SIMCHAS TORAH, COLLEGE KIDS AND CUISINE OF NECESSITY (10/11/04)

You and I are up to our earmuffs with self-pitying stories of my departure from the rabbinate and ensuing Jewish isolation, so enough already.

Nonetheless, at certain junctures of the year the aloneness is too much to bear. Simchas Torah converts isolation into deafening emptiness. Self-pity gives way to self-recrimination and tales of tzaddikim who danced in Siberian gulags become not inspiration, but an indictment of my own vapidity of faith.

No dancing with Torahs this year, but an engaging way to celebrate the Holy Day did stop at my doorstep. It was one of those delightful instances that leaves us hanging between “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” and “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

I received a call from a prof who is teaching a course on the meaning of food in the religious experience. She wanted me to speak to her class on the significance of food in the Jewish tradition. The date: Simchas Torah. She did not pull my name out of the Yellow Pages. She had been reading my columns on Jewish cuisine, “Rabbi Ribeye,” that appear in the Internet magazine, eGullet.

I told the prof that I could not travel her because of Yom Tov, but that I had a better idea. The class and I could prepare a “sacramental” dinner at my home that replicated the Holy Day fare that my grandparents brought from the Old Country.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure? Hey, I’m Rabbi Ribeye!”

But, what to do to make the dinner “sacramental”? Recite Kiddush and the Motzi to be sure. A festively set table, of course. To draw parallels for these Christian girls to the Last Supper, a necessity.

Then, an epiphany: The real sacramental nature of our grandparents’ Sabbath and Yom Tov table was that their struggles, poverty and eking out daily bread never stopped them from setting a majestic feast to celebrate God’s bounty. The same meager ingredients, sans pork, that the impoverished peasants cooked were all that our bubbehs had in their modest pantry. Yet, we never ate “peasant food.” Our table was sacramental because, to lift a Talmudic phrase, “there was blessing to be found in our bread.”

In culinary terms, this is sometimes called “celebrating cuisine of necessity,” that is, elegant menus built from inexpensive, readily available ingredients. That, I decided, would be the lesson in the sacramental nature of Jewish food that I would convey to nine young women who would likely never have to struggle with poverty.

Stop and think, I asked them, what were the ingredients available to poor folks in Eastern Europe: potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, celery, cucumbers, flour, sugar, dried spices, honey, vinegar, certain varieties of fish, dried fruit like prunes and raisins. And then there was all-powerful chicken: eggs, schmaltz (just like lard!), bones for soup, succulent meat for the main course.

I made most of the dishes ahead of time, pointing out that many of the foods required slow cooking and pickling. But they put the finishing touches in the chicken soup with me, made the matzo balls, and prepared a tzimmes that would be ready in time to take it home.

Quite a regal menu: cured lox, pickled cucumber and beet salads, matzo ball soup, roast chicken with veggies, sweet-potato tzimmes, apple-raisin compote and Linda’s challah and honey cake. We served everything buffet style, because I was not sure that the “sheineh shikselach,” as my mother would have called them, would be too turned on by the odd-and-curious fare. I especially gave them a preemptory pass on the pickled beets.

What a mistake. They finished everything, including the beets – everyone from the frumpy, studious kid to the well-tanned homecoming queen. And, no question that they were going to take back the tzimmes they’d made. None of them had ever tasted that kind of roast chicken, but all of them wanted to have it again. And they cleaned up afterward without being asked!

And, we sat at the Yom Tov table and talked, well beyond their departure time. We spoke about everything: the Holocaust, what it was like to be a rabbi, how it was to live in the South, had I ever experienced anti-Semitism, why wasn’t I a Christian, how and why my grandparents came to the States, what going to school was like for them, what their plans were, how they had come to question the faith with which they had been raised, how they had become more open-minded.

Then they asked the ultimate question: What do Jewish people do when they sit at the Sabbath or Holy Day table? To their great amazement I told them, “The topics may be different, but we basically do the same thing that we’ve done this evening: have a lovely meal usually made out of cuisine of necessity whether we can afford better or not, talk, enjoy each other’s company, catch up with each other, discuss things that our daily busyness doesn’t allow us, not feel the constraints of time, feel at one with ourselves and each other.”

“Funny,” I said. “We may not talk a lot about God. But let there be no mistaking. The presence of God is right there at the table with us.”

How different Southern-bred young women can be from our bubbes and zaydes who arrived impoverished on these shores. Yet, somehow I believe that those “sheineh shikselach” may still be working through the delicious Jewish paradox that even the lowliest pickled beets can attain the stature of sacrament.