Archive for the 'Jewish Learning' Category
Counting…
Blessings, Bread, Cleanse, Community Agri., Farming, Holidays, Jewish Farm School, Jewish Learning, Seasonality, Sustainability
Thanks to Yigal Deutscher for this guest post.
We have just begun the Sefirat HaOmer, counting off the direct correlation between Pesach & Shavuot, two celebrations separated by a string 50 days long. These are two moments in time, interwoven, yet at polar opposites. On Day 1, we have left bread behind, as Chametz. On Day 50, we are elevating bread as an offering in the Holy Temple, a sacrifice unique to the day of Shavuot. A serious transformation has just taken place.
The link between our starting point and our destination goal is food, bread in particular. This corridor of time marks the counting of grain ripening…from the start of the barley harvest to the start of the wheat harvest.
1 Comment »Sophisticated Shalach Manot (Part 2)
On Monday, Chef Gil Marks offered us a delicious array of recipes to fill your shalach manot basket with freshly-baked treats (hamentaschen, of course, but also baklava, almond horns, pecan tassies and even fortune cookies!) Now, he’s back with even more ways to surprise your friends on Purim with creative, DIY shalach manot.
Chef Marks is the author of The James Beard Award-winning, Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World, and the upcoming Encyclopedia of Jewish Food - Next week, Chef Marks will be back with a menu for a Purim Persian Feast!
Themed Gifts:
Besides giving baked goods and confections, theme baskets provide an outlet for your ingenuity.
Try an Italian motif with an assortment of pastas, homemade tomato sauce, pesto, balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes, salami, Italian bread or focaccia, biscotti, and a bottle of Italian wine.
For a sushi basket (most of these items can be found in health food stores) include some homemade sushi, short-grain rice, nori (seaweed sheets), rice vinegar, tamari, mirin (sweet rice wine), homemade pickled ginger, wasabi (Japanese horseradish), salmon caviar, dashi (soup stock), sake, and Japanese tea and enclose instructions on how to use everything.
For an English effect use scones, an assortment of marmalades or jams, Cheddar cheese, rice pudding, pound cake, shortbread cookies, English ales and beers, and an array of teas.
After you have gone to the trouble of making and/or purchasing special items for shalachmones, it seems only appropriate to put them into something special…
Are “Green” Fuels Green?
There’s a concept in Jewish tradition called mitzva ha’ba b’aveirah, a mitzvah that gets done as the outcome of a sin is rendered invalid. For instance, one may not blow a stolen shofar on Rosh Hashanah, eat stolen matzah on Passover, or light a stolen menorah on Chanukah. The fact that the mitzvah came out of a sin renders it unacceptable to G-d.
While we already know about the impact biofuels are having on food prices, an article in today’s New York Times makes me wonder if the entire positive impact biofuels will have in the near future is rendered a mitzva ha’ba b’aveirah.
Posterboy of The New Jewish Food Movement
Animal Care, Blessings, Cheese, Eco-Kashrut, Farming, Jewish Learning, Kosher, Milk, Seasonality, Spirituality
The Jew & The Carrot {hearts} Aitan and Adva Dairy. Thanks to Nextbook for producing a wonderful podcast and feature one of our favorite Jewish goat farmers - yes, there’s more than one!
“Goat Days”
Nextbook 2.25.08
By: Jesse Graham
(Listen to the podcast)
There’s a growing movement among environmentally conscious observant Jews to rethink kashrut. Its adherents place less emphasis on the official kosher stamp, and more on where their food comes from. They want locally and organically grown produce, and if they are meat-eaters, they want to know that the meat they’re eating comes from farms that treat animals humanely.
One devotee of this movement is an unassuming thirty-year-old named Aitan Mizrachi, founder of the AVDA Dairy, a small-scale goat dairy farm in northwestern Connecticut that produces organic, kosher raw milk yogurt and cheeses.
Glimpsing the Eternal
Animal Care, Blessings, Community Agri., Family & Kids, Food Conference, Hazon, Holidays, Jewish Learning, Judaism, Kosher, Meat, Milk, Personal Story, Spirituality, Women
Thanks to Maria Russakoff for this guest post, originally printed in the Arizona Jewish Post. It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything about Hazon’s Food Conference or the controversial goat schecting, but this piece is worth sharing.
The handwritten sign over the shiny percolator reads: “Chai tea - made lovingly with raw goat and cow milk, brewster honey, sadeh hot peppers, blackstrap molasses, black tea and ginger.” I haven’t the faintest idea where brewster honey comes from or what makes hot peppers “sadeh,” but I know from the first sip that I have come to a place that will nurture my stomach, mind and soul for the next three days. I breathe a contented sigh of relief, happy to have made it in one piece from sunny Arizona to the Connecticut Berkshires in the dead of winter, happy to be back at the Hazon Jewish Food Conference in its second year.
