace through which we have this food to eat in the first place. We are after all, in the very small minority of humanity that benefits from such a bountiful harvest. We should have the humility to recognize that whenever we are about to eat. And there is birkhat hamazon a much lengthier prayer at the end of the meal, once we are full and feeling especially grateful in which we express our thankfulness for all sorts of blessings that grace our lives daily.
And then there is kashrut , that oft maligned, oft misunderstood practice of separating that which can from that which we cannot put into our bodies. In this week’s Torah portion, 47 verses are spent distinguishing that which we can from that which we can not eat. A great deal of the meaning behind many of these ancient dietary laws has been lost in the mists of time. But still, we can understand the great compassion and sensitivity inherent in the Torah’s instruction that we should not boil a kid in its mother’s milk – the basis for the prohibition against mixing milk and meat. That being said, I can also empathize with my son who protests to this day, “Dad, I know that the cheese on my chicken sandwich did NOT come from this chicken!”And while, I might not understand the ancient logic behind the prohibition against pork, I can appreciate those who refuse to eat that ‘other white meat’ out of a bond across history with those scores of Jews who were murdered because their own feigned Christianity was revealed in their refusal to eat pig.
Even in this week’s menu list of edibles and non-edibles it is possible to discern a hidden logic. As Rabbi Joe Rapport recently noted about this list, each of the allowed items on the list are fit to be offered as sacrifice on the Temple altar. The simple message is that our bodies are a Temple. What you put in it is a reflection of the holiness you hope to achieve. This Torah portion Rabbi Rapport writes, as all Torah portions asks the larger existential question, “Who are you?”but it also asks the more specific question, “What does a person like you eat?”
As Reform Jews, it is not enough to simply dismiss kashrut as irrelevant and archaic. We are called to consider the meaning underlying these dietary laws, that we might discover a way to make eating more than just a mindless physical act, but rather to imbue the act of eating with a spirituality and mindfulness that was part of the ancient right of sacrifice; a contemporary spirituality and mindfulness that recognizes where our food comes from, the fullness of the process from farm to our table, and those that made it possible, and finally our gratitude for those who share this meal with us. This is, in part, what sacrifice was all about … transforming a purely physical act into a spiritual one, making God a partner in the act of eating.
In this context how we eat is just as important as what we eat. Just as there is power and meaning in the food we eat, there is power and meaning in how we eat. We should not eat alone! Meals are meant to bring community together. Meals are a celebration of our connections, our relationships … they are a place for conversation and sharing, for storytelling and teaching. Sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem were shared. Kayla’s bat mitzvah tomorrow will be followed by a seudat mitzvah a celebratory meal that keeps the community together as Kayla is welcomed into her new role in the community. A bris, a wedding, a meal of consolation – food provides the context for community. As we break bread together we share in each other’s lives. Even tonight, we won’t rush out the door … we will extend the celebration of Shabbat by joining together for an oneg, literally a celebration, delighting in each other’s company, catching up after a long week over a cookie or brownie and a cup of coffee or punch.
And I think it crucial that we find a way to imbue our own meals with the meaning inherent in our ancient rituals. Last year at the national biennial of the Reform movement, our movement’s president Rabbi Eric Yoffie challenged us to consider our relationship to food, to create a new kind of kashrut. He asked,” What does it mean to eat Jewishly? What does it mean to hallow our eating by inviting God in?” He challenged us to create a way of eating based upon being “ethically aware, ecologically responsible, and sensitive to matters of physical and spiritual health.”
Such eating may involve conscious decisions about what we eat recognizing not only the physical implications (sadly) of eating too much red meat, but also the environmental impact as well. Likewise considering the environmental impact of the food we buy, making a conscious decision to buy locally whenever possible, supporting our local economy and reducing our own carbon footprint.
Rabbi Yoffie continued, “we need an approach of our own—our own definition of what is proper and fit to eat. Because our ethical commitments remain firm, and we understand – as we did not a century ago – that Jewish eating has a profoundly ethical dimension. We now know … that eating can be an entrance to holiness. We now see that when we eat with mindfulness, even the humblest meal can become a sacred act.”For me, for my family, we have found our own kind of mindfulness through a modified kashrut that we keep in our own home. Although I rail against it at times, when I really want to make meat lasagna, or have a cheese omelet with my turkey bacon … at my better moments I understand that keeping kosher has helped to make our home into a sacred space. It is just one important element that helps to provide a context that, in the mindfulness it demands, reminds each of us of the specialness of that space – of the sacred nature of our home and of the people within it.
When I reflect back now to my early days as a kid sitting at the end of the bar in my family’s restaurant, I think this was the joy of the restaurant business for my grandfather and father.(It certainly wasn’t the hours … or the loads of money they raked in …)In their own way, with quality food served in wonderful surroundings they created a context for community. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that my grandfather’s name was Aaron? Like his high priest namesake he created a place where, like in the Temple of old, people could get together and, over a meal, share their lives. Something that I think it is incumbent upon all of us to do, making our home tables into just such a sacred place of offering,you know, a place where everybody knows your name …
Cheers!
and Shabbat Shalom.
Kashrut … what we ingest and what it says about us … connection to holiness? Conscious decisions, conscious acts.
Our keeping kosher – I answer with hesitancy … yes, of a sort.
We keep a kind of kosher in our home, why?
Adam – conversation about going to Temple with Israeli roommates eating Pepperoni pizza.
Joe Rooks Rapport
: Leviticus would simply answer the question with a question. What fits and what is unfit? The category of animals identified here as fit for the Children of Israel to eat corresponds directly to the category of animals that are fit to be offered as sacrifices on the altar in the Tabernacle of Israel’s God. In other words, your body is a temple. What you put into it is a reflection of the holiness you hope to achieve.
Here is the lesson of this week’s Torah portion; holiness is the commitment to reach for a higher standard in life, not for real or perceived gains, but for the opportunity for holiness and nothing more.
“For I the Eternal am the One who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God: you shall be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45).
How we might interpret these words for our own age may differ, but the value of the principle remains the same, “You are what you eat.” So let me ask you—yes, you who are reading these words: “Who are you?” And having asked that somewhat existential question, let me ask you an even more personal question: “What should a person like you choose to eat?”
Aish: In this week's Torah portion, Shmini, the delineation is made between kosher and non-kosher animals. The Torah states that for an animal to be kosher it must chew its cud and have split hooves. Chewing the cud ("rumination") involves the regurgitation and then redigestion of food. Jewish tradition sees this as an allusion for the need to review and reexamine one's actions, a procedure that is at the very heart of righteousness. The split hoof, coming as it does at the foot, emphasizes the need for a person to be complete from head to toe.
Aish: By juxtaposing the food laws with the priestly laws, the Torah makes a parallel between food and holy service. In other words, it's what you have on the inside that makes you holy.
Food touches on one our strongest drives. Diet books are a billion-dollar industry because human beings find it difficult to control the desire to eat and drink.
When you think about it simply, the whole diet industry is silly. If you want to lose weight, all you need to do is eat a balanced diet and eat less food then your body uses. You don't even need to exercise more than normal activity. If you want, walk a half-mile or so. To figure out how much food your body needs, don't snack, and stop eating before you feel full. Easiest diet in the world!
But my diet won't sell because it doesn't deal with human nature. We all have food desires that are difficult to control.
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