Thanks so much to Rabbi Dov Gartenberg who shared his Kol Nidre sermon with us. Rabbi Gartenberg is the Spiritual Leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Long Beach, California. You can find more of his writings on his blog or listen to audio files of some of his other sermons.
As Jews we can speak with authority about the importance of health care. We come from a tradition that has great reverence for healers and the art of healing. “Two ethicists are debating about abortion. One says a human life is viable at conception. The other says human life is viable only after birth. A Jew hearing the discussion interrupts, “When does a human life become viable according to the Jews? When your child finishes medical school.”
Humor aside, our greatest philosopher and authority in Jewish law was a physician. Maimonides establishes a cornerstone obligation concerning human health in his great code, the Mishneh Torah:
” When one eats and drinks, one should not be doing so just for enjoyment, because then one will eventually be eating just to sweeten one’s palate and for the joy of it; but one should eat and drink just for the sake of the health of one’s body and limbs. Therefore, one should not eat whatever he desires like a dog or a donkey; one should eat only what the body will use, whether it is bitter or sweet, and one should not eat those things which are bad for the body, even if they are sweet.”
(Torah, Hilchot Deot 3:5-8)
The Jew & The Carrot partnered with Chow.com to come up with some yummy holiday recipes for this season of Yuntif meal after Yuntif meal…
Thanks to our contributors Jeannette, Rhea and Rachel for sharing these ideas! You can see the whole slideshow on Chow.com‘s website by clicking here.
Rachel Harkham shared the following three recipes with us:
The Jewish New Year holidays are a time marked by eating (Rosh Hashanah), not eating (Tzom Gedaliah, the day after Rosh Hashanah), big-time not eating (Yom Kippur), and more big-time eating (Sukkot through Simhat Torah). How should we understand this series of ritual oppositions connected with food? What is the significance of eating and not eating, each in relation to and in contrast with the other?
Since all rituals are best understood—at least to begin with—by considering what makes them different from the ordinary (“Why is this night different from all other nights?”), to understand the meaning of eating and not-eating rituals, it is essential to begin by asking how, what and when people do or do not ordinarily eat. Since eating in the ancient world was very different from eating in our world, the meaning of eating or fasting will be very different in our world than it was for our ancestors in the past.
I have to admit that I’m pretty surprised that none of the contributors at Jew and the Carrot has mentioned anything about shiva asar b’Tammuz, or the 17th of Tammuz, a fast day that fell this year on July 9th. I don’t mean to wag my finger – I’m not keeping the fast days either – nor compete with Rabbi Mark Hurvitz’s elegant post regarding fasting as a mode of consciousness-raising about Darfur. But I do think it’s worth contemplating what it means, as a Jew, to refrain from food. Frankly, the topic of fasting should be a part of our collective conversation, in the aftermath of the AgriProcessors and Rubashkins fiasco, of what it means to be kosher.
(Originally posted on Express Night Out, a new online segment of the Washington Post).
If Jews properly atone for their sins (no short and sweet confessions a la the Catholics), they are written into the “Book of Life,” which means they will live to see the next Yom Kippur. But once the sun sets and the starving is over, it’s time for the break-the-fast meal — a day of atonement followed by a night of binge eating.
Leah Koenig is editor of “The Jew and the Carrot,” a blog dedicated to the “New Jewish Food Movement”: sustainable food within a Jewish paradigm. Think local, organic, humanely raised food in a yarmulke — that tastes delicious. Koenig will help you navigate the world of forgiveness, fasting and food
(Ideas and recipes below the jump)
Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.
In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted.
Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory – it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh variety. The other was six or so tiny butter sandwiches on my mother’s anise bread.
The bread was a high, oblong loaf shining from egg glaze and redolent of liquorice, which I despised as a child. On our walk, I would watch the plastic sack of break-fast food thumping against my father’s trousered leg, a reminder that holy space of Yom Kippur was about to close over us and leave us to our good intentions and the rest of the year. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, that sweet, seeded bread. (Now, of course, I know better.)
In a season filled with symbolic meanings, the question of whether to eat nuts during these days of repentence has advocates for the yeah and the ney. There are those who definitely avoid nuts of all shapes and sizes during these ten days. For some there is a deep symbolic meaning, as I mentioned in my Rosh Hashana post, as the Hebrew word egoz has a numeric value 17 (when you add up the value of each letter) [thanks to Devo for the correction] that is equal to that of the Hebrew word of sin (het) and as sin should be avoided so too should nuts.
I don’t personally find this to be the most persuasive argument against nuts, as I suspect that if I looked long and hard I might be able to find other foods whose value was similarly negatively associated. But there is another school of thought that suggests that nuts should be avoided in this particular season because they can have a negative effect on our ability to sing. (Their husks and meats have a tendency to get caught in or dry up throats and so they are to be avoided in this season when our need to raise our voices to God is so essential.)
Looking into this matter, I came across some wonderful rabbinic teachings about nuts.
Thanks to Aaron Kagan for this guest post. Aaron maintains the blog Tea and Food.
While a Yom Kippur recipe might seem like an oxymoron, there are many food traditions surrounding the meals immediately preceding and following the 25 hours in which most Jews refrain from food. Jews in Iraq, for example, frequently break the fast with a nourishing yet easily digestible glass of rice milk.
I was surprised to find this beverage in such a traditional context, having until now chiefly associated it with vegans and the lactose intolerant. But it turns out that rice milk is popular in many parts of the world besides those places where you can order a dairy free smoothie for the cost of a meal. Take the Thai kokkoh or Mexican horchata, for instance. Cut the sugar and skip the cinnamon of the latter and you’ve got something that closely resembles both the stuff in the rectangular carton at Whole Foods and the drink made by Iraqi Jews to close the most holy day of the year.
