A SPOT OF AMYLASE IN THAT HUMMUS?

Hummus is an elementary food: ground chickpeas, olive oil, garlic, pepper. It becomes a yellowish blob to be scooped up with pita. You either love it or detest its very sight.

I love hummus. Its popularity is no longer reserved for Israelis and sympathizers; it has proliferated among gentiles, too. I have even eaten it at an Irish pub.

One may purchase hummus at nearly every supermarket. The problem: Commercially-prepared hummus is so pumped with preservatives that the aficionado gags at the toxic dump it has become.

Those who really care seek out hummus that is prepared fresh daily. In my village of Greenville, it is available only at a small grocery owned by Palestinians. The proprietors treat me kindly, calling out “Raaaaaabbi!” and speaking Hebrew with me.

Recently, all that changed. I entered, and they shouted among themselves in Arabic. I looked down and realized the provocation. I had thoughtlessly chosen a tee-shirt emblazoned in Hebrew with “Hebron, Now and Forever!” This is the equivalent of a Palestinian wearing “Li-Shanah Ha-Ba’ah B’rushayim!” to Simchas Torah.

Nonetheless, I ordered my pound of hummus. Without a word, the proprietor announced that he was getting “special” hummus for me. He went to the back, and I stood on my tiptoes to peek into the kitchen, where the “special” hummus was being prepared. There was a lot of chatter in Arabic and tremendous laughter as the proprietor spat in my hummus and neatly replaced the lid. He presented it to me with great flourish.

Are Jews shrewd, or what? I told him, “On second thought, I’d like a half-pound instead of a pound.” With that, I took a fresh carton from the shelf, replaced it with the pound container, mixed it with the other tubs three or four times, so that no one could tell the “special” hummus from the others. I timidly paid my bill as they cursed at me in Arabic.

Sadly, my quandary had been resolved. I now purchase my hummus from the supermarket. I meticulously read the contents for various preservatives, knowing that I am pumping myself with carcinogens. I am extremely wary, though, if one of the additives is amylase. I think I’ll leave the basic enzyme of saliva for some other unsuspecting customer.

A KASHRUT LESSON FOR KOSHER DOGS

For 58 years, I have not owned a pet. Suddenly, I have become father to an immense fur-ball, to afford me companionship that will break the day’s monotony. I have named her “Minnie,” in memory of my aunt, who hated dogs.

Minnie is well-behaved, loving, even fairly smart. Despite her girth, Minnie is a picky eater. She hates dog food. Not long ago, the poor dog had an upset stomach. The veterinarian recommended the regimen we’d prescribe for ourselves: rice and chicken breast, both boiled. Mazal tov, the bland diet worked. Moreover, Minnie loved it so much that she refuses to eat anything else. Augmented by vitamins, she is flourishing.

What’s the rub? It’s Jewish, naturally. Simply put, kosher chicken breasts are expensive, $8 a pound, and they are so scarce that a trip to Atlanta, 140 miles away, is the only insurance that you will find them at all.

Then came my epiphany: Why does a dog require kosher chicken? Ah, and treife chicken breasts cost only $5. I ran out to buy our first package.

But wait. It’s not quite so easy. After all, serving treife in a kosher home has its unforeseen demands. Now we need a new pot, with a special lid. With what will we cut the chicken? A new knife. What about a new fork and tongs? On what will we slice the chicken? Our kosher cutting board? No, go buy a new one. We don’t want treife to spill over onto our counter, do we? Purchasing a new counter cover –custom fit – is in order. What about our sink? A new scrub brush, sponge, gloves, dishpan, and drainer. Just to play it safe, we buy a separate bottle of soap.

By the time we turn around, we have invested $200 to feed Minnie her damned chicken. She must consume 70 pounds of treife for us simply to break even. (My math may be off a little.)

Meanwhile, I am eating moldy cheese on stale bread. God looks down from heaven, not thundering in disapproval, but simply laughing at this schlemiel. In the meantime, Minnie is demanding rice pilaf. I tell her, “Not before you go to the mikvah!”

LATKE NEUROSIS

My introduction to Chanukah latkes at the tender age of three was, sadly, a less-than-joyous occasion. The Chanukah party, always hosted by Tante Leah, was a bacchanalia of yontifdik foods, a platter of her potato latkes at the center.

O how I loved those latkes. They were sodden, thick, greasy – the fantasy of a three-year-old who already weighed 33 kg. How much better could yontif be?

That was, until we made the trek home. Five minutes into the ride, my grandmother would announce, “Feh.”

“Feh, what?” my mother would ask.

At that, my grandmother would launch into her harangue. “Leah’s latkes. Feh. Spongy. Greasy. Oniony. Not like Bobbe Rochel’s. Bobbe Rochel’s were lacy and brown. Just like mine.”

This was likely the origin of the conflicts that I have borne for the last 57 years. How could I dishonor Bobbe Rochel and even my own cranky grandmother by pretending to prefer “lacy, brown” latkes, when my heart pined for “spongy, greasy” ones?

The ensuing years of my youth did not treat me much better. The first time I experienced Chanukah latkes in Talmud Torah, I knew instinctively that something was not right. They were forebodingly grey and dismal. You see, they were not of potato at all, but made from buckwheat. Buckwheat? I do not know from whence in Yehupetz Mrs. Ginsburg came, but I do know that she deserved to be suffocated in a mountain of kasha.

Tentatively, I have learned to deal with my neurosis. How do you like your latkes? Sugar? Applesauce? Cinnamon? Sour cream? I bathe mine in ketchup. As much as I can tell, I am the only member of an international cabal who likes to watch latkes bleed, not shimmer. I have met only consternation from friends and family. Too bad for them.

This, though, is my ultimate solution. A block away from my house stands a dingy goyische eatery . . . but . . . they serve wonderful “potato pancakes.” There is always a bottle of ketchup on the table. I douse them, and nobody cares. Then, my muscles bulge. I strike a valiant pose. I radiate nobility. And I say to myself, “Ah, this is how Judah Maccabee must have felt on the 25th of Kislev!”

RELIGIOUS LEADERS WHO ENDORSE CANDIDATES ARE PRACTICING PHONY RELIGION

I first singed my fingers on the volatile mixture of religion and politics about 20 years ago. Sue Myrick – a lovable, but slightly loopy, friend – was running for mayor of Charlotte. She asked to speak before my congregation, and I agreed, provided that a Q&A session would follow. We built her visit around a Sabbath dinner, assuming that it would create a relaxed, convivial atmosphere. We were, if nothing else, an overwhelmingly friendly audience.

Sue delivered some fairly cogent remarks, but the Q&A marked a disastrous turn. After fielding two creampuffs, someone asked the inevitable: “How would your religious fundamentalism be reflected in the way you conduct the comings-and-goings of the city?”Inexplicably, Sue choked up. She was obviously not angry, but hurt by the question. She began to weep, her face crossed by an expression that said, “I thought you were my friends,” and with that, her husband led her from the synagogue. Ironically, we were her friends, and despite her decompensating, which became the morning news, she won the race, and is now in her seventh term as a North Carolina Congresswoman.

That painful exchange became emblematic of what happens when religion and politics try to woo each other into going to bed, albeit one of its more bizarre examples.

The ultra-fundamentalist Dr. Bob Jones endorses the heretical Mormon, Romney, not for his relationship to God, but because he is “electable.” The equally fundamentalist Pat Robertson takes the podium with the moderate, Catholic Giuliani, because he is “electable,” despite his fealty to the Antichrist, the Pope. And, fundamentalist constituentswait breathlessly until Dobson’s endorsement is revealed.

All this gets to be pretty messy stuff. It should be jarring, even hypocritical, for men of faith to jump into the pocket of a particular candidate, putting pragmatism ahead of their beliefs, to which they purportedly pledge their highest allegiance. Jesus certainly did not ally with the Romans because they consistently won the “elections.” Nor did Christian martyrs save their lives by surrendering their beliefs to appease the infidels.

Religious leaders, those who subscribe to the teachings of the Prophets, should not support candidates, nor even become too chummy with them. They should be their adversaries, vigilant over what a candidate espouses, whenever they agree and especially when they disagree. Religion’s purpose is to raise relentless gadflies whose mission is to afflict the comfortable, not make smarmy campaign appearances.

David had his Nathan. Jeroboam had his Amos. Isaiah took on all of Judea’s bourgeois. And tell me about Jesus and the Pharisees.

Religious leaders are phony so long as they espouse fealty to one man alone, rather than the autonomy to agree, challenge, or even condemn any candidate who strays from virtue. I’d rather hear a minister caustically denounce a candidate than play kissy with him.

Has Romney or Guiliani strayed from virtue? That’s a story for another time. But the idea of a religious leader “belonging” to a candidate or vice versa, smells of religion selling out and politicians becoming even more opportunistic than they have always been.

So, religious leaders, stay true to your principles. Let the first among them be autonomy, to never fear to speak the truth, even if it means not currying political favor or being invited to officiate at Presidential prayer breakfasts.

FORCE-FED PITCHA

Have you ever tasted pitcha? Have you liked it? Ick. Have I already offended our handful of pitcha-lovers? Sorry. But show me someone who likes pitcha, and I’ll show you a person who thinks that squid ink is a delicacy. Even Google has only two entries under “pitcha,” because finding it on the Internet is like trying to find a dirty word on your spell-check.

So, what is pitcha? If we must: Split open calves’ hooves and boil them until shards of meat and grizzle can be scraped from the bones. Boil the hooves and onions/garlic, forever. Pour into a pan, and refrigerate it until slightly gelled. Stir in onions/garlic/grizzle/meat and sliced hardboiled eggs. Let it set. Voila. A quivery, granular quagmire that even Emeril would refuse. If you were really lucky, the hooves still had a tidy fringe of hair surrounding them.

In our family, pitcha was not called pitcha. We called it “fus-noga,” the bastard child of the German and Russian words for “foot.” My cousins and I dubbed it “fitch-a-noogie” which is onomatopoeia for the rumbling of ones stomach upon ingestion.

