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)

As we enter our 25 hour fast, what better time to reflect on food and health as we suffer from its temporary absence. Maimonides establishes a central principle of the Jewish teaching on physical health. We have a personal obligation to live in the healthiest way possible. The imperative for health starts with each of us.

Maimonides establishes here a principle about health and eating. Tonight, I want to suggest to you that kosher, which means fit or proper, should be understood to include all Jewish teachings about food, what constitutes proper food, how we prepare it, how we consume it, and how we share it with others, and the impact of our way of eating beyond ourselves. There is a way of eating that is “fit” not only in the ritual sense, but “fit” in a broader sense-food that is fit for our health, food that is fit for our bodies, food that is fit for our environment, food that is fit for our world.

Being kosher is not just about permitted and forbidden foods, it is about a whole way of eating and relating to the bounty of nature. Being kosher is taking responsibility for the way we eat and a concern for all matters relating to food and health, an activity that is integral to our daily lives.

Judaism’s profound teaching about food gives us a unique perspective on the health care debate raging around us. My beef with the great health care debate is about what is not being talked about. What is our personal responsibility in regards to the way we eat? I have a right to good medical care, but don’t I also have an obligation to not eat excessively, to avoid the consumption of unhealthy foods and substances, to maintain my body.

Tom Nantais, TBS co-president, shared with me his conviction that if more Americans committed to eating healthfully, we would go a long way toward resolving our health care morass. Tom, you are a follower of Maimonides who teaches us that the first obligation for a Jew is our responsibility to do our best to care for our health through the way we eat. We all know that illness can strike us even with a healthy lifestyle, and that we all age and ultimately die. But our tradition does emphasize that we can greatly influence the outcome of our health by our way of eating.

But a big problem in our times is that the food choices around us and pedaled to us, the crazy pace of our lives, and the lack of universal access to good and healthy food compromises our ability to live healthy lives.

The current raging debate about health care focuses on our vast, dysfunctional system of interventionist medicine. But there is an elephant in the room. No one is talking about how our government subsidizes terrible food choices. No one raises the injustice that poor Americans have little or no access to healthy food. No one challenges a system that spends billions of marketing dollars seducing us to eat food products that undermine our environment, waste huge amounts of fossil fuels and most of all jeopardize our personal health.

Michael Pollan, the leading critic of the American way of eating, writes that the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, one of the main contributing factors to that disease. Our health crisis in America is driven not only by a broken health care system, but even more so by the American way of eating and producing food. This food system compromises our health which requires massive amounts of expensive medical intervention to keep us functioning and alive.

One of the leading products of the American food industry is patients for the American health care industry. (Pollan, NY Times, 9/9/09)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are. Our food industry produces 17000 new food products every year with a marketing industry which spends over thirty two billion dollars a year to sell us those products. The fast food industry, one large part of this industry, is the source of over 250 billion dollars a year in health care costs and billions more in environmental and energy costs.

According to Michael Pollan a global pandemic is in the making, a most unusual one because it involves no virus or bacteria, no microbe of any kind- just a way of eating. Four of the ten leading causes of death today are chronic diseases with well established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime.

The modern American diet, built on highly processed foods and grains and on the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat, dependent on a handful of staple crops and on massive amounts of chemicals and fossil fuels to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures is the most radical change to the way humans eat since the discovery of agriculture. The modern American diet has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

But our way of eating doesn’t only impact our health. It has massive side effects. US agriculture uses 400 gallons of fossil fuels a year to feed every American. That includes the average travel distance of 1500 miles for your food to arrive on the shelf.

Current meat packing practices maim and cripple tens of thousands of workers each year by virtue of the intense speed and volume of their output. The working conditions at these slaughterhouses are horrendous. With great embarrassment and shame to the Jewish community the top kosher meat producer, the Kosher Agriprocessers plant in Iowa, was busted by the Feds for illegal hiring and labor practices– then when bankrupt.

These sobering facts, which are only the tip of the iceberg, remind us that Judaism’s call for us to take personal responsibility for our health is made more challenging in an environment that seduces us constantly with cheap, poor quality, mass produced and marketed, wasteful, and unsustainable food products. All these factors overwhelm the wisdom of our food traditions and centuries of accumulated common sense about eating.