(x-posted to Pickled)
I grew up in a household with a Christian dad and a liberally observant mom, so there wasn’t much fasting going on in my house on Yom Kippur. Throughout my teenage years, I would go to synagogue and watch hungry, repenting Jews sneak off to the bathroom to eat the baggie of Cheese Nips they hid in their purse. My family would come home from services and eat warm corned beef with mustard, purchased from a nearby deli. I had no sense of guilt. I knew that some Jews fasted, but my family (and apparently a solid handful of other congregants) didn’t.
It wasn’t until I moved to New York after college that I started to get the sense that fasting was kind of a big deal. I was invited to a “pre-fast” meal before Kol Nidre – a concept that didn’t really resonate with me since I was still planning to have breakfast the next day. I was struck during that meal at how reverent and aware people were of their food. The dinner guests filled their dishes with knowing looks, as if they knew they’d never eat again, not just abstain for the next 25 hours.
Erev Yom Kippur / 20 / September 2007
Dear All,
I had one of the most astonishing and fascinating conversations of my life over Rosh Hashanah. It was about killing two goats, and I wanted briefly to share it with you ahead of Yom Kippur and Succot.
I spent Rosh Hashanah at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, and – after visiting the goats there – I sat down with Aitan Mizrahi, Freedman’s very own goatherd and the founder of the Adva Goat Dairy and Rachel Gaul, another goatherd friend of Aitan’s. This Yom Kippur will be exactly a month since I posted a piece on The Jew & The Carrot, titled Schechting a goat at the Hazon Food Conference? The conference will be at Freedman, and the key part of the conversation went roughly as follows:
-You know, of course, that if you want to schecht two goats at the Food Conference [in early December], you’ll have to pay to feed them from October till December.
-Why?
-Well, because otherwise they’ll be killed in October – that’s when bucks [male goats] get slaughtered.
-Why’s that?
-Well, goats give birth in the spring. The kids in due course give milk, so they live for a good number of years; but the bucks have no use, so they’re fed during the summer, when food is abundant, and then typically they’re killed in October, ahead of the winter.
-That’s unbelievable! That’s just incredible! You’re telling me that if we schecht two goats at the food conference, we’ll actually be extending their lives by two months – because otherwise they’d be killed in October?
-Yeah, Nige. You know – “no dairy without death.”
-NO DAIRY WITHOUT DEATH??!!
The Jewish Week published an article this week that examines: The Yom Kippur tradition of kaporot, the Jewish ethical food movement. Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot both get significant shout-outs. Read the full article here (or below).
Swinging No More
Kaporos and the new eco-kosher movement.
Steve Lipman – Staff Writer
Growing up out of town, in a non-Orthodox household, I never knew from kaporos.
It’s a post-Talmudic, pre-Yom Kippur custom in some traditional circles that involves swinging a live chicken three times over your head, reciting some verses that symbolically transfer your sins to the fowl — a rooster for a man, a hen for a woman — then leaving it behind to be slaughtered, in a kosher manner of course, and given to a needy family.
Kaporos is Hebrew for “atonements.” The custom is supposed to teach sensitivity for God’s creatures and awareness of one’s own transgressions. Orthodox, but a rationalist, I wasn’t interested. Then Tami called.
“Do you want to do kaporos with me?” she asked.
I am sitting in the Nagycsarnok — the Great Market — in Budapest, thinking: I’m only here for 4 days, there’s no way I can possibly eat my way through this country! Only four days, and one of them Yom Kippur.
This food is the Hungarian countryside, only edible. Cucumbers. Celery. Leeks. Melons. Yellow beans. Carrots and parsnips and piles and piles of peppers — pale green ones and bright red ones that look like crumpled wads of newspaper. While the amount of global food in Budapest is a little sobering (Burger King, pizza places, gyros and felafel and Chinese fast food), there are still a lot of foods I’ve never seen before, and that makes me feel I’m in a new place.
Such as bags of cheese — turned out to be a sort of dry cottage cheese. And a biscuit-type thing with cheese and pumpkin seeds. And (baruch hashem!) all the “meggy” treats — sour cherry turnover, strudel with sour cherries and poppyseeds….
What does it mean, to eat my way through a country? And what does that mean for Yom Kippur, a day of not eating?
So. I’m in week one of kitchen tshuvah – my attempt to “return to my best self” through some serious reflection and reordering of my kitchen and all it symbolizes: family, overeating/under-eating, connection to the land, caring for others, care of myself, building community…
It’s all a bit daunting, especially since I haven’t spent more than 10 minutes in my kitchen for almost a week. But with the Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat lineup (prayer, food, sleep, food, prayer, more food, a little more sleep and leftovers to bring home) finally over, I actually feel free to spend time reassessing my culinary situation.
Glancing into my fridge this morning, I noticed a crisper of neglected (but remarkably still fresh) CSA vegetables and not much else….unless you count the nearly empty milk container and murky condiment jars. So, I dusted off my granny cart and headed for the Park Slope Food Coop.
I know – so I went shopping, big deal, right? But I felt giddy strolling down the aisles – bagging bulk pasta, grinding coffee grounds and stocking up on bread, beans, and cheese. My kitchen would have life again! It would have potential and I, for a change, would feel settled there instead of bewildered and hungry. I started dreaming up meals I could make for friends, reconnecting not only to my cutting boards, but to the people I love.
See below for more and a recipe for plum and nectarine cobbler…