Lest you think that pitcha was the cheap eats of gypsies, tramps, and thieves, it was served on the most festive occasions. Once, I attended a reception, and a wedge of what I assumed was potato kugel appeared on my plate. I attacked it only to find that it was pitcha. I heaved it onto my pants, leaving an indelible stain.

My Aunt Leah would frequently baby-sit for me. One day she served me a bowl of iridescent pitcha. I squirmed and wailed. She tied me with a towel to the back of the chair, and force-fed me the pitcha to its slimy end. I told this to my therapist just last week. He winced. “That,” he said, “begins to explain your recurring nightmares of being trampled by cows.”

If I have offended, please know that for all I care, you may do the backstroke in a pool of the stuff. As for me, I’d rather take my chances stoking the fires of hell . . . where they would probably tie me to a chair and feed me pitcha, just out of spite.

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

So much angst to being a Jew. Woe particularly unto those of us who have lived with it since tender youth. At the age of 16, I traveled from my parents’ home in idyllic San Francisco to attend Yeshiva University in foreboding New York City, 4,800 km away.

I had been warned about New York – thefts, muggings, gang attacks, dangerous neighborhoods, illegal weapons, pickpockets, even gratuitous murder. What a thrill for a yeshiva-bochur to live alone in New York!

I wasn’t really all alone. I had plenty of classmates and a campus surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. We were quickly trained that if you cared for your life, you would not walk down Audubon Street.

But, the angst of life in New York was outweighed by it being paradise for fressers. We judged the quality of any town solely by its abundance of kosher restaurants and pizza parlors. They were everywhere.

A friend and I heard that the sine qua non of kosher restaurants was Gluckstern’s. In fact, we were told that it was so terrific that there were two Gluckstern’s, one Downtown and one Uptown. Just as our longing for matzo ball soup had peaked, though, we heard murmurings that “Gluckstern’s wasn’t really kosher.” Our hearts sank. What should a frummeh yeshiva-bochur do?

We decided to take the issue to one of the rabbinical authorities at the Yeshiva. “Gluckstern’s?” he intoned. “Which Gluckstern’s? Uptown or Downtown? You know that there are two of them.”

“We know, we know.”

“Well, some say that both of them are kosher, and some say that both of them are treife. Some eat only at the Uptown one. Others eat only at the Downtown one.”

“Who’s the mashgi’ach?” we ask.

“I can’t tell you that,” the rabbi said. “I don’t want to embarrass anybody.”

“So where do you eat?”

“It’s better that I don’t tell you,” he says dismissively. “I wouldn’t want to get you confused.”

Forty years have passed, and now Second Avenue, my favorite kosher deli, has re-opened under new management. I am salivating.

Kosher? How kosher? Who’s the mashgi’ach? Would you eat there?

Nu, what do you think? Do you think I’m going to ask?

"WHENCE COME REST AND JOY?"

Not too long ago, I had to have my pills taken away. Linda took them from me because of my increasing addiction to Lortab, after I had injured my shoulder. Now, my Oxycontin, prescribed for a broken elbow, will soon be taken from me. Dependent again.

At first, they were my medications. Then they became my friends. No hallucinations, no goofiness. But, one or two before bedtime to take the edge off, ease the aches and pains of a middle-aged man, make my sleep a little deeper and more restful.

Then, never thinking about the portent of addiction, I swore that “tonight would be the last,” only to gravitate again toward the bottle. “I’m sure that by tomorrow, I won’t need it again.” When Linda hid them, I simply played hide-and-seek. What about when they run out? “Not a problem,” I deluded myself. “I’ll just stop.” Only when the now-horrifying thought of asking my doc-kids to prescribe more crept into my head, did I my conscience clutch. But, it was not addiction, I reassured myself. No. Just conscience toward my kids and their profession. Then, more panic, more dread. Stopping became a necessity, not a virtue. The pills ran out.

Since I “wasn’t addicted,” I took no counsel. I would muster the strength and simply stop. I went to bed that night at my kids home. Within an hour, the sweats soaked four tee-shirts, chills, shaking, crying, contemplating the most horrific thoughts. I woke Scott. But, I “wasn’t addicted,” so he assumed that I was dehydrated. He drove me to the ER. No, I was not dehydrated, they said. A moment later, Scott winced. “You haven’t been taking narcotics?” he asked. “I dunno, maybe I have.”

“You are going through withdrawal.” Shivering, I could no longer escape the truth. Foolishly, I drove myself home to Greenville. All to the best, Linda was away at a conference. I thought the worst was over, so I laid down, slept fitfully for a couple of minutes, awoke, and went into contortions, tossing, screaming, directing garbled prayers and epithets toward God, Kabbalistic rabbis, anyone, vowing piety, pleading for forgiveness, cursing, then begging for life. Only when I cried out for Momma was my torment exorcized. Cradle me again. Wipe my eyes. Tell me you understand. Promise me that I am safe.

How, in search of calming ones pains, might one slip so easily into darkest torment? Momma, let me be at peace. Let it not hurt anymore. Return to me the innocent sleep and dreams of childhood. “Whence comes rest? Whence comes joy?” the refrain of an old Sabbath hymn. Addiction is not in the chemicals, but in the emptiness of the soul.

Months later, I find myself struggling with Oxycontin, despite my broken elbow being long healed. An addictive personality, you say? Perhaps. Perhaps in the short-run, it simply helps me feel more restful, softer, at ease. And the short-run is sometime all you can see when the long-run seems so evasive.

Why is simply counting my blessings, of which I have so many, less than enough? Ingrate! Whiner! Pathetic! Victim! Wallowing in unjustified self-pity! You don’t even know what real pain is! From what does the emptiness in ones soul come to hunger for the momentary, futile attempt to put the heart at rest? Will Torah, or the Rebbe, the Dalai Lama, et al, allay the torment of the soul that Oxycontin cannot?

Here I am, about to have another round of my pills taken from me. This time, I know something more about handling their post-partum effects. I’m “not addicted,” remember? But, I still do not know what un-wholeness within ones self makes the brown bottle so irresistible, and perhaps – even given therapy and Torah – I never will.

“Whence come rest and joy?”

Please, Momma, please . . .

THE KOSHER OENOPHILE'S COMING OF AGE

Talk to an orthodox – or even right-leaning conservative – coreligionist, and s/he will tell you that wine, too, must be kosher. And you think, even ask, “Where’s the cheeseburger? Where’s the pork?” Fact is that if you want to be “strictly strictly,” must pass through the hands only of orthodox Jews, from juicing the grapes to double-sealing the bottles (or heating the wine to 165-190°, I know, picky-picky). This all has to do with wine’s potential for idolatrous libation or promoting unnecessary conviviality between Jews and their gentile neighbors. We are all well aware of the conviviality sparked by a shared bottle of Manischewitz.

I know what those of an upscale kosher palate would say: “That’s all yesterday’s news.” You would be right, Every Upper West Side Metrodox and Jewish gastro-journalist celebrates that one can now procure kosher dry wine with a cork (!) in the bottle.

It is true. It is true. Chateau de Fesles Bonnezeaux, Chateau Fonbadet Pauillac, Chateau Giscours Margaux, Chateau Leoville Poyferre Saint Julien ($134.99), Chateau Patris Filius (Isn’t that two-thirds of the Holy Trinity?). All kosher. All to be swirled and swizzled at equally trendy-dox kosher establishments. Not only do they come bearing corks and un-sugar-encrusted bottlenecks, but tales of international awards, too. It is a prism through which we may view the coming of age of American Jewry.

Being part of that schizoid bridge-generation, I do, however, owe a love song to those goopy, syrupy wines that were so long synonymous with kosher. Those were the wines that had an indelible influence on our earliest infancy, when the mohel administered pre-circumcision anesthesia, gauze soaked not in Bonny Doon, but in Schapiro’s Extra-Heavy Malaga. Primal nursing instinct and Chateau Schapiro soothed our castration trauma then, and we have owed it a debt of gratitude ever since.

Fond memories of childhood include eating brisket and kishke at Siegel’s, under the Lake Street El tracks in Chicago, and Mr. Siegel furtively bringing over shot glasses of Mogen David to the men of the party, a lagniappe to his “preferred” customers. I also remember the evening when I joined my folks at Siegel’s, and Mr. Siegel included me among the “preferred.” Garrison Keillor could not have written a more nostalgic coming-of-age story.

“Are you sure it was Mogen David?” you ask me. Nah. Essentially, all old-time kosher wines were interchangeable: Manischewitz, Kedem, Lipschutz, Mogen David, Schapiro’s
Each had a little edge of its own identity, to be sure. Manischewitz was first with the fruity, soda-poppy varieties – peach, strawberry, mango – quite a buzz, and cheap, too. The old Mogen David label had that loopy little picture of the Seder table, prompting the winos of bygone days to ask for “Morgan Davis, you know, the one with the guys playing poker on the label.”

The warmest spot in my heart, though, is left for Schapiro’s. There was an honest, proud wine, no apologies, no secrets. You want sweet or extra-sweet? They boldly led with their “so thick you can almost cut it with a knife” tag-line. Norman Schapiro to this day boasts that Schapiro’s is “aged for over six months” as though it were a century-old Balsamico di Modena. The taproot Shapiro’s is the musty, musky subterranean labyrinth, the cellars of Schapiro’s, a full square block right underneath the schmootz of the Lower East Side. Yes, the operation has moved Upstate, but on a Sunday, you can still meet one of the Schapiro’s at the ancestral entrance on Essex Street, enjoy a free tasting tour, and walk and inhale, the catacombs for yourself. Amazing, is it not, that even as the Lower East Side gentrifies, the vestal grotto keeps bearing its luscious fruit?

Now, our Jewish palates are more finely attuned. Our noses are better sensitized to inhale the bouquet. We know, and own, the right crystal for each Bordeaux and Merlot. We debate how “chilled” chilled should be, with Talmudic acuity. We Jews have arrived, and remarkably, our yarmulkes are still clipped to our heads. We are deservedly proud, as we have lived to witness “synthesis” become reality.