As Jews we have to start with personal responsibility even when the environment around us is set up to undermine good choices. Because once we take personal responsibility for our choices, we have authority to speak out for society as a whole. In that spirit, I call on my fellow Jews to a renewed and expanded understanding of what it means to be a kosher Jew.

To be kosher in the fullest sense is to eat

healthfully,

ethically,

sustainably,

intentionally,

practicing hospitality,

and in a distinctively Jewish way.

1. To be kosher is to eat healthfully.

The Talmud offers an astonishing admission about Yom Kippur: Resh Lakish said: One who gorges himself with food on Yom Kippur is free from punishment. Why? Because the Torah said, “A person who does not afflict themselves throughout the day shall be cut off from his kin.” (Lev 23:29), and that excludes one who does himself harm by excessive eating.

In other words, we afflict ourselves more by unhealthy eating than by any of the sanctioned afflictions such as fasting on Yom Kippur. Unhealthy eating is its own punishment.

2. To be kosher is to eat ethically:

To be a kosher is to be an ethical eater. This requires mindfulness about the way our consumption of food impacts others. If we know a food was produced by slave labor, should we eat it? If we know the kosher meat we are eating was made by producers who treat their laborers unfairly, should we eat it?

In the wake of the Agriprocessors raid, the Conservative Movement established a new kosher certification process called Magen Tzedek. Kosher meat and poultry producers will only get a Magen Tzedek Heksher if they are able to demonstrate their upholding of fair and ethical labor practices.

Hear the story of what is in my mind a kosher hero. Will Allen, son of a black share cropper won a $500,000 McArthur Genius Grant for his efforts to bring healthier options to the urban poor of Milwaukee. Allen was moved to action as he witnessed the horrible health conditions of America’s urban poor who suffer from sky high rates of diabetes, heart disease, obesity and the devastating health impact of the limited food choices in the urban ghettos. He applied farming skills learned in childhood to establish 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side.

Allen’s Growing Power Farm produces a quarter of a million dollars worth of food in his crammed urban space using microbe and nutrient-rich worm castings. (poop, that is). Using these natural nutrients Allen grows produce and fish to provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites. Being kosher to me means supporting heroic efforts like Will Allen’s.

3. To be kosher is to eat sustainably

One day Choni Hamaagal, the rainmaker, a famous figure of Jewish folklore, was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree. He asked him, “How long does it take for this tree to bear fruit?” He replied. “70 years.” He then asked him: “Are you certain that you will live another seventy years?” He replied: “I found grown carob trees in the world; as my forefathers planted these for me so I too plant these for my children.”

Does the way we eat and the food we consume enhance the prospects for a sustainable diet for future generations? The answer is to seek out ways to eat sustainably. Patronize farmer’s markets, buy foods that are grown locally, eat a wide variety of foods to avoid an over dependence on corn products and over processed foods.

4. To be kosher is to eat intentionally

Being mindful when we eat is a critical element to the Jewish way of eating. “Rabbi Ba the son of Rav Hiyya bar Abba teaches: If he ate while walking, he must stand and bless. If he ate standing he must sit and bless. If he ate sitting, he must recline and bless. If he ate reclining, he must enwrap himself and bless.”

By distinguishing the act of blessing from the act of eating, the Rabbis teach us to strive toward awareness when we eat. Humans should not eat like dogs or donkeys. Judaism teaches that we should become conscious eaters.

Instead of “You are what you eat,” Hale Sofia Schatz writes that people eat what they are. “If you are stressed out all the time chances are you’re feeding yourself stressed out quick grab foods with little vital nourishment. When we shift our way of thinking from ‘you are what you eat’ to ‘you eat what you are’ we see that the latter involves awareness. It makes us stop and question who we are.

If we believe that we are spiritual beings, then we are more likely to seek out the nourishing foods that feed the shining life force that already exists within us.” By adding blessings to our eating, by practicing the Jewish way of mindfulness, we will be more inclined to eat food that blesses our bodies.

5. To be kosher is to practice hospitality.

“Greater is the welcoming of guests than receiving the countenance of the Shekhinah,” states the Talmud.

Jews don’t talk about food like Puritans. We emphasize responsibility, but we teach there should be joy in responsibility. This is the key to understanding the Mitzvah of Hachnasat Orchim-hospitality. Sharing meals is joyful. It is also healthy.

