The month Nisan begins tonight and with it, so many associations. Last year, I wrote about the practice of refraining from eating Matzah from Rosh Hodesh Nisan (i.e. tonight) until Passover. Most people make, if any, the association of dreaded Pesach cleaning and preparation. I’ll be writing some about that in a few days or next week, God willing, but for now, let’s stick to things connected specifically to Rosh Hodesh Nisan.

One association fewer people make is that Birkat haIlanot, the blessing over blooming trees, is typically said in the month of Nisan:

Thanks so much to Rachel Kriger for this terrific meditation on the month of Adar.  Rachel was raised on organic food and in Jewish dayschool. After college, in the Adamah fellowship, she was able to merge her love of small scale farming and Judaism, and she became the farm manager for the following year.  The Calendar Garden at Kayam farm at Pearlstone, is a place to cultivate plants and their connection to seasons, Jewish wisdom and body awareness. Please feel free to join this Rosh Chodesh group in the garden each month.

On Shavuot, when we celebrate receiving the Torah, we also celebrate the offering of the first fruits in the Temple, the bikurim.

The offering was a supremely humble gesture: the fruits which form first on a tree are often smaller, less perfect, only hinting at the abundance to follow. In ancient Israel, these offerings were gussied up, surrounded by the more beautiful fruit which grew later, brought sometimes in gold baskets, accompanied by flutes, processions. All the trappings of art and wealth were used to beautify the offering. Yet without the small, perhaps wrinkled fruit of the bikurim, there could be no offering.

It was at this moment of offering that the Torah teaches us to recite the story of redemption, the same one we now read in our Passover haggadah. The story was also a garland, as it were, for the bikurim offering, connecting our history to the very physical redemption of another spring and another growing season.

Thanks to Matt Brown for this guest post. Matt is the Communications Assistant at the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education. He used to be a food columnist for his college newspaper because, he says, it’s the most fun way to be published.

Eating is beyond rote; most of the time, when we’re hungry, we simply wander over to the fridge or call for take-out with nary a thought. At the Atlantic Monthly, however, Zeke Emanuel makes the case for prayer before meals. Reflecting upon the Motzi and the other brachot, he notes:

The prayer serves to synchronize the starting of a meal. It also is a shared activity. Said out loud and communally, the prayer literally unites people. Thus a prayer makes a community for a moment. At the family dining table it serves as a reminder of the unity of the family.

Although Emanuel’s focus is ultimately on a “secular” prayer before meals, he’s spot on. Taking the time to “say grace” before eating – whether a blessing or the unreligious/pan-religious “thanks for our privileged position and access to wonderful food” – truly is a quick and simple way to connect to your food and all who worked to put it in front of you. But what about after the meal?

At Pesach we drink a lot of wine. Why is it called the symbol of our joy?

In an arid environment, wine can be seen a method of preservation. If you do not live or work near a well or a spring or some other source of fresh water you need to have something else to drink during the day.

• Milk does not last without refrigeration; actually we can think of cheese as a form of dried milk (that is a form of preserving milk).
• Crushing olives obtains oil, which while highly useful, does not quench thirst.
• Squashing pomegranates produces a very tart juice, but it doesn’t last long at room temperature.
• Squeezing dates creates a very sweet paste our ancestors called “dvash“.
• And figs don’t produce much in the manner of a drinkable juice either.

The Grape

But, that other fruit mentioned among the seven species, the grape, undergoes an amazing transformation when it is crushed, squashed and squeezed. With just the right amount of exposure to oxygen it becomes a drink that, like a good person, becomes more distinguished as it ages.

Purim is a pretty strange holiday. The text we read, Megillat Esther, isn’t a typical biblical book; it makes no mention of the big guy upstairs. Its heroine, a nice Jewish girl bunking with her uncle, ends up in the arms of the non-Jewish king (oh gosh!), and exchanges certain things, namely her wedding vows, in order to save her people. The story ends with the Jews going out on a revenge spree, killing thousands. And how do we celebrate this event every year? By dressing up in costumes, making lots of noise, gorging on delicacies and getting drunk out of our minds ad d’lo yada. Pretty strange in comparison to, let’s say, Yom Kippur, where we don’t eat or drink, instead spending the day in deep and contemplative prayer. What’s even stranger is that we’re taught that Purim is an even “higher” holiday than Yom Kippur. In fact, the rabbis teach that during the Messianic Era, Purim will be the only festival that we observe.

Some Jewish businesses and advertisements in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn were recently defaced. You might expect that they were defaced by anti-Semites, or maybe that the shops sold clothes deemed immodest by the Hasidic population of Williamsburg. But in fact, as Vos Iz Neias reported, the problem was food related:

The motivation behind the incidents is spiritual. Ads featuring highly detailed images of tantalizing food—and businesses hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food, such a the now-shuttered Sub on Wheels once parked along a Williamsburg street—are seen as excessive and indulgent by austerity-minded activists, who are alarmed by what they see as an intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into their community.