Sorry, though. I also pine for the other days. We were not so smug, nor so self-satisfied, nor so damned sure of ourselves. But, one thing was for sure: When someone raised a thimbleful of Mogen David at Siegel’s and bellowed “L’chayim!” we all knew what to answer . . . and we meant it.

HAVE A COKE AND A HECHSHER

My former hometown of Atlanta holds two matters sacred: It was burned to the ground during the Civil War. And, it is the origin of Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola has had such tremendous impact to Atlanta that citizens refer generically to all varieties of soda pop as “Coke,” and that a huge museum is devoted to its wonders.
Naturally, Coca-Cola has its Jewish connections. What doesn’t?

Dr. Pemberton invented Coke as an elixir. Some elders claim that it contained a bit of cocaine, hence the name “Coke.” But, it was introduced as a beverage at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta. Jacobs, as you might have surmised, was a pillar of the Jewish community.

The other Jewish connection is even more arcane. Coke created a mystique by claiming that it was made with a “secret formula” that was locked in a vault, and even Jacobs was not made privy to its contents.

When Coke went national in the 1930’s, most “frumeh Yidden,” were wary of its kashrut because of the “secret formula.” Rumor had it that the ingredient was treife glycerin.

What to do?

At that time, only one strictly orthodox Rabbi served Atlanta, Tobias Geffen. Rabbi Geffen was naturally bombarded with queries from all over the country about Coke.

But, there was a rub: Should Rabbi Geffen be told the secret formula? How could this Yiddish-speaking, Litivisher rov penetrate the goyische inner circle of the Coke hierarchy?

So the legend goes: Rabbi Geffen’s son, Louis, was an attorney. He had a colleague, Hirsch, who barely acknowledged that he was Jewish. Hirsch happened to be the counsel for Coca-Cola. Louis asked if he would approach them.

After Hirsch sensed Rabbi Geffen’s piety, he did indeed get the President of Coca Cola to personally open the vault, while Rabbi Geffen alone peeked at the formula. Ah, no glycerin, no treife. Shortly afterward, Rabbi Geffen published a responsum endorsing Coke as a kosher beverage. Oy, a simcha bei Yidden!

Meanwhile, American Jews luxuriate in Coca-Cola, smiling and belching with great gusto. How aptly does it describe us: a nation that is full of gas, water, sugar, and an enigmatic ingredient that no one will ever really understand.

JEWS AND PIZZA -- A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION

I have yet to comprehend the American Jew’s love affair with pizza. You can’t drive through a Jewish neighborhood without passing a dozen pizzerias, three or four of them strictly kosher. I have long wondered why Orthodox Jews routinely order fauz-treife vegetarian sausage on their kosher pizzas, the quintessence of chazerai.

I assume that our obsession with pizza originated in the Hillel sandwich that we eat at the night of the Seder. Think of all the kids who demand “matzo pizza” on Pesach, a flat of matzo schemered with tomato sauce and cheese, to forestall a week without the genuine stuff. Ah, but was pesto indigenous to the Sinai Peninsula?

In Atlanta, one of the world’s finest pizzerias, Mellow Mushroom, is located right at the heart of the Judengasse. The family and I know this, because we do indulge in questionably-kosher cheese and are a little lax about items baked in a blazing-hot oven. It’s no surprise that we bump into many of our “metro-kosher” friends there. But, sometimes I also catch a glimpse of someone “really Orthodox” sneaking out with a pie, albeit with tzitzis tucked in, and women with hair shoved under a baseball cap.

Once upon a time, I enjoyed genuinely kosher pizza in Detroit. So what made this pizza “genuinely” kosher? It was all in the toppings: crumbles of gefilte fish, potato kugel, matzo balls, falafel, even cholent. No embarrassment about Jewish ethnicity here. After all, God don’t make no junk. I have yet to see a pizza crowned with blobs of pareve pitcha, and aren’t we the better for it? Oh, you’ve never had pitcha? Just think of Jell-O extracted from a calf’s foot, studded with shards of garlic and hard-boiled egg. Nummy.

To what extent will a Jew go to eat pizza? When I was a rabbi in Charlotte, the schule was situated a block away from a pizzeria. Right about Yizkor-time on Yom Kippur, half the teenagers would flee the sanctuary and congregate at the pizzeria for a slice of lunch. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself and confronted the miscreants.

“Well, Rabbi,” one of them eventually responded, “at least we didn’t have the sausage. You’re not allowed to have milk with meat, right?”

VEGETARIANISM: IT'S NOT SO EASY

How hard should it be for a Jew to become a vegetarian?

Fruits and vegetables spring forth directly from pristine earth. They are neither milchig nor fleishig, and they can’t become treife, right? Well, it’s not so easy.

I have often suggested that religious Jews become vegetarians, since they would not then have to worry about how flexible the schechita knife is, or whether the kashering salt is properly sifted. Fish should raise its own special concerns, determining whether the scales are sufficiently scaly, and whether its fins are merely legs in disguise. Dairy, too, poses its own set of problems, e.g., How close to the action did the mashgi’ach really get? Did he actually touch the udders? Or, did he merely flip the switch on the milking machine?

I say that vegetarianism is the only way to go.

Then I thought, uh, oh, not so fast. Vegetarianism, I realized, is even harder. Leafy vegetables, like lettuce and spinach, might be rife with little buggies, so each leaf need be soaked separately and washed with a soapy cloth. The buds on Brussels sprouts and asparagus are so tight that they can’t be sufficiently cleaned, even if you kashered them with steel wool. So, they are completely out. And, did you ever notice that cucumbers, apples and the like are covered with some kind of wax to make them shiny? Where did that wax come from? Tomatoes are impossible to peel, and what insecticide do they use to spray the cherries and potatoes? Do you see a hechsher on it?

What about salad dressing? It causes its own problems. You may think that one with the hechsher is pareve. Again, it’s not so easy. It could be pareve, but still manufactured on dairy equipment, and what are you going to do about that?

I bet you never thought of that.

Well, my beloved, I have a hard time believing that God is that worried about flexible schechita knives when He has to deal with nuclear war and global warming. So, go put a quarter in the pushke, say you’re sorry, and go fix yourself a sawdust sandwich. And, don’t forget to wash your hands and make a Motzi.

THE WAGES OF TRUTH TELLING

Cruise: “I want the truth!”

Nicholson: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Cruise and Nicholson’s repartee in A Few Good Men, is deliberately left unresolved. So too for the ages, a conundrum: Will we tell the truth? Can we handle the truth?

It takes tremendous self-discipline not to dance the jig when some sanctimonious snot like Senator Craig is caught with his pants down. Let’s put aside for now our delight in schadenfreude and even the intrinsic nature of the act he committed, however it not be forgotten that playing footsie in a public bathroom with someone unknown does rise to the level of a crime.

Nonetheless, this issue here is lying and hypocrisy, the typical refuges of the arrogant and the morally trapped. Lying may be an objective matter; you either did or didn’t. Hypocrisy is a tougher call, because it begs the question of judging a foe by a standard to which we ourselves might fail. That is, pointing a finger at hypocrisy may in itself be hypocritical.

Yet, we are usually well attuned when we witness hypocrisy, and not merely everyday inconsistency, even though we cannot define it. Perhaps we recognize hypocrisy because of its intimations of superiority and smugness. Perhaps it’s because we know that awareness of ones own moral turpitude should lead to introspection and humility, not condemnation of someone who has stumbled.

A hypothetical: Let’s say that one day, someone who aspires to position of public trust – political clergy, civic leadership – says forthrightly, “Ladies and gentlemen, before you go searching through my life and moral flaws, let me be upfront: Ten years ago, I had an extramarital affair. I have since led a monogamous life, with good faith to my wife, family, and community. It has not been easy to regain their trust, but gratefully, I have been forgiven by the significant people in my life.

“I put this truth before you so that there will be no sense of betrayal from my constituants down the road, and so that I might be attributed the merit of telling the truth rather than have salacious secrets forever dog me.”

Enough of the hypothetical. We reluctantly return to reality. What is the sense, beyond altruism, for an aspirant to public trust to tell the truth? At best, his/her truth-telling would be treated for a couple of weeks as an interesting novelty. Then it would certainly give way to accusations that the confession was little more than political posturing.

Finally, our penchant for the lurid would be victorious over altruism and candor. The candidate would be subjected to the same witch hunt had the indiscretion been disclosed by a yellow-dog journalist: Who was the paramour? When? Where? Microphones jammed in the faces of wife, heretofore girlfriends, hotel bellmen? The leering eye of suspicion that this confession was merely a throw-‘em-a-bone to cover up even worse peccadilloes?

Sadly, we will cynically gobble it all up. People like Senator Craig will still and always be arrogant, hypocritical liars. But, when we total up the score, what difference in the world of realpolitik does it make to tell the truth? What is it worth besides a little transitory admiration and praise for refreshing candor?

Is this about people like Senator Craig? Or is it equally about people like you and me who place so little lasting value on the truth?

We all bang our fists, from Geraldo and O’Reilly to the rest of us circling vultures, “I want the truth!” But then a craggy, cynical voice, tempered by decades of reality, upbraids us unforgivingly, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

DINNER ON THE WHOLLY DAZE

After I left my congregation, I anticipated the Holy Days would be all that it had not been in three decades. Now there would be spirit-filled prayer, family together catching up on each other’s lives, unrushed Yom Tov dinners, walks in the park.

Then we received a call from nefarious Aunt Annette. She demanded, as was her style, that we join her family for Yom Tov in Washington. Furthermore, she was certain that “You would be delighted to prepare dinner, because you are such a wonderful chef.”

I gritted my teeth. But, there was no reason to argue. On Erev Yom Tov, we took that day’s only flight into Washington and arrived at 10:00 AM. Annette had already called the dinner for 20 at 6:00, just eight hours away.