As our meals have become more rushed, they have also grown more isolated. We rush through our meals in the car or eat mindlessly and excessively in front of the TV. As one critic has observed, “The sheer abundance of food in America has bred a vague indifference to food, manifested in a tendency to eat and run rather than to dine and savor.” (Pollan, Eater’s Manifesto, p.54)

Sharing our meals enables us to dine and savor. When we share, we eat more slowly; when we share, we are more inclined to serve healthier food to guests and friends. We rediscover what our Sisterhood already knows, that cooking for others is great gift. You will also rediscover the joy and art of conversation and interaction with others. And you will be doing a mitzvah, especially when you share your meals on Shabbat and Festivals.

6. To be kosher is to eat in a distinctively Jewish way.

This aspect of koshrut is most familiar to us. Following the ritual laws of koshrut, eating meat only from permitted and properly slaughtered animals, separating of milk and meat, buying products that are free from foods forbidden to us by the Torah is a significant way we express our uniqueness.

It is also the part of being kosher about which many of you are ambivalent. Why go to the trouble of eating the unique diet called upon by the Torah? What has this to do with all that I have described up to this point?

It is hard to be kosher today, just like it is hard to eat healthy today, because of the enormity of the bad choices all around us. Being kosher is the Torah’s way of teaching us to be strong, to be not afraid in being distinct, and to learn self-discipline. Every generation of Jews who remained loyal to koshrut had to make mindful and distinctive decisions about the way they ate. This included healthy practices that distinguished the Jews from their neighbors in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.

Eating is a holy act that encompasses so many dimensions of what it means to be a purposeful human being. It is time to reclaim the excellence and wisdom of the Jewish way of food and eating. We have every reason to be proud of what our tradition teaches us and to commit to living it in our lives.

Let us come back to the theme of personal responsibility in leading healthy lives. Our choices do not only have impact on ourselves, but those around us. And when more of us work hard to live responsible, healthy lives, we find the courage to face the obstacles and traps made by our troubled food system.

The current health care debate is important because it will hopefully lead to addressing the heartbreaking unfairness, the terrible inequities and inexcusable inefficiencies of our byzantine health care system. But we should not ignore the troubling linkage between a health care system and our food system. For reforms in our food system will have a huge impact on our health care system and an even larger impact on our lives and the lives of those who come after us.

By living kosher in the fullest sense we walk the walk toward a healthier, sustainable, and Jewish way of living. In renewing our commitment to living kosher in the fullest sense we stand on firm ground to advocate for a just and sustainable national health care system built on a reformed food system which offers us accessible, affordable, and abundant healthy choices for our way of eating.

Here are four concrete ways our Temple community can act to collectively offer a healthier and kosher way of living for every member of our community.

First, Beginning Thursday morning, October 8th, Thursdays will be a Health Walk with Rabbi Dov . Every Thursday morning at 6am before the minyan I welcome congregants to join me for a vigorous 45 minute walk around Hilltop Park on Signal Hill.

Second, lets join TBS Member, Martha DeYoung, with her idea to start a small organic vegetable garden in our courtyard which would be tended by our children. Help Martha to realize her initiative so we can teach our children the value of growing good and healthy food and enjoying its bounty at our communal meals.

Third, let’s establish a congregational CSA: a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) Program. A CSA supports local, sustainable agriculture by working with a local farm to bring local, organic produce to our members at competitive prices. The CSA helps a farmer to do sustainable organic farming and preserve farmlands near urban areas. A CSA enables participating members to pick up delicious, fresh produce once a week from the synagogue for the entire growing season. I have a CSA food box from Tanaka farms for you to see what could come to your home if you participate.

Lastly, join me at the Hazon Food Conference in Monterey, California at the end of December where the emerging Jewish Food Movement is bringing about a renewal of our understanding of koshrut along the lines I have spoken about here. I would love to share this wonderful and exciting Jewish experience with TBS congregants. Go to www.hazon.org to learn about this award winning organization transforming the Jewish scene.

The Torah is the way of sacred attunement-of holy mindfulness about our most common and basic acts of daily life. Judaism teaches that our daily acts do ripple out to affect the wider world. We consume what we are. The way we eat impacts our own bodies and carries repercussions for our fellows.

“We do not inherit the earth from our parents; we borrow it from our children.”

Reflect on this truth as we deprive ourselves of food and drink over this great Day of Atonement. Let us rise from our fast tomorrow to work together as a community to restore common sense and holiness to the way we eat.

Live Kosher. Help Save the World.

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.

• Slow-Cooked Stuffed Cabbage with Beef and Rice – by Jeannette Hartman.
• Kale and Pepper Fritatta (contains dairy – good for a veggie meal!) – by Rhea Yablon Kennedy

Rachel Harkham shared the following three recipes with us:

• Apples & Honey Vinaigrette Salad with Spicy Pecans
• Honey-Mustard Baked Chicken
• Fall Spiced Caramel Apple Upside-Down Cake (pareve)

Shana tova! and I hope you’ll be sharing many delicious meals with family and friends in these next couple weeks.

photo credit due to the Chow.com test kitchen

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.

Eating was generally far more modest and infrequent for our ancestors than it is for us. To begin with, food was far harder to come by. Drought and famine were far more common than they are for us, and they had greater difficulty adapting to these conditions than we do. Since all of our ancestors were “locovores”—that is, they all ate what was available in their immediate environments—when the local environment failed them, they had to fall back on whatever might have been stored. When their stores ran out (as they quickly would have, as their storage capacities were technologically limited) they would have had to fall back upon alcohol (an excellent way to store calories long-term!) or hunger. And hunger was a regular part of the experience of common people.

It was also true, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least, that some Jews (we cannot know what number or proportion) fasted with some regularity. Fasts were called for in response to drought or famine, for example. They were also prescribed in the aftermath of bad dreams. And some Jews took upon themselves the discipline of fasting every Monday and Thursday. All-in-all, hunger, and even fasting, was a much more common experience for them than it was for us, and it against this experience that we must interpret their fasting ritual during the New Year season.

So what did it mean to fast when hunger and even fasting were a more common experience? It meant, first of all, that a fast-day was not all that shocking, as the experience that defined it was not as different from the ordinary as we might imagine. Yes, strict, absolute fasting rendered Yom Kippur different, but not radically so. Ironically, it was the other restrictions of Yom Kippur—the prohibitions pertaining to washing, anointing, wearing shoes, and sex—that set it apart. If anything, the self-imposed hunger of Yom Kippur took a relatively common experience—hunger—and made it sacred. In other words, rather than being an experience of common deprivation, it became an experience of dedication to God. By experiencing what we often experienced, though now in response to divine command, we re-entered relationship with God, a God who, on account of our undertaking, was bound to forgive us our transgressions (or so the tradition promised).

But what about fasting today? We, in the developed Western world, live in a world of caloric abundance. Even the poor among us are often overweight because cheap calories are so readily available- this is why thin is beautiful in our culture. In the world of the Talmudic rabbis, fat was beautiful because the poor were thin by virtue of near starvation. Most people in our societies never deny themselves all food and drink for more than twenty-four hours. So when we do this, we do something radically different. To begin with, when we fast, we are radically different from our neighbors, most of whom never fast (in the pre-modern world, virtually everyone experienced hunger, so Jews fasting on Yom Kippur were not all that different from their neighbors). We are also radically different from our normal, well-fed and sated selves. On Yom Kippur, many of us genuinely suffer—in ways that are different from our normal experience. As a consequence, Yom Kippur is, for us, set apart by that hunger, by that suffering. Yom Kippur is a day of affliction, but in a way different from what it was for our ancestors.

What difference does this difference make? The rabbis of old designated Yom Kippur as one of the most joyous days of the year. But, we say to ourselves, how could that be? How could a day of hunger and self-affliction be a day of joy? When hunger and affliction are unique to a day, then it will be difficult to make it a day of joy. But when hunger is a more common experience, transforming that hunger into a fulfillment of God’s command will be, for the religious person, a source of joy. Taking the common and making it holy—now that’s a reason to rejoice.

The same considerations pertain to our eating during the holidays. When meals were small and hunger a known experience, abundant eating distinguished an occasion as truly special. But today, when even over-eating is common, abundant eating is par for the course. We, therefore, have to work hard to make our festival meals special, to find foods or preparations that mark this day off as being different from any normal day.  When our ancestors ate like kings and queens, they quickly knew that the day was set apart. We eat like royalty all the time. The challenge for us, therefore, will be to create meals that are fit for these days and no others.

Shanah Tovah From JTS! Visit our High Holiday website

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 17^th of Tammuz, a fast day that fell this year on July 9^th. 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.

The whole point of kashrut, as I recall — aside from driving ourselves and our loved ones mad — is that it teaches us to be thoughtful. In other words, to think before putting just anything in our mouths. To my mind, other aspects of Judaism, like wearing a kippah or tzitzit, or living in a home with mezuzot, do much the same; they encourage us, if only by virtue of reminding us that God is watching, to think twice before committing a negative act by word or deed.

Fasting, you could argue, is similar. It reminds us of the bounty we have, which we so often take for granted, and promotes mindful eating once the fast is over. But we’re smart people. And I have to say that I think there must be a better way.

You could ask why bother fixing what ain’t broke. But the reasons are many. For one, there is the surfeit of disordered eating among adolescent women, with Jews being no exception. My high school was pretty badly afflicted, and I always wondered whether it were a  coincidence that the first outposts of Tasti-D-Lite were located just blocks away. (Girls used to go there for “lunch.” They broke even on rent, supplies, and wages from the trips there from the girls in my class alone. ) Second, given that it is one of the only mitzvot universally observed (that is, on Yom Kippur), the concept of fasting has lost much of its meaning, because for some, it is the only mode of observance, or identification with Judaism, still practiced. Third, there is so much hunger in the world — in Darfur, of course, and the rest of the developing world, but in our own communities, too — that it seems a chillul Hashem to perpetuate.

What if, instead of fasting on a single day, we devoted the period of the Nine Days or the Aseret Yemei Teshuva to donating half of our normal food intake to the hungry (literally, by clearing out our pantries, or symbolically, through charitable donations)? Or if we devoted those same periods to ensuring that we said the brachas before eating, or the Birkat Ha’Mazon, if we did not do so normally, and with even more kavanah if those prayers were part of our practice? I don’t know; I’m no halachic expert. But I think that the concept of fasting has become so perverted, within our own culture and as a result of Western mores, that it’s time that we did better.

(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)

5 ways to not think about your stomach growling during fasting.

Be fully engaged with the holiday. I think the problem for many Jews on Yom Kippur is that synagogue can be boring and unfamiliar, which can lead to a more intense focus on how terribly hungry they are.

So, instead of going to a synagogue that will bore you to both hunger and tears, find one that you resonate with and enjoy. Or, gather a group of people to pray together with — or study texts, or sing, or reflect, or mediate — away from the synagogue. Your holiday will ultimately be a lot less painful and significantly more meaningful.

Have a back up juice box in your fridge. For the last two years, I kept an apple juice box waiting in the wings, in case I couldn’t stand the hunger anymore. Two years ago, I drank it, but last year I found that I didn’t need it. Still, having the juice nearby somehow calmed my irrational anxiety that I “couldn’t” eat, and reinforced that I was choosing not to eat for spiritual reasons. It took the edge off the dogma as well as the hunger.

Get outside. Although exercise burns calories, which in theory could make you more hungry, a brisk walk in the autumn air clears your head and allows you to focus on the beauty of your neighborhood or wherever you’re spending the holiday.

Smell fresh herbs. One year, I went to a Yom Kippur service where the leaders handed out fresh basil and mint about an hour before sundown. Congregants were instructed to smell the fresh herbs — but not eat them! After depriving ourselves of food for many hours, our senses of smell were radically heightened. Taking a deep breath of the basil briefly sated my hunger and actually helped to reconnect my wandering head back to the service and the spiritual tasks at hand.

Nap. Yom Kippur is all about delving head-on into our inner spiritual and moral selves, not about sleeping the day away until we can eat again. But taking a catnap between services can really help fill up some of the painful downtime.

5 great break-the-fast foods:

I know everyone swears by bagels for the break-fast and that it’s a bit blasphemous to suggest there might be an alternative path. But while there’s certainly nothing wrong with a schmear and some smoked fish on a bagel, I think our entry back into the world of eating should be as sacred an occasion as the holiday itself. The recipe ideas below are simple to prepare, focus on bright flavors and fresh ingredients — and most everything can be made in advance.

Fresh-baked scones. You can bake these a day ahead so they are ready and waiting when sundown rolls around. I like doctoring up the basic scone recipe from “The Joy of Cooking” with chocolate chips and a little orange zest.

Apple salsa with blue corn chips. Mix together chopped apples with minced cilantro, chopped onion and jalapeno, and a squeeze of lemon juice and agave nectar and let it sit and marinate until its go time.

Stuffed figs. These delicious, bite-sized snacks can be prepared in minutes. Split fresh figs in half and fill centers with a dollop of fresh goat cheese. Drizzle with honey and crushed pistachios.

Cheese and olive plate. Arrange four or five of your favorite cheeses on a plate or cheeseboard and surround them with a variety of salty, briny olives and crackers or French bread.

Seltzer! Almost more than eating, rehydrating is crucial after a fast. But I think it’s somewhat depressing to see a break-fast table weighed down by sodas, diet sodas and other super sweet drinks. Are sugar and chemicals really the first things you want to put into your body after the fast? Plain or flavored seltzer water with a squeeze of fresh lime is festive and delicious, without the added baggage.

Read the rest of the article, here.

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.

In an earlier post, I discussed the idea of doing food teshuvah or repentance: a gradual changing of mindset to try to do better to eat more consciously and sustainably. The comments to the post rightly pointed out the dangers of associating food with sin. There are so many issues to deal with when we make food choices. In the end, over-active guilt about each bite might end up back firing, leaving people to their old habits rather than dealing responsibly with questions like “Is it better to eat local but non-organic, or organic but from 3,000 miles away?” and “What if the only fruit my child will eat are strawberries and it’s the dead of winter?” Indeed, one of the problems with the American diet is that we’ve become so obsessed with the minutia of what goes into our mouths that we have forgotten to take pleasure in eating. We can see the corn stalks but not the field.

I want to suggest that this line of the Al Chet is on to something slightly different. First, its about responsibility. The formulation “We have sinned” requires us to admit that it’s not the chocolate mousse cake that is sinful. We’re the ones who take food for granted in a time when so many people are food insecure.

Perhaps more important is the reminder that this sin is before God—it’s not just about eating sustainably but about eating sacredly. We have to remember the Jewish version of Michael Pollan’s basic rule about eating: “Eat kosher food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Say a bracha.” When we forget to acknowledge that our sustenance depends on God and that we are blessed each day to be able to enjoy it, then we have missed the mark. Judaism provides us with ways to reinforce the sacred nature of our food—as my teacher David Kraemer taught me, we say a bracha not to make the food holy but because it is holy to begin with—saying a bracha thanks God for giving us permission to eat it, and only then does it becomes mundane. On Yom Kippur, we acknowledge as a community that we have been blind to God’s blessings.

There is a beautiful paragraph in the prayer U’netaneh Tokef that describes humankind’s fleeting presence on earth as compared to God’s eternity. One line reads: B’nafsho yavi lachmo, with a person’s very life he or she earns bread. We spend our lives focused on the basics of sustaining ourselves one more day. Learning to eat sacredly means to try to see past those blinders.

Looking deeper, we can see more in the Al Chet to inform our sacred eating. Another line asks forgiveness for sins done knowingly and unknowingly. As sacred eaters, we learn not to eat unknowingly, even if changing our behavior takes a bit longer. In light of recent scandals in the kosher food industry, we should also take to heart the line about sins in our business dealings (Masah u’matan). When standing before God, we cannot compartmentalize our religious obligations from our ethical obligations, and our sacred eating must reflect that synthesis.

It’s especially poignant that we recite this line of the Al Chet on a day when we are fasting. I, like I am sure many of you, end up dreaming about bagels and water as the last hours of Yom Kippur tick down. Most days of the year we can commit this sin. On Yom Kippur, we can’t. This offers us a fantastic opportunity to live our lives differently as soon as the holiday is over—we can begin to eat sacredly as we break our fast.

G’mar chatimah tovah—may each of us be inscribed this year for good in the Book of Life.

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.)

When we got to synagogue, one of my parents would stow the bag under a pile of coats, ostensibly to keep from bothering others who couldn’t even look at food so far into the fast, but also to keep me from repeating my generosity of one year, when I gave out our sandwiches to a bunch of teenagers whom I wanted to like me. After the final service we’d walk home, chewing, still feeling elevated by the specialness of the evening until we’d shed our fancy clothes and sat down to bagels for dinner all together.

Every year I tried the bread. Every year I rejected it and my family would pronounce, “more for us!” with a shrug. Yet when I got to college my freshman year, I could still taste that strong anise flavor all the way from Wisconsin. It was September, my nose told me – the time for the particular smell of that bread in my life. In a sense, nostalgia changed my taste buds for ever. I called up my mother and begged her to send a loaf. She did, and I sat on the grass outside the Madison Hillel after Ne’ila, pulling off hunks of it with my friends. We even had apples bought from the farmers market days before – way better than the old supermarket Macs.

Now that I’m a venerable twenty-five, I’ve inherited some traditions and also changed some, in a daughter’s way. I haven’t touched the anise bread, which to my adult tongue is unbeatable as it is. The apples I’ve messed with a little. I go to a pick-your-own apple orchard every year now, and bring back a bushel of Macouns, Libertys and Cortlands to make apple butter from. A fruit butter is different from a jam or jelly in that it’s made with whole fruits cooked to a thick paste and then strained or milled until they reach a satiny consistency. My apple butter goes on top of my cow butter which goes on top of my anise bread. All three go with me to services, carefully concealed, to carry me through sweetly into the new years of my adulthood.

The recipe for the anise bread can be found in Edda Servi Machlin’s wonderful cookbook, “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, Vol. 1” which has been a go-to at dinner time in my house for as long as I can remember. It is both a cook book and a memoir, and is an entertaining read as well as a wonderful resource. My mother calls the recipe, which Machlin names “Il Bollo,” a “very easy yeast bread.” Click on the link for that recipe. The apple butter recipe is my variation on the classic Joy of Cooking fruit butter, but with a lot more kick to it, and is below:

Apple Butter

Wash eight to ten apples, remove stems and quarter. Don’t worry about skin, cores or aesthetics, as you’ll mill these apples later.
Add the apples to a large pot and cook them slowly on medium heat in a liquid solution of:
1 cup water
1 cup apple cider
1 1/4 cups cider vinegar
If I have no cider, I use half and half water and cider vinegar.

While the fruit is cooking, put another large pot of water on to boil. In this pot, sterilize half a dozen pint-sized mason jars by boiling them for at least fifteen minutes. I use recycled ones from sauerkraut, salsa, peanut butter, mayo, etc., which sometimes come in jars with mouths that fit mason/ball jar seals and bands. Bands can be reused but seals must be bought new. Don’t empty out the water from your jar sterilizing, you’ll need it to seal the full jars later.

When the fruit is thoroughly boiled, force it through a fine strainer (for this task I’ve used everything from a potato masher and a sieve to a hand-cranked food mill, which is a lot easier on the arms and the kitchen floor.)

Now comes the fun part:
To each cup of pulp that you’re left with after milling, add:
1/3 of a cup of sugar (this is really to taste, I often use less)
4 teaspoons cinnamon
aprx. 8 to 10 whole cloves, or 1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon whole all spice
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon grated lemon/orange zest
3 tablespoons lemon juice

Optional: 1 teaspoon dried orange peel/dried rose hips, which look lovely floating in the finished jars

Cook the butter over low heat, stirring constantly, until the sugar is dissolved. Then turn the heat up and cook while stirring frequently until the butter sheets from the spoon. Pour into sterilized jars. I add one cinnamon stick to each jar to keep the flavor developing over the months, and seal. Place the filled, tightly closed jars back in your boiling water bath and process them for fifteen minutes at a hard boil. Pull them out to cool (canning tongs are a great help, though not a necessity, in this) and enjoy them for months to come.

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.

Riffing off of the verse in Song of Songs 6:11 “I went down into the garden of nuts” the rabbis writing in Song of Songs Rabbah suggest that the nut is like the people of Israel coming before God on Yom Kippur. The nut in its shell, they explain, may fall into the mud but it can be picked up wiped, washed and returned to a form suitable for eating. Similarly with the people of Israel fall into trouble throughout the year but come Yom Kippur, they are washed clean and restored to a pure condition. In my reading this midrash reminds us that no matter how sullied we may seem on the inside there is an inner core that is pure.