Healthy, Sustainable Tu B’shevat Resources
“You can trace the recent history of Tu B’shevat seders like branches on a tree.” - Nigel Savage, Jerusalem Post, 2004
The Jew & The Carrot Presents: Healthy, Sustainable Tu B’shevat Resources
Click here to peruse The Jew & The Carrot’s Tu B’shevat Resource List, for helpful tips and ideas to create your own Tu B’shevat seder, or celebrate the holiday of the trees in sustainable style. If you have any ideas or tips you’ve picked up from a Tu B’shevat past, please share them below.
Move over Rachel Ray…
Hazon was delighted to welcome Chef Gil Marks, author of several cookbooks including the James Beard award-winning Olive Trees and Honey
Chef Marks put Rachel Ray’s 30-minute meals to shame, by preparing four entirely different, entirely fried Chanukah goodies from around the world in an hour and 15 minutes. (He also managed to be quite entertaining while avoiding the “words” Yum-O and EVOO). His dishes included:
Keftes de Espinaca (Sephardic Spinach Patties)
Cassola (Roman Sweet Cheese Pancakes)
Couscous Hiloo (Couscous with Dried Fruits and Nuts)
Bimuelos/Zelebi (Sephardic Doughnuts/Funnel Cakes)
The recipes are listed below the jump - and will be as delicious on a random Sunday as they were at The Food Conference!
Jewish Traditions / Sustainable Food Systems
America, Blessings, Coffee, Community Agri., Cooking, Dinner parties, Featured, Food Conference, Food Justice, Hazon, Health, Israel, Jewish Farm School, Jewish Learning, Personal Story, Shemita, Travel, Tuv Ha'Aretz, gardeningBelow is the full text of Friday night’s keynote at The Hazon Food Conference. The keynote was given by Nati Passow, co-founder of The Jewish Farm School. It’s a long post, but definitely worth the read - even if you have to print it out (on recycled paper of course!) and take it home.
(Nati’s on the right, next to Simcha Schwartz. Photo by Sabrina Malach.)
Hazon Food Conference
December 6-9, 2007
Keynote Address: Nati Passow
Thank you Nigel. Shabbat Shalom and Chanukah Sameach. It is a great honor to be here with you all tonight. Nigel suggested that I begin by sharing my story with you, my connection and relationship to food, which I think is a great way to begin this talk, because one of the things I like most about food is that sitting down to a meal is a great excuse to spend time with friends and listen to each other’s stories. So here is a little bit of mine.
Seven years ago I took a Sabbatical. I left university for the year and traveled in Israel. I studied in yeshiva, toured the country and then settled into an apartment in Jerusalem. After having little success finding a job, I decided to enjoy my sabbatical for what it was time to just be present. This was when I discovered good coffee, which for any honorable coffee drinker is a moment you never forget. An older friend of mine sat me down and said that if I was going to drink coffee everyday, I should make it good. Buy whole beans, grind them myself and brew something delicious.
The coffee was my gateway drug to the world of slow food.
Uri L’tzedek tackles Agriprocessors
X-posted from Jewschool, Josh Frankel covers the growing Uri L’tzedek social justice beit midrash in Washington Heights. This week, the beit midrash covered food issues, including Agriprocessors:
Avi Lyon, director of the Jewish Labor Committee, told stories from his visit to Rubashkin’s meat’s AgriProcessors plant, in Iowa, and poor working conditions there, from intimidating workers not to speak to outsiders, to charging workers for their smocks and not paying them for the time required to get into and out of their safety equipment, to the high injury toll. Mike Schultz led a group brainstorm of any and all problems of workers’ rights or being an ethical kosher consumer that were really bothering the people in the room, and people had a lot to say, with a lot of fervor. Steven Exler outlined the cycle of community organizing, presented more facts on Agriprocessors, and asked people what they would be willing to do about it. Shmuly closed out the night by offering multiple opportunities for “homework,” ways to start acting on what we had talked about. 10 people signed up to table for workers’ rights at this weekend’s convention of kosher food producers, KosherFest. Others are planning to start working on pressuring local food providers to carry other meat options. Several people wanted to work on generating more of a halachic discourse on tzedek questions among the poskim.