I prepared most of the dinner at home and then had to figure how to schlep it to Annette’s . . . on an airplane. We loaded four insulated bags with food and worried whether security would consider the aluminum lining suspect. Ironically, they asked no questions, but they did examine my Tefillin, because the boxes seemed to contain “suspicious material.”

Arriving in Washington, we trudged with the bags to Annette’s. I had planned to adorn my Caesar salad with seared duck breast, until I discovered that the heat of Annette’s stove could barely boil an egg. “Annette, the stove doesn’t get hot!” “Oh, sweetheart, I almost never use it, because we go out to dinner so often.”

I worked along, a knife here, a peeler there, until Annette announced that the floor needed washing. So, I scrubbed it. In a delicious moment of schadenfreude, my mother-in-law slipped on the wet floor and skidded, only to be saved by her commodious derrière. Quite a sight.

Miraculously, dinner was ready at 5:45. The vultures were already circling the table, waiting. As I was showering, I heard voices behind me calling, “How much longer will you take?”

How was dinner? I don’t really know. The moment I sat down, I fell asleep in my bowl of kreplach soup. The only inkling I had was when Annette pronounced the dinner “Wonderful! It was so good, in fact,” she said, “that we must have Marc do it again next year!”

WHERE YA GONNA BREAKDUFAST?

Whatever American Jews are lacking in religiosity, they make up in their obsession with food:

Take my friend Jack, who ordered a sandwich in a treife restaurant during Pesach, but insisted that it be served on matzo, because “my momma made me swear that I would never eat bread on Pesach.”

Then there was my boss Lew, who served a huge ham at their “Holy Day Dinner,” never God forbid referring to it as “Rosh Hashanah.”

Not to be outdone, my girlfriend Ellen served crabmeat appetizer on Rosh Hashanah, because it was “an old family tradition.”

Then, how many hausfrauen in the American southeast would make their matzo balls with cornmeal grits and jalapeño peppers, special treats from that region?

And, what of Shabbos chicken breaded in Fruit Loops?

Strangest may be our preoccupation with "breakdufast” (pronounced as one long word, not “break-the-fast”), the repast served at the conclusion of Yom Kippur.

Gentiles may assume that we prepare for the holiest day of the year with confession, penitence, and doleful prayer, but we know that we are really planning our breakthefast menu: a bacchanalian of lox, bagels, herring, cheeses, blintzes, and the ubiquitous tuna salad.

There have been years that I have had to make rabbinical guest appearances at no less than four breakthefasts, like Eliyahu Ha-Navi, and told each hausfrau that her gefilte fish was “absolutely the best.”

Please, don’t get me wrong. Breakthefasts are wonderful opportunities for fellowship and relaxation. Ones hosted in schule are even better. But, they are also the perfect venue for ruthless critique the sermons, catty comments on the women’s couture, and summary gossip about anyone and anything.

Breakthefast was obviously conceived by Kafka: It’s the first opportunity of the New Year to start racking up next year’s “Al Chet’s” – covetousness, slander, gluttony, arrogance, and all the other reasons to clop one’s breast. No sense calling off next Yom Kippur.

Now go fill the mikveh with hot coffee, so I can breakthefast gossiping along with you about Mrs. Yifnef’s ridiculous hat. Then sing me a couple bars of Ashamnu, and I’ll know that the New Year has really begun.

TORTURE AT 40,000 FEET

We have all been conditioned to gripe about a benefit that has arbitrarily been taken away from us. But, what if the benefit turns out not to be a real benefit, like griping to the dentist to give you “another” root-canal, after he’s already given you three?

What of the decline, now demise, of airline food? Is it tragedy or triumph? I say, “Farewell to airline food, and grant peace to stomach, pants, and mind.” Do you remember the glory days, when the traveler was served a full-course dinner, a choice of entrees, even a glass of wine? And real silverware?

The food, though, was terrible. Fish masqueraded as chicken, chicken pretended to be veal. What difference did it make? They were all just piles of wet hemp. Primitive microwaves presented a dinner of frozen brisket and scalding sherbet. Woe unto the passenger at the window seat. Which spilled food was more agonizing to the groin – the frozen entree or scorching fruit salad?

We Yehudim were purported to have it better. Many times a gentile would comment about how much better my dinner looked than his. I told him to order “kosher” on his next flight, but still beware of demons lurking under the potato kugel. Pareve margarine is not the equivalent of butter. Sandy “coffee lightener” is not the same as cream. Take heed to any Passover meal produced in New York that bears the hechsher of the Chief Rabbi of Livorno. Ten years in yeshiva will never adequately explain how rolls moistened with apple juice do not require reciting Ha-Motzi.

So I say, grieve not, you kosher-observant Jew, for the decisions have largely been made for us by an international cabal. Now, the best we can do is an in-flight bagel stamped with a huge hechsher. Naturally, the sandwich is stuffed with half-a-pound of ham. I want to give the airline the benefit of the doubt. Ham is so much cheaper than lox-and-bagels. But, you and I know the real truth: It’s another clear-cut case of anti-Semitism. Damn the airlines, I say. From now on, I will ride the train.

A CHEESEBURGER IS NOT A CHEESE SANDWICH

I doubt that you will ever be in a village as tiny as Deep Step, Georgia: One stop-sign, one anemic policeman, and a fly-specked restaurant, no tables; just a shabby counter. No wine or beer either, because of their strict religious compunctions.

A few years ago, business, not Talmud, brought me to Deep Step for a week. There are no Jews within 160 kilometers of Deep Step, but there is one little grocery about 30 kilometers away. For three days, I observed kashrut meticulously, dining on fresh fruit and vegetables. But by day number four, I compromised my observance of kashrut “just a little,” and curiosity led me into the grimy little diner.

“Greetings, stranger!” he announced. “You must not come from these parts.”

“How did you know?” “Well, big-city folks never shine their shoes.”

“Now, what to eat?” I pondered the ancient chalkboard up front” Pork here. Chazzer there. Lard and bacon everywhere. I played it safe by ordering a grilled cheese sandwich, figuring that they could not do too much to adulterate something so simple.

“Mister, we don’t have grilled cheese here.”

“But it says that you serve cheeseburgers, so why can’t you take a slice of the cheese and grill it between two slices of bread?”

“Mister, I told you already. We serve cheeseburgers, not grilled cheese.” “Well, maybe then, a regular cheese sandwich, not grilled.”

“Nope, just cheese with hamburger or bacon, not plain.”

“Ah,” I said, in a moment of sheer genius. “Do you read the Bible?” “Every day.” He presented his well-worn Bible to me, and just as I was about to show him the dietary laws in Leviticus, I saw that it was a copy of the New Testament. “No, it’s in the Old Testament.” I said. “Well,” he announced. “We don’t have anything old around here.” as I glanced at the torn stool covers.

“But, Mister, I wouldn’t want to offend anyone from the big city. I’ll tell my boy to make an exception for you.” I thanked him graciously. “Now,” he said. “What kind of side-dish do you want with that?”

“What do you have?”

“You have three choices: cole slaw, potato chips, but you’ll probably really this: the kosher pickles that we bring in especially from the big city.”

"JUST WHAT I CHOOSE IT TO MEAN"

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll)

Who would have ever known that the same observation would have its impact on the culinary?

Not too long ago, I was engaged by an upper-class couple to cater a small dinner party. Given the summer heat, as a first course I suggested gazpacho, a well-chilled soup of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, garlic . . . pungent, but awakening to the tongue.

Experimenting at home, the gazpacho shimmered in the bowl, yet somehow, it still looked naked. Garnishing with a dab of sour cream seemed the answer. But, the cream was too bland, and soon decomposed into a nauseous pink puddle. Himmel!

What to do? With little time to spare, how could I still adorn the soup? Out of sheer desperation, I grabbed for a jar of the cheapest mayonnaise, the kind one would use to bind the most lowly tuna salad. Then I mixed it with an old, crusty jar of powered thyme. Huzzah! Magnificent! A perfect foil for the deep-red gazpacho!

Later that evening, I served the gazpacho adorned by the mayonnaise mixture, right out of a workman’s lunch pail. My unsuspecting audience went wild with delight. “Everything was wonderful,” the balaboste said, “but the garnish on the gazpacho was exceptional.”
“What was it? What was it?” the guests demanded. I was about to tell them that it was “just mayonnaise,” but in a moment of atypical clarity, I told them that it was “thyme froth.” Such a noble name for such a mediocre food.

“Thyme froth?” Please, may we have the recipe?”

“Oh no,” I warned. “The recipe is strictly a secret.”

“May we buy thyme froth from you?”

“That’s something I’d have to consider.”

Ever since then, Linda and I have been making “tuna froth” and “egg froth” sandwiches for lunch. I guess that what a Jew lacks in talent, he can always make up in seichel.

And then I ponder Humpty Dumpty’s wisdom: “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean . . . nothing more, nothing less..” Amen.

SIT DOWN, MESHUGANER!

Does anyone remember images of those misanthropes who stood on their soapboxes and harangued the passing crowd on everything from the End of Days to the evils of fluoridated water?

My Grandpa Julius was one of those misanthropes, every Sunday in Wicker Park berating his ragtag audience. Some of them would stand by impassively, but the majority would jeer at him, “Zetz zich avek, mishuganer! Sit down, lunatic!”

My grandmother and Aunt Celia were not impassive. They were morbidly humiliated. Their friends would also stroll and picnic in Wicker Park. Each week they would beg, “Julius, schveig! Shut up! People think you’re a mishuganer!” But Sunday after Sunday, he was undaunted.

Finally, he would leave, his demeanor crumpled by defeat. He was not embarrassed, but sorrowed by the failure of another episode of impassioned, futile pleading of his convictions.

Mishuganer? Lunatic? Whether he was a misunderstood, prophet or not, he was routinely mocked and berated by my grandmother and relativesves whose social conscious went so far as penny-ante kaluki and watching wrestling on the ten-inch TV.

Grandpa Julius, I discovered only well after his death, was a misunderstood scholar, if not a prophet scorned. In a tattered box, I found a well-worn first edition of Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Talmud (which I use to this day), erudite writings on Spinoza, and his copy of the Apocrypha, which he had cross-referenced to the Mishna and both Testaments. All this from a man who was destined in the Old Country to become a pattern-cutter.

More extensive, though, were yellowed pages of correspondence, crumpled notes penned in meticulous Palmer-method script, so much like my dad’s, pocket-sized address books and diaries. There was even a brief exchange with Ludwig Zamenhof, Grandpa Julius’s landsman and the inventor of the erstwhile universal language, Esperanto. Even more curiously, there was a return-address stamp inscribed “Bnai Brith Adam – The Children of the Covenant of Adam.”

Ever the pragmatist, my dad was blasé as he filled me in bit-by-bit on the intertwining threads of Grandpa Julius’s philosophical life. My father remembered most, it seems, the enormous cost of the correspondence, which was a source of constant family strife and his separation from my grandmother.

Finally, all the letters, address books, philosophical writings, his contacts with Zamenhof, and all the rest, came to meld. His soapbox exhortations were not about flat-earth theories or the toxicity of smallpox vaccines. Grandpa Julius, one Sunday after the next, preached about universal peace, mutual understanding, an end to war, international currency and Zamenhof’s language, even the establishment of a permanent forum for the world’s leaders to work out their differences peacefully, better than the League of Nations had accomplished.

The address books and correspondence were attempts, unanswered but not frustrated, to enlist like-minded people to share in his vision. He asked, even begged, them to support his recently-founded organization, “Bnai Brith Adam,” a covenant in which the entire world’s people would be enfranchised. Hence, the stamp bearing that return address.

So, Grandpa Julius was a prophet, a utopian, whose vision has yet to be embraced. If nothing else, he preached idealism to a world, cynical then as it is now. Or perhaps he was just some meshuganer who hallucinated a bizarre dream of universal peace and at-one-ness.

Imagine . . . the vision of the Prophet Isaiah, another meshuganer, a millennium-plus before John Lennon sang of it. But this was my Grandpa, the idealist, the visionary. My own Grandpa Julius. How cool.

And if, 80 years later, you and I would mount the same soapbox, how would our message be greeted? Perhaps with welcomed enlightenment? Uh-huh. Sadly, I am obliged to say we would again be mocked and shouted down, “Sit down and shut up, meshuganer!”

WOULD YA PASS THE GRAPES?

When has a rabbi ever had the nachas of exceeding the stature of an aristocratic goy? The instances are rare, but so it happened.

Recently, I was invited to deliver the invocation at a dinner, an organization that raises money for worthy causes. At the dais were seated celebrities, magnates of business, aristocracy. All them and me.

Shortly after being seated, the waiter placed before me the fruit-plate I had ordered. Next to me was an aristocratic woman wearing a gown that once belonged to Princess Margaret.
I saw the glint of her fork from the corner of my eye. A moment later, she announced, “That honeydew melon looks delicious. May I try some?” Before I could answer, she stabbed the fruit, and ate it with gusto. “Simply delicious,” she pronounced. “May I have another?”

The ravenous dowager was Mrs. Ben Heinemann, who owned the largest railroad from Mexico to Canada. I told her that my dad had commuted on her train. “Forget the trains,” she stopped me. “I see you aren’t eating your grapes. How about passing them over?”

By then, the waiter brought her dinner. She cut into it, discovering that it was pork, dry and stringy. “You can’t expect me to eat this,” she prated, calling over the waiter. “How can I get a plate like his?” pointing to my fruit. The waiter foolishly answered that he could not get another.

“Well, then,” she announced. “I’ll just have to share this one.” and reaching across me, partook in my apples, oranges, and more honeydew.

“How did you get so lucky?” she asked. “Are you a vegetarian?”

“No,” I’m Jewish,” I said, and briefly explained to her the rules of kashrut.

“Oh, and if I were Jewish I could get a fruit plate, too? What else do I need to do?

“You don’t need to anything else. Just tell them you’re Jewish.”

“And lie? What would God do to me?”

“Probably just laugh,” I told her.

She pondered for a moment and slipped me a $10 bill. “Here,” she said. “Go out and buy a bag of fruit, and the next time you want to go to Mexico, tell them that Mrs. Ben Heinemann sent you. Now pass me that last piece of peach.”

PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS?

I have yet to figure out what I really do for a living. This has led not only to ambiguity but poverty. Am I a rabbi? I am by virtue of my education, but as a vocation it turned out to be a dead-end four years ago when I was fired for being too uppity and manic. Would you care to share a few pills?

Am I writer? Only if I want to live on $100 a week. And the idea of holing up in a windy garret to write sad poetry holds little attraction for someone who occasionally likes to eat a juicy steak.

Well then, am I a chef? Sometimes I pretend to be and even have vague success. Who are my clients? Ironically, nearly all of them are upper-class goyim, of whom there are many in Greenville. Most of them have heard of me by word-of-mouth, after a cooking class I gave last year.

Yes, of course, my menus are kosher, prepared in my own kitchen. If I do not tell them, who would know the difference? My offerings might as well be classical treiferei, mostly quite continental and elite.

Then one day a local society-lady requested an elaborate menu, so very creative, she thought. It was comprised of pate de foie, potage aux champignon et orge, poitrine roti, soufflé pommes de terre, racine-rouge saumure, et pommes marmelade.

Remember the Midrash that says that all people, even goyim, stood at the foot of Mount Sinai? The menu she chose is proof-positive that the Midrash is right. Think about it: Unbeknownst to her, she ordered the perfect Shabbos dinner, right from oma’s kitchen: chopped liver, mushroom-barley soup, roast brisket, potato kugel, pickled beets, and compote.

She and her guests ate until they were stuffed. They, in turn, entertained other friends with precisely the same menu, and so on, and so on.

Funny, but time and again, Shabbos dinner has been celebrated in mansions where Jews have never been and likely never will be. My mission, however, will not be complete until I have convinced them that Kiddush is really a poem by Flaubert.

KOSHER ICE CREAM FROM KOSHER COWS

Long ago when I was a yeshiva-bochur we ate all types of ice cream without regard to its kashrut. After all, what could be treife about pure frozen cream flavored with pure vanilla? And so it was for nearly all the orthodox Jews in Chicago. We hung out at our favorite ice cream parlor, Lockwood Castle, and on any given Saturday night there were more yarmulkes in the place than there were crosses.

But then one day, some busybody decided to check into the bona fide kashrut of ice cream. He found, to our dismay, that everyday ice cream contained non-kosher additives, especially those that kept the ice cream creamy and fresh.

Ice cream is treife! Lockwood Castle’s business plummeted. The boys rent their garments and wore sackcloth and ashes. The more philosophical among them mused, “That’s what happens when you ask too many questions.”

Our grief, thanks be to God, lasted only a little while. The outrage was so enormous that it reached the throne of America’s premier kashrut authority. In no time, a number of purveyors were marketing kosher ice cream, presumably because the cows were all Chasidim from Brooklyn.

Now, that was all right if you were satisfied eating supermarket ice cream at home. But, when will there be a place to indulge in sodas and sundaes like the good old days at Lockwood Castle? Fortuitously, the outcry was again heard in Heaven, and in months, just such a chain of kosher ice cream parlors opened.

Not too long thereafter, I jubilantly announced to my chasidic friend, “Did you know that Brewster’s is now kosher?”

“Kosher? Really? But is it cholov Yisroel?” “I don’t know,” I answered. “What about the syrups and toppings and whipped cream? Cholov Yisroel? Under Chasidic supervision?” “I don’t know.” “And what about the scoopers? Are you sure they’ve touched only kosher food?” “I don’t know,” I said, imagining what pork-flavored ice cream would taste like. “ . . . and? . . . and?” he sputtered. “I don’t know,” I sighed.

“I guess I’ll just have to bring some kosher ice cream and eat it with my own bowl and spoon.”

“Why not have just a glass of water, to be especially sure?” I asked.

“Water? Is that kosher? What about all the treife bacteria?”

I just don’t know . . .

RECIPES FOR PARADIGM SHIFT IN POKER GRUB


FOR “SAUCE CHALLENGE”

CUCUMBER-DILL SAUCE

2 cups mayo
2-3 “pickling” cucumbers, unpeeled
1-2 medium sweet onion(s) (Vidaila preferred)
4 or more whole sprigs of dill, finely chopped OR 2 tablespoons dry dill
salt and pepper to taste

Coarse-grate cucumbers and onions over clean kitchen towel (one that you’ll never use again). You might lose a knuckle, but I prefer a manual-grater, because food processor makes it too mushy. Squeeze out excess liquid, the more the better. Mix together all ingredients. Especially good as sauce for baked or poached salmon.



FOR TASTE-TESTING COMPETITION

CHOPPED (DON’T CALL ME PATÉ!) LIVER

1-2 pounds chicken liver
4-6 hard-boiled eggs
2 large onions coarsely chopped and sautéed until soft and golden in liberal amount
of flavor-neutral (I use peanut) oil, water, oil or schmaltz and gribenes (chicken skin cracklings – a lesson for another time)

Lightly (kosher) salt and broil livers. Rinse in cool water. (This is kashrut requirement.) Finish Livers by sautéing them together for a few minutes and onions. Grind all ingredients together with medium-coarse blade I prefer hand grinder like bubbe’s, or electric. To my taste, food processor makes it too mushy. Add water, oil and/or schmaltz. Mix to clay-like consistency.

Garnish with chopped onion, grated boiled egg, crostini, onion-pepper marmalade, toasted pita, bagel chips, or challah



FOR COMPETITIVE “POP A TAGAMET”

CHOLENT ALA SUVALK

½ to ¾ cup of assorted beans (mixture of navy, pinto, lima, kidney, and/or great northern) and ¾ cup barley
Sizable chunks of short ribs, brisket, and/or chuck (Optional: For vegetarian, sauté onions)
Handfuls of coarse chopped onions
Chunks of potato, peeled
Lots of fresh chopped garlic (Don’t you dare use that stuff in the jar!)
Salt, pepper, paprika (more than you think you need).