Furthermore, the almond whose nut can be a bit bitter at times, is the first tree to flower in the Israeli spring and as a result is a sign of hope and rebirth. It is a reminder to all of us that even our hidden bitter bits can flourish into the possibilities of tomorrow.

So I’ll take my chances with my singing voice and serve almonds and other nuts tomorrow before the fast.

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.

Unfortunately I am at present unable to consult the source from which I learned this custom, and the internet is surprisingly unhelpful on the topic. However, while searching, I was surprised by yet another unexpected context for rice milk.

In a 1990 New York Times article, Iraqi doctors cite the use of rice milk as a substitute for cow’s milk as one of the sources of malnutrition that claimed the lives of 1,400 children. Iraqi medical officials, while being closely monitored by Iraqi government officials, blamed sanctions in the wake of the invasion of Kuwait for making milk scarce and prohibitively expensive. According to them, desperate mothers turned to rice milk as an inadequate substitute.

Observers outside of Saddam’s regime (including then ambassador Joe Wilson) begged to differ, saying that there was no evidence for the 1,400 deaths and that markets were full of both food and medicine. Regardless, this instance is a reminder of many things as we contemplate both a new year and the dawn of a new administration.

Iraqi Jews have chosen to cap the day of atonement with rice milk for who knows how long (if anyone knows, I’m all ears!) It is a drink popular all around the world, and one that has at least once played a pivotal part in the complex relationship we have with a region many Jews still call home. Growing up in Boca Raton, we always had bagels and lox – but this year I can’t think of a more thought provoking way to break my fast than with this history laden drink.

Iraqi Rice Milk

Cook any kind of rice, though brown is preferred, using twice as much water as you normally would. Once the rice is soft, blend it and the water. Strain and spice (cinnamon, cardamom, etc.) or sweeten (sugar, maple syrup, honey, agave, etc.) if so desired. To thicken, blend again with a neutral oil (like canola).

Related Posts
Vegan Honey Alternatives
Sushi Shabbat
Yid.Dish: Rice Gelato

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.

The next day I ate my eggs and toast and headed off to shul hop in my neighborhood. All around me were hungry Jews – truly hungry, not secretly full of Nabisco snacks. “What’s wrong with eating on Yom Kippur?” I asked myself. “I wouldn’t focus on praying if I was hungry.” Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilt that I stood there with a fully satiated stomach, while the Jews around me were truly experiencing a physical sense of loss which seemed so appropriate for such a solemn day. I ate a snack after shul before heading back for neilah. But I was determined – next year I was going to fast.

And so I did – up at a Jewish retreat center in the Catskills where some friends and I went for the holiday. Everything was fine – I felt newly a part of things, I could commiserate with my fellow fasting Jews and was proud of my headache, which I took as a sign that I was truly repenting.

But halfway through the day, things went sour. My head surged with a terrible headache and I felt so woozy I could hardly stand. I went to lie down. I went to breathe in more fresh air, but my body was clearly rejecting the fact that I hadn’t nourished it.

Feeling desparate, I found a member of the retreat center’s kitchen staff and begged for their help. They gave me some concentrated apple juice, which I drank mixed with water. Reconstituted and industrially packaged, it was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever consumed. I felt my stomach settle slightly and my body regain its sense of balance. I went back to services, feeling relieved but horribly guilty. I’d failed fasting. I sucked at Judaism.

But then I realized, I was still really hungry! I’d stopped myself from fainting, but my belly still cried out for food. I could pray and I could concentrate on repentence, but I still felt far from full. This weird little mixture of sustained-but-not-satiated felt right. As I davenned at Neilah that evening, I forgave myself for the juice and the religious crisis drinking it caused.

This year, I will officially instate my own yearly Yom Kippur juice fast. I have lemonade in my fridge for the critical moments, but will otherwise abstain from eating. I will take a morning walk in the park, I will go to shul and pray, I will read the story of Jonah, I will drink a little juice if need be and, come break-fast, I will celebrate my return – I hope – guilt free in every sense of the word.