The batei midrash will continue every 3 or 4 weeks, open and accessible to all, and now Uri L’Tzedek is starting to move into providing support and partnership for those who are ready to take the lead and get it done in the community. Started by three YCT students, Aaron Finkelstein, Mike Schultz, and Shmuly Yanklowitz along with the generous support of a Herbert Lieberman Award. For more information, contact Aaron Finkelstein.
Eat, drink, simcha
Thanks to Rabbi Ian Pear (Rabbi of the Shir Hadash community in Israel) for this guest post. It’s funny how things come in twos and threes - Rabbi Pear’s post picks up on the theme of simcha and meat that Avi included in his most recent post about Chef Frankel.
Cross-posted from (Joyous Judaism)
For vegetarians, one Talmudic phrase is particularly bothersome: “There is no simcha (joy) without meat and wine.” The customary way to deal with this dictum — that is, if one is a vegetarian — is to argue that the Talmud was speaking subjectively not objectively — i.e., it did not believe meat and wine were objectively the only means by which simcha could be achieved, but rather the most likely catalyst for the majority of people. Or to put it another way: If one genuinely feels simcha by eating meat and drinking wine, then such a person certainly should not refrain from doing so when mandated to celebrate life — like at a wedding, brit mila, Shabbat meal, etc.. He must enjoy himself! A puritanical asceticism is not permitted; the simcha requires meat and wine. On the other hand, if a person does not feel simcha by eating meat and wine, then he is certainly not obligated to do so, but rather must find an alternative source of joy and pursue that course instead.
Resting - a religious/political view
Today’s New York Times reported:
As Israel’s Jews start a new year, the country finds itself in the middle of a fierce religious dispute about the sanctity of fruits and vegetables.”
Indeed.
As Yigal’s article mentioned, the ancient, Torah-mandated practice of shmita leaves the contemporary land of Israel, its farmers - and also its eaters - in a peculiar bind. The problem is, unsuprisingly, religious. Israel’s chief rabbinate condones the loophole practice of heter mechira, or growing food on Israeli soil if it is temporarily sold to non-Jews. Still, it allows rabbis of local cities to decide for themselves whether heter mechira will rule, which opens the “two Jews, three opinions” floodgates.
Resting - a farmer’s view
Blessings, D'var Torah, Farming, Hazon, Holidays, Israel, Jewish Learning, Organic, Seasonality, SpiritualityThanks to Tuv Ha’Aretz farmer and founder of the Shorashim:Roots program at Chava v’Adam farm in Modi’in, Israel, Yigal Deutscher, for this insider look at the shemita year).
22 days have passed from the moment we celebrated the New Year with the blowing of the shofar until yesterday, when, after hours of dancing, drinking, and singing, we rolled the Sefer Torah back to her beginning and read the story of creation.
This stretch of time has been a stretch out of time, a microcosm of creation itself, mirroring the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the 22 building blocks that God used in creating the world we live in.
Yesterday, we stepped back into time, into the Hebrew year 5767, the seventh year of the seven year cycles that guide the flow of time in the land of Israel. This year itself is an extended dimension out of time, one Shabbat stretching from now until next Rosh Hashana. We are already 22 days into Shemita but only now will we come face to face with this moment.
We cannot make this transition alone. We can only begin our year if the land begins with us. Our awakening, reemerging into the normal flow of time, is hand in hand with the earth itself. We have been in a cocoon, nursing from spiritual banks of forgotten reservoirs. The soil of Israel has been in a cocoon herself, deep in sleep after 5 months of hot sun and barren skies.
Swinging No More
Animal Care, Eco-Kashrut, Hazon, Holidays, Jewish Culture, Jewish Learning, Jewish Orgs, Kosher, Meat, News, Notable Press, On The Web, PoliticsThe 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.
Sloppy Joe Goes Green
Thanks to The Jew & The Carrot friend, Robbie Friedman, for this guest post.
Rectangular pizza, sloppy joes and canned corn — classic components of a school lunch. Many of our schools still spoon out such unwholesome foods, yet a growing number of them are turning the greasy corner.
Since New England born physicist Benjamin Thompson founded the Poor People’s Institute in Munich, Germany in the late 1700’s, providing daily staples such as potato soup, barley and peas to children during the course of their studies, our social institutions have constantly “sought to develop meals which would provide the best nutrition at the lowest possible cost.”
This approach has undoubtedly fed countless mouths, but it has also led to the deterioration of food quality. Today the struggle to nourish our children persists, due in part to school systems’ ailing budgets, parents pressed for time and our own lack of nutritional knowledge. However, a failure to deliver a wholesome source of vitamins, minerals, proteins and healthy fats to our children’s plates is a detriment to their development. People, including Jews, are beginning to take the matter into their own soiled hands.