Sorry, you’re gonna have to start this early in the morning if you want it to be proper consistency for that evening. Layer bottom of crock-pot with chopped onions and garlic. Add meat. Season. More onions and garlic. Add barley and beans. Season again. More onions and garlic. Add potato chunks. Season again. Sprinkle liberally with paprika. Cover with boiling water. Cover with heavy lid and cook on high, forever. Do not serve to Presbyterians. Or, as my tactless step-great-uncle would say, “Anybody care for a Tums?”

OPTIONAL: JAKOI ("CANNON BALL")

2-3 eggs, beaten
Mixture of matzo meal, cornflake crumbs, oatmeal, Grape Nuts
Sautéed chopped onion and garlic
Salt, pepper, paprika
Water or chicken stock

Blend all ingredients thoroughly, adding enough water or chicken stock to make mixture drop-from-spoon consistency. Heap mounds of mixture atop potatoes and sprinkle liberally with paprika. Cover crock-pot and cook as above.



FOR BEST “I-CAN-BE MORE-GOYISH-THAN-YOU” CHALLENGE

AUTHENTIC WHITE CASTLE SLIDER/SLYDER (DIFFERENCE OF OPINION)

1-1½ pound(s) ground chuck
1 medium onion, finely diced
8 small dinner rolls, the softer the better

Grease bottom of 12”-fry pan with Pam or a light coating of oil. Form beef into eight thin, preferably square patties. Poke five holes in each patty. Place 1 teaspoon of onion for each patty on medium-heat pan. Top with hamburger, then with bottom of roll. Place top of roll on pan. Steam-fry by covering pan. When patty is lightish brown, take off pan and assemble. Dress with condiments, but the fewer the better.

ALTERNATIVE: BOURBON-SOUSED BRISKET SLIDER
(FOR 10-POUND BRISKET; ADAPT ACCORDINGLY)

Large, preferably whole, brisket (first-cut tends to come out too dry.)
2 cups cheap bourbon (save the Maker’s Mark for a bris)
1 cup soy sauce
1½ cups water
½ cup freshly-squeezed lemon juice
2 cups brown sugar (light or dark)
loads of chopped fresh garlic

Combine all ingredients and whiz in blender, food processor, or immersion blender (preferred). Marinate brisket (I use trash bag) overnight. Roast at 375 degrees, 20 minutes per pound, covered. Slice thinly and substitute for patty in slider recipe.

ALTERNATIVE: (VEGAN AND/OR HYPER-KOSHER) ONION-PEPPER MARMALADE SLIDER

2 medium/large onions
2 red bell peppers, cored, roasted under broiler or flame until black, and peeled. Roasting is optional, but if not, skins will show up in marmalade, ech.
Eighth to quarter-cup olive oil (EVOO, for Rachael Ray fans)
cup Marsala or sweet Sherry (optional)
¼ cup light brown sugar
salt, to taste

Slice onions and peppers thinly. Sauté over medium heat in olive oil until very soft. Add Marsala/Sherry. Raise heat to high. Stir until it reduces by half. Lower heat. Add brown sugar and blend together until glazed. Lightly salt – tends to bring out flavor. Prepare buns as slider and schmeer with marmalade. If you must, choose your condiment(s).

A PARADIGM SHIFT IN POKER SNACKING

I have never played a game of poker . . . er . . .uh . . . unless you count the one time at Camp Ramah, summer of ’63, when a couple of sharpies conned me into a game of strip poker . . . and I wound up running to-and-from the next cabin clad only in my tzitzis.

My boys, Scott, Joey, and Ben, however, are world-class pokeristim. I have yet to compute the stakes, but Scott, my eldest, nearly doubled the size of his house, Joey just bought a very gemutlich one, and Ben, the runt of my litter, has a two-bedroom apartment in New York. I rest my case

As every Jewish event has its own cuisine, poker played by former Yeshiva-bochorim needs to assert its own culinary identity. Devising a menu for young, upscale guys is no easy task, because they always grouse about the absence of quality and diversity of poker-night snacks: No more Buffalo wing dripping pepper sauce . . . too plebian and messy. No more nachos cracking under the burden of salsa . . . too trite. No more guacamole-residue to grease the cards and chips . . . too gauche.

And they’re right. You really can’t do anything exciting to jazz up poker food, unless you hire Wolfgang Puck to replace “Five-Card Louie.” And anyway, the Austrian’s pizza is too prissy.

Thus, I say change the concept, if you cannot change the cuisine:

Serve nothing during each hand except maybe soft drinks. Once the spirited competition of each hand of poker has concluded, let the competition really begin.

Fill shot glasses with a splash of costly or cheap vodka, from Belvedere to Smirnoff. Only the “dealer” knows which is which. For the rest, it is a blind tasting.

After a l’chayyim, down go the shots, one by one. The players rate the quality or try to figure out which is which. (I can always tell Grey Goose, uh-huh.) Four shots each? Be sure to choose a designated drive.

A few hands later, do the same with cheap-versus-classy beer: Bud? Old Milwaukee? Theillier La Bavaisienne? Mestansky Pivovar Havlickuv Brod Lev Lion Pale Double Bock? OK, OK, so I got their names off a website. (http://beergeek.stores.yahoo.net/index.html)

The host is in charge of making or procuring the varieties, so everyone can enjoy the nuances. Or s/he might assign the others to help with the task. After all, everybody has his/her own concept of tuna salad. The possibilities are infinite. Enlist a domestic partner, or as we used to say, “wife,” to do (some of) the procurement.

After the next hand, try the same kind of tasting with tuna salad, chopped liver, Kiddush wine, lox, scotch, cookies, those iddy-biddy gefilte fish balls, cheeses, sauces, meatballs – anything you can spear with a toothpick or in a shot-glass. Never serve anything that has “roll-up” or “crudités” in its name. Rate each round, guess who made it, or just fress. Give prizes to winners – perhaps six-packs of Theillier La Bavaisienne.

Or, I’ll give you something really off the wall: Get a slab of ahi tuna. Cut it into ¾ inch cubes. Flash fry, preferably rare. Put a dab of cocktail sauce in a shot-glass, then the tuna, then a dash of vodka. Down it. A tuna shooter. One of my special favorites: The slider. A teeny hamburger steamed inside a gooey bun. Why not try the same with a couple slices of brisket, corned beef or salami? You can read the definitive saga of the slider at http://www.99w.com/evilsam/ff/whitecastle.html.

As the evening progresses, the players will become pleasantly sated. They have had tastes from a bountiful table bearing all kinds of interesting food and drink. With each ensuing hand, kings start looking more like jacks. Cards become secondary to competitive fressing, and no one will ever again complain about his/her domestic partner coming home smelling of cigars.

It’s just like Henry Herbert Knibbs always said: And far behind the fading trail, the lights and lures of town. So we played the bitter game nor asked for praise or pity. (All right. I got that off a website, too}

FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE ARAB MINDSET MAKES THIS A STUPID WAR

My dad was a Colonel in the National Guard. One day in 1965, he told his high- strutting, hup-two, ROTC son to find a way to stay out of Vietnam. It was, he said, going to be a “stupid war.” Why? Among other reasons, he said, “Because we don’t understand the enemy.”

I was bred by patriotic parents to believe that the people who govern us are ipso facto smarter and more discerning than we. That axiom was rent asunder by the time I became an antiwar protestor. The Vietnam War, it turned out, was not merely immoral and ill-conceived, but it was stupid. It was conducted by stupid men. We, the everyday hoi polli, turned out to be smarter than they were.

Johnson and McNamara, to their feigned surprise, discovered only after each foray that it had been a boondoggle, only to try the same thing over again. They had no idea of the Southeast Asians’ weltanschauung, their mores, motivations, and culture. Most of all, they had no idea of how many of the oppressed yearned for America-style democracy, so, we fought to impose it on them.

Now fast-forward to Iraq: Is the war immoral? At first, that was a tough call. But, when every other justification turned out to be phony, some of the hoi polli were snookered into believing that we would liberate Iraq and ramp it up to become an American-style democracy. By that point, the rest of us regular folk figured out that we were diving happy-hooligan into another stupid war, because, as Daddy said, “we don’t understand the enemy.” The President, et al, simply didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, that the mindset of the man-in-the-street Arab would not cotton to the idea of becoming an American-style democracy.

Of course, they didn’t. That should have been obvious when our men and women marched triumphantly into Baghdad to an anemic throng of 35 Iraqis, none of them bearing flowers. Likewise at the toppling of Saddam’s statue . . . all of them sent over from central casting.
No surprise. Many of us, yawned, “So, what else is new?” It was neither the first nor the last un-surprise that us regular folk knew would happen, while the stupid men in national leadership had yet to figure it out.

Despite all the ballyhooed bluster on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the mission will never be accomplished, nor will the civil war end. Why? Because the men above us refuse to understand that the mindset of Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, et al, unlike American-style democracy, is rule or be ruled, destroy or be destroyed. The notion of “peace” is not nearly the same as that of an American-style democracy. We came to them bearing and then trying to impose, faux-democracy on them. Instead, the vacuum we have created is filled with civil war and the only issue upon which the warring faction agree: “Yankee go home!”

This is the lesson: Heretofore oppressed people do not automatically default to democracy. It is not axiomatic that freedom will, by its very nature, step in to fill the gap created when subjugated people become free. Perhaps that’s why George Washington called America a “great experiment.” Perhaps that is also why the newly-liberated Israelites yearned to return to the oppression of Egypt rather than face the challenges of the wilderness. Another “great experiment” nearly gone sour.

Call it jingoism, narcissism, or nearsightedness, it is just old-fashioned stupidity, and we hoi polli had it all figured out, while the dopes above failed or refused to understand it.
Are they smarter than we are? I think not. We laugh when we recall that story of the natives showing up with baskets as their colonial rulers announced that they would be given their freedom. Now there is no reason to laugh, only to be sobered.

You were right, Daddy. It is a stupid war.

A BACHELOR AND HIS SANITARY NAPKINS

Once upon a time, decades ago, my grandparents owned a little grocery store in the old Jewish neighborhood in Chicago. My grandmother and mother ran the store, rolling herring and pickle barrels out onto the sidewalk at 5:00 AM in the frigid pre-dawn darkness.

But, my grandfather was a man of leisure. He came down to the store at 9:00, dressed in the flashy suit of a mafia don, complete with diamond pinky ring, checked yesterday’s receipts and disappeared, purportedly to go “to market.” Decades later, my mother disclosed that he always had a woman on the side. But that was back then when wives suffered silently through their husbands’ peccadilloes. So, my grandfather caroused like a tycoon, trying to hide that he was just another little storekeeper.

My grandfather benefited the store in only one way: He was a marketer par excellence. When Cross and Blackwell came out with a new flavor of jelly, he’d offer housewives tastes of it, something that no other immigrant grocer would have considered.

When the rumor spread that mayonnaise was a dairy product, housewives resisted for fear of mixing milk with meat. To combat the false report, my grandfather asked the Chasidic rebbe across the street to declare that mayonnaise was pareve. Then, he proceeded to tape copies of the official document to every lamppost in a mile radius.

My grandfather’s only near-mistake was trying to market women’s sanitary napkins. But, the idea of purchasing them at Abe Goldsmith’s grocery was beyond propriety.

For months, the crates of sanitary napkins remained untouched. Then one day, Louie Zaidman, a middle-aged bachelor, bought a package. A month passed, and Louie bought another. By now, the yentas were whispering to each other, “What was the ‘feigeleh’ doing with women’s private-ware?”

Finally, my grandfather got up the courage to ask.

“Goldsmith,” he answered, “there’s only one use for those shmattes. Every time I polish my Buick, they leave a wonderful shine. Now go tell your patrons that if Abe Goldsmith can sell sanitary napkins to a bachelor, he can sell them to a balaboste who wants to wax her floor.”

LESSONS IN NOTHINGNESS

What transcendent lessons might we learn from Britany’s downward careen?

“Absolutely none,” you’ll wearily answer. A once-innocent child, coached by her handlers and her own narcissism, has decomposed into an annoying, but entertaining, puddle of schadenfreude.

The expected litany of cliches: Britney . . . “too much too soon,” “both a cause and result of the slack-jawed empty-headedness of today’s youth,” “a symptom of society’s pervasive decadence,” “a grotesque image of self-indulgence gone wild,” “a basically stupid, big-breasted girl co-opted by greedy phonies,” “simply self-destructive.”

Beyond all the clichés, the transcendent message is to let Britney choke on her own vomit. Stop with the pity. Stop with the excuse-making. Stop with the compassion. Stop the limousines dropping her off and then taking her back to 90210 after her field trips to rehab. Marginalize her as a loser, just another deflowered flower out on the street on a collision course with coked up ‘ho-dom.

Britney’s path has been sabotaged by greedy faux-friends. Nonetheless, her path has been paved with gold. She blew it herself. She had assistance, but she also was guilty of rejecting a better way, presumably inculcated by parents, school, church, and small-town values.
But now transcend Britney and consider people living in squalor on the streets.

Most of us do not pity them, nor make excuses, nor show them understanding and the benefit of doubt, nor send limousines to pick them up and drop them off. At best, maybe they get is a corndog and a mat in a shelter, then to be booted back on the streets at 6:00 AM. They roil in their own vomit, some of them because they blew it via alcohol, drugs, or shiftlessness.

But a majority of the homeless are out on the streets due to no fault of their own. They are there because of domestic violence, mental illness, lack of education and marketable job skills. Only a small minority of them will ever be in place to transition out of homelessness, because those resources are so pitifully scarce.

The homeless should not be relegated to the streets, but they are. Britney, in her lucrative self-inflicted destructiveness, should be. But she will likely never be relegated to a taste of the mean streets, but she should be.

This is the transcendent lesson of Britney’s self-debauchery: We who are warmly ensconced in the Upper Middle Class, just like me, have never tasted the bitterness of the streets, a descent from phony self-sufficiency to pathos to nothingness. Maybe an encounter with helplessness would so enlighten us to come away humbled, more cherishing of that which is sacred in our lives, understanding of the reality of the human condition, no longer so oblivious of love of neighbor and love of God.

A friend of mine, an orthodox rabbi in his 50’s, took the self-challenge to the extreme, at the advice of a Presbyterian colleague. My friend would take only the clothes on his back, a clean towel, and a knapsack. He would randomly pinpoint a town, fly there, and – devoid of any money or resources – find his way back home.

Upon his return, he spoke to me of the nights spent in shelters, sleeping on the streets, begging to sweep out a bar for $2 an hour, where the best place to hitchhike are (truck stops), learning how to beg, adapting to nothingness. My friend, a genius, scion of great rabbinical families, Johns Hopkins credentials, got a third of the way back home, from Buffalo to Atlanta, in a week.
He know that he would return to Upper Middle Class-dom. Regardless, the changes to him brought on not only stories, but encounters so core-shattering and life-shaking that they gave birth in him empathy, understanding, and self-doubts that he had never before experienced. The transformation of a life.

This is precisely what Britney, stripped of all pretension, needs. It’s likely what every one of us needs: an encounter with nothingness, a descent into relentless urban squalor.

Need we ourselves go on that same sobering journey? Is that what it would take to open our hearts and souls?

A MASHKE MARTINI

Scotch or vodka, it makes no difference to me. Pour me three shots of Glenlivet or Grey Goose, and I’m a happy man, gleefully under the table.

However, the discriminating palate of my Lubavitch friends prefers “white” liquor (vodka), over “brown,” (scotch, bourbon, etc.) Indeed, they simply call white “mashke – the beverage par excellence.”

Why “white” above “brown”? Perhaps the answer derives from kashrut: Brown could attain some of its darkness by adding goyische wine, rendering it unkosher. White, could not be polluted.

I recently had conversation with a young Lubavitcher about drinking white mashke. He whispered to me that he had hard time drinking vodka – nausea, headache, horrific hangover. He craved, he said, to have the same celebratory, euphoric buzz that his friends enjoyed at the various Chasidic functions, while he was busy steering the porcelain bowl.

I have decades of experience in drinking white, so I offered him unsolicited advice. I told him: “Chill the mashke, almost to the point of freezing. Only use the best vodka, nothing less than Stolichnaya. Then, pour it into a broad glass. Shot-glasses are used to measure, not drink. Why broad? Mashke must be allowed to breathe, so that its bouquet is savored. And, I bet you’re drinking it with cake or nauseating sweets. Sweets make mashke disgusting. Good mashke deserves something salty. Do you like olives? Try soaking some of them in the mashke. Then, sip it. No more shots.”

A few months went by. We encountered each other. Yes, his friends consider him a heretic, but it was a price he was willing to pay for a buzz without a retching hangover. And the best benefit, he said, was that his bride-to-be was no longer furious with him, nor did she have to clean his shoes the next morning.

So, he is a heretic. But, if Lubavitch has evolved into the age of laptops, iPods, and satellites, why shouldn’t they bring the same modernity to the mashke they drink?

And along the way, no one will realize that I have just taught them how to transform the yesterday’s “white mashke” into a beverage that they will never know is a really great Martini.

KUGEL AT THE MEAT-AND-THREE

Have you ever eaten at a “meat-and-three”?

Chances are not, unless you have visited my hometown in rural America. There are at least 25 meat-and-three restaurants within a 16-kilometer radius from where I live. The common denominator among them is that they all serve the simplest food in the simplest manner: one plain main course chosen from the likes of meat loaf, chicken, fried fish, and three side dishes selected from among pickled beets, peas, beans, squash, bread pudding, and the other foodstuffs you would expect a yokel to eat.

I have had occasion to dine (fish, not ham) at a local meat-and-three and have always enjoyed it. Ironically, I have recently been ordained as a local meat-and-three expert under the pseudonym, “Rabbi Ribeye,” because of my newspaper column and forthcoming television show. The premise of my column and show is to travel throughout rural America, sampling the cooking and chatting with the cooks and diners.

Knowing the proprietors of a local meat-and-three, I proposed to them a novel idea: Let me cook a tray of potato kugel, I asked, and offer it as one of the three side dishes for a couple of days. We’ll see who eats it and what their reaction is, without telling them that it is quintessential Jewish food. Let’s see if the word gets out and the diners eat more and more kugel each day.

Well, need I tell you that it was such a tremendous success that it now appears on the menu every day and has become a favorite among the yokels, never knowing that it is “Jew-food”?
Then I tried the same with matzo-ball soup, with resounding results. The ultimate success came with my chopped liver, which many of the goyim declared “better than ham-and-cheese.”
Oy, what a victory for God’s chosen people. The local meat-and-three was being slowly converted to a classical Jewish delicatessen, just as the local gentiles were unwittingly being converted to Judaism.

I take no credit for this discovery. All honor goes to God. One can only assume that the goyim stood there with us at the foot of Mount Sinai, and instead of manna, they insisted on ordering meat-and-three.

AN AMERICAN IN VICHY PARIS

What is left to tell you about my home town, Greenville? Twenty years ago, its downtown was a foreboding moonscape. Ten years ago, Mayor Heller, a Viennese Holocaust survivor, resurrected downtown.

Nightlife on Main Street has become the signature of downtown’s vitality. Successful new restaurants sprung up. On weekends, sidewalk cafes jam the traffic.

Linda and I love to stroll the downtown streets, and enjoy cuisine that ranges from pizza to Thai. After all, how else would someone weighing 220 kg judge the quality of downtown?

Ah, but where were the French? Only one French restaurant in the entire city.

I am inclined to say, “Who cares?” My disdain for the snooty French is equal to that of any self-respecting Jew. Yet, consider my foray into Greenville’s only French restaurant an exercise in morbid curiosity.

My first clue was that it was the only restaurant up-and-down Main Street that wasn’t full of patrons, despite its welcoming name, “An American in Paris.” Perhaps, we thought, the potential diners who walked by the place knew something we didn’t. Of course.

The cuisine – consciously or not – was a clear-cut case of anti-Semitism:

The tea was an anemic, tepid green. It was nothing like the robust, boiling, honey-brown Swee-Touch-Nee that honorable Jews use to wash down a heavy Shabbos lunch.

Linda ordered a salmon sandwich and made sure that it contained no pork. Out it came garnished with slices of bacon. Upon questioning the server, she protested, “bacon is not pork.”

Meanwhile, I opted for salade au saumon fume, which arrived as salade au babeurre of lettuce piled six inches high and two shards of lox, decorated with crabmeat. Again, we were told, “crabmeat is just like fish.”

The accompanying roll looked like barches, until the first bite hit my palate like mush. Finally, we ordered a Sacher torte, filled not with delectable Viennese chocolate, but with gooey pudding.

Yes, the menu was a clear exercise in anti-Semitism. No wonder no one was there, for the restaurant’s name in tiny letters read “An American in (Vichy) Paris.”
Shame on them for the deception. But we should have known better, on the night we went to see “I Am My Own Wife.”

THE STATEMENT THAT SILENCE MAKES

They weave together its diversity and mend the vacuous “moment of silence” as we become communities united through prayer, not disunited by acrimony.

This is going to seem crazy coming from the pen of a Rabbi and intrepid liberal: Another South Carolina public forum, the Oconee County Council, was wrong in forbidding an invocation at its meetings, in deference to a moment of silence.
A moment of silence is precisely that: Silence. Yes, it may mean a moment of thoughtful reflection. It might be an all-too-precious opportunity to elevate ones heart and spirit beyond the mundane, that the affairs of state be guided by justice and equity.


But, a moment of silence, by dint of human nature, has likewise opened two minutes to chew gum, contemplate the dinner menu, or simply dawdle in emptiness. I dare say that most of the worshippers in our pews use an entire Sabbath for precisely those purposes!

Prayer on public occasions is a good thing because it makes an affirmative statement of God’s presence not merely in church/synagogue, but in the common avenues of life. For those people who find public prayer odious, the prayerful moment is still an opportunity for thoughtful reflection before everyone starts slogging around in taxes and culvert routes. If the noise of prayer interrupts the meditation, it’s no great task to “tune it out,” as my dad would tell my mother about annoyances, a classical army-officer response.

Ah, would it only be that the prayers were inspiring, but nonsectarian? Yes and no. Pastors who have sensitivity and wisdom will offer inclusive prayers that enfranchise the entire community in the commonweal. Some pastors might even momentarily suspend their own faith dogma to draw the community together in the spirit of at-one-ness.

Certainly, most of us look at God and His/Her way with the world through our personal filter. But let us agree that for all faiths – and perhaps even some atheists – our threshold understanding of God is that S/He is the sum total of all the creative and moral forces of the universe, and thus infinite. Most of us believe more of God than that, but it is certainly a good place to start.

What, however, of the pastor whose system of belief compels only sectarian prayer, as some Christians believe that God hears prayers only if they are offered through the intercession of Jesus. This matter is no more problematic than the Jewish dogma that God is absolute oneness, not comprised of the Trinity. Or, likewise the Catholic fealty to the Pope.

But, we should not see prayer as something offered in the spirit of exclusivity. To the contrary, we should be delighted to be a community that is a tapestry of prayerful idioms which testify to an interweaving that makes us all one peoplehood. I celebrate the various idioms of prayer whether or not I defer to their doctrines: white and African Americans in their own diverse idioms, my yarmulke and the affirmation that “The Lord is One,” and the Muslim proclaiming “Allahu akbar!”
I love the diversity of prayer as a statement of unity before a likely contentious meeting to follow. Would only our prayers for lovingkindness be answered and turned from aspirations to action. A naïve aspiration? Naïve aspirations are precisely what prayer is about.

So, “in the name of Jesus,” “Shema Yisrael,” “Bismellah,” and all the others do precisely the opposite of dividing a community. They weave together its diversity and mend the vacuous “moment of silence” as we become communities united through prayer, not disunited by acrimony.

Oxymoronic as it may seem, the sound of silence hurts and does not help a community’s wellbeing. Prayerful aspirations do.

THE DESCENT TO NOTHINGNESS

What transcendent lessons might we learn from Britany’s downward careen?

“Absolutely none,” you’ll wearily answer. A once-innocent child, coached by her handlers and her own narcissism, has decomposed into an annoying, but entertaining, puddle of schadenfreude.

The expected litany of cliches: Britney . . . “too much too soon,” “both a cause and result of the slack-jawed empty-headedness of today’s youth,” “a symptom of society’s pervasive decadence,” “a grotesque image of self-indulgence gone wild,” “a basically stupid, big-breasted girl co-opted by greedy phonies,” “simply self-destructive.”

Beyond all the clichés, the transcendent message is to let Britney choke on her own vomit. Stop with the pity. Stop with the excuse-making. Stop with the compassion. Stop the limousines dropping her off and then taking her back to 90210 after her field trips to rehab. Marginalize her as a loser, just another deflowered flower out on the street on a collision course with coked up ‘ho-dom.

Britney’s path has been sabotaged by greedy faux-friends. Nonetheless, her path has been paved with gold. She blew it herself. She had assistance, but she also was guilty of rejecting a better way, presumably inculcated by parents, school, church, and small-town values.

But now transcend Britney and consider people living in squalor on the streets. Most of us do not pity them, nor make excuses, nor show them understanding and the benefit of doubt, nor send limousines to pick them up and drop them off. At best, maybe they get is a corndog and a mat in a shelter, then to be booted back on the streets at 6:00 AM. They roil in their own vomit, some of them because they blew it via alcohol, drugs, or shiftlessness. But a majority of the homeless are out on the streets due to no fault of their own. They are there because of domestic violence, mental illness, lack of education and marketable job skills. Only a small minority of them will ever be in place to transition out of homelessness, because those resources are so pitifully scarce.

The homeless should not be relegated to the streets, but they are. Britney, in her lucrative self-inflicted destructiveness, should be. But she will likely never be relegated to a taste of the mean streets, but she should be.

This is the transcendent lesson of Britney’s self-debauchery: We who are warmly ensconced in the Upper Middle Class, just like me, have never tasted the bitterness of the streets, a descent from phony self-sufficiency to pathos to nothingness. Maybe an encounter with helplessness would so enlighten us to come away humbled, more cherishing of that which is sacred in our lives, understanding of the reality of the human condition, no longer so oblivious of love of neighbor and love of God.

A friend of mine, an orthodox rabbi in his 50’s, took the self-challenge to the extreme, at the advice of a Presbyterian colleague. My friend would take only the clothes on his back, a clean towel, and a knapsack. He would randomly pinpoint a town, fly there, and – devoid of any money or resources – find his way back home.

Upon his return, he spoke to me of the nights spent in shelters, sleeping on the streets, begging to sweep out a bar for $2 an hour, where the best place to hitchhike are (truck stops), learning how to beg, adapting to nothingness. My friend, a genius, scion of great rabbinical families, Johns Hopkins credentials, got a third of the way back home, from Buffalo to Atlanta, in a week.

He know that he would return to Upper Middle Class-dom. Regardless, the changes to him brought on not only stories, but encounters so core-shattering and life-shaking that they gave birth in him empathy, understanding, and self-doubts that he had never before experienced. The transformation of a life.

This is precisely what Britney, stripped of all pretension, needs. It’s likely what every one of usl need: an encounter with nothingness, a descent into relentless urban squalor.

Need we ourselves go on that same sobering journey? Is that what it would take to open our hearts and souls?

AN AMERICAN IN (VICHY) PARIS

What is left to tell you about my home town, Greenville? Twenty years ago, its downtown was a foreboding moonscape. Ten years ago, Mayor Heller, a Viennese Holocaust survivor, resurrected it.

Nightlife on Main Street has become the signature of downtown’s vitality. Successful new restaurants have sprung up. On weekends, sidewalk cafes jam the traffic.

Linda and I love to stroll the downtown streets, and enjoy cuisine that ranges from pizza to Thai. After all, how else would someone weighing 220 kg judge the quality of downtown?

Ah, but where were the French? Only one French restaurant in the entire city.

I am inclined to say, “Who cares?” My disdain for the snooty French is equal to that of any self-respecting Jew. Yet, consider my foray into Greenville’s only French restaurant an exercise in morbid curiosity.

My first clue was that it was the only restaurant up-and-down Main Street that wasn’t full of patrons, despite its welcoming name, “An American in Paris.” Perhaps, we thought, the potential diners who walked by the place knew something we didn’t. Of course.

The cuisine – consciously or not – was a clear-cut case of anti-Semitism:

The tea was an anemic, tepid green. It was nothing like the robust, boiling, honey-brown Swee-Touch-Nee that honorable Jews use to wash down a heavy Shabbos lunch.

Linda ordered a salmon sandwich and made sure that it contained no pork. Out it came garnished with slices of bacon. Upon questioning the server, she protested, “bacon is not pork.”

Meanwhile, I opted for salade au saumon fume, which arrived as salade au babeurre of lettuce piled six inches high and two shards of lox, decorated with crabmeat. Again, we were told, “crabmeat is just like fish.”

The accompanying roll looked like barches, until the first bite hit my palate like mush. Finally, we ordered a Sacher torte, filled not with delectable Viennese chocolate, but with gooey pudding.

Yes, the menu was a clear exercise in anti-Semitism. No wonder no one was there, for the restaurant’s name in tiny letters read “An American in (Vichy) Paris.”

Shame on them for the deception. But we should have known better, on the night we went to see “I Am My Own Wife.”