In two recent incidents, an enormous building-side banner advertising Grill on Lee, a new gourmet restaurant in the neighborhood’s heart, was sliced halfway, and a Satmar butcher shop with large photographs of dish-laden tables in its windows had those photos cut out.

The issue here is that some businesses are “hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food” which is apparently a symptom of a larger problem: the “intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into [the Williamsburg] community.”
I want to first say that my gut reaction here is just to write all of this off as completely ridiculous and move on. In fact, I’m already on the record with what accounts to a snort and an eye roll.

But I’d like to give this issue a little more attention.

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.

People often are confused by my explanation of my Jewish practice. They ask, “How kosher are you?” or “What’s your Shabbat practice?” and my answer is always something along these lines:

“Whatever the Old Man Upstairs and I decide that day.”

For whatever reason, that’s always chuckle-worthy to them. Which is unusual, because in Christian circles, talk of personal relationships and conversations with God is very common. Whereas as close as Judaism seems to get, the Bratslav tradition of hitbodedut, is extremely radical, even now: “To talk to God in your own tongue, without pre-prepared words, like you would a friend? How weeeeird.”

Many people complain that it’s difficult to find a synagogue to join in New York City. There are just so many options, that none of them feel exactly right – you might call it The Shul-Goers Dilemma. These days, however, I’m feeling pretty good at Temple Bet Pollan.

Michael Pollan gets his fair share of love on this blog, and his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto has already joined its predecessor, The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a New York Times Best Seller. Pollan is in the middle of his second whirlwind book tour in two years (I guess he sleeps on the plane) – and I hear the same account every where he goes. Huge venue, sold out show, knockout performance.

Like any effective leader – Martin Luther King included – he’s charismatic and big on the big ideas that change the way we think – or in this case how we eat. But as I devoured (pun intented) Pollan’s new book on my subway commute, I wondered what, if anything, does his worldview offer to the Jewish community? And, perhaps more interestingly, what wisdom does the tribe have to offer back to him?

The recent controversy regarding the custom of Kapparot (see article in the Forward) made me realize that Kapparot is virtually the only remaining ritual that uses an animal sacrifice as an atonement for human sin. In Temple times, any inadvertent sin had a corresponding animal sacrifice that was intended to cause the sinner to contemplate the nature of sin and how this animal is now losing its life instead of the sinner. pretty powerful stuff, if your environment is agrarian and animals are preciously traded commodities. Today however, things are much different.

Two long months with hardly any rain. That is the dire situation we have been facing this season. Our CSA provides shares to 85 families in the Washington, DC area.  Long ago this past April, we missed a month’s worth of rain, kicking off a season of high and dry windy weather. This has been tough on everything and everyone around.  During this season’s severe extended drought we’ve been dealing with a 2-pronged “war”. On one hand, we must keep every new seedling and translant happy and moist, on the other, we must keep the deer at bay.

The deer come out around mid-August every year as their food runs out in the forest. This season, they were here in July. Entire plantings of green beans, sweet potatoes and edemame, were gone. Badly eaten were the new and still tender tomato and cucumber plants.

Earlier in the season we cought 6 groundhogs over the course of a month and a half, and safely transported them to a wooded area a few miles away. Now we have an early deer problem, and a drought like we’ve never seen before.

This Friday, DC’s rockin’ progressive havurah is taking on Jewish food issues!

Tikkun Leil Shabbat is a songful, soulful, Friday evening services featuring a teaching about a social justice issue and followed by a potluck vegetarian dinner. This Friday July 13, the “dvar tikkun” will be introduced by Hazon’s very own Laura Bellows and feature:

Aliza Wasserman (also one of our fabulous “The Jew & the Carrot” bloggers!), from Community Food Security Coalition, will talk about a progressive Jewish take on national food policy and the pending Farm Bill.

Written for Kol Zimrah’s Feb 2nd, 2007, Tu’Bishvat minyan:

Last week’s parsha featured the ten miracles and the ten doubts of the Israelites as they flee Egypt for the Holy Land. Ten times, the Israelites lose faith in Moses and God and ten times they return to God and Moses’ leadership after an appropriate miracle.

The people say to Moses, “Dude, we’re gonna die!” So Moses says to God, “Dude, gimme a trick!” And God says to Moses, “Here, try this.” Moses then turns to the people and displays a miracle, “Ta dah!” And the people say, “Whew, Moses that was close. We almost lost faith in you there. Thanks for the manna/water/victory/pillar of fire.”

Can I say that this is really stupid? We can all see it. This level of faith endurance is pretty shallow, this reliance on miracles. And I want to say that I don’t need miracles to be faithful. As a post-modern, post-Enlightenment, seriously spiritual but definitely down to earth guy, I’m not a fan of big miracles. When I set out to write this d’var, I was ready to be very condemnatory. But when I sat down to write this d’var, recent live events prevented me from being so: