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.”

SETTING A TERM TO DISGRACE

Somewhere in a basement box rests a editorial cartoon, circa 1973, of Watergate snitch John Dean wearing a button declaring, “Nixon’s the One!” By the next year, Nixon had resigned. A month later, Ford pardoned Nixon. For years to come, Ford was hung out to dry.

Now in his death, we adulate Ford’s decision as self-sacrificial and courageously conciliatory. Time has vindicated him, and well it should. He intrepidly led us to the beginning of reconciliation.

Regardless, America is still not kind to the spat-upon. We have lived through the scandalizing of Nixon, philandering Clinton, Foley, Haggard, e t al. Deservedly or nor, their foibles have fed America’s insatiable appetite for schadenfreude, the delight in someone else’s troubles.

If you are wise, you ignore it. If you are gutsy, you denounce it. But chances are that you publicly eschew it, but privately relish each tawdry detail. If you are its object, you die a thousand deaths only to be resurrected to someone else’s salacious jokes. A society that luxuriates in scandal must always have a bogeyman to slake its blood lust and to reassure itself that real evil lurks menacingly "out there" not "in here." It is the stuff of beasts victoriously circling their prey before moving in for the kill.

Let us not trivialize the consequences of wrongdoing and moral corruption. Avarice, unbridled ambition, and lust are acts of betrayal that deserve accountability and recompense. But, the punishment that the subjects of our derision withstand also should not be trivialized. We have contrived an elaborate ritual of humiliation to destroy any last pretenses of dignity to which a public wrongdoer might cling:
The social analysis of wrongdoer and wrongdoing become sanctimonious debate on Nightline and Face the Nation. Then the salacious expose on O’Reilly to his self-righteous mob. The ritual is complete, as one becomes the butt of jokes in a Letterman Top Ten and joining a list of pop-culture nouns and adjectives: Anyone over 18 (12?) knows the sexual implications of “a Lewinsky.”

The only chance we have of distinguishing ourselves from beasts is to create a countervailing "rite of reconciliation," a national temperament that is just as zealous in welcoming the penitent as it is to humiliate the sinner. We know too well, what one must do to fall from grace. We have little sense of what one must do to regain honor.

What penance must Foley and Haggard perform to regain public honor? How much time must a shamed Nixon spend being subjected to derision?
Should we not at least ponder the time that should elapse, the quantum of worthy deeds one should perform, the changes in demeanor and attitude one should evince, before he may re-ingratiate himself as a respected member of the community?

This rite of reconciliation, however, is not a media-hyped jailhouse conversion followed by a tell-all book ballyhooed on Oprah that paves the road from sinner to saint. That is just another snack to feed society's insatiable appetite for public spectacle.

No, the real rite of reconciliation demands more from the smirk-faced good-guys in the pews than it does from the sinner. It calls us to account for all the righteous Judeo-Christian virtues we piously affirm each Sabbath, only to betray them each weekday – virtues like forgiveness, tolerance, abhorrence of sin but not sinner, the granting of second chances. Creating a rite of reconciliation means to forge a communal mind-set that demands no more penance from those we have condemned than we would want for ourselves, were we someday to be held accountable for all the lofty values we have preached with our lips but then denied by our deeds.

People who have now fallen from grace, the ones we were too eager to strip of their humanity, deserve a chance, maybe even two, to regain our trust and our respect. Ford pardoned the errant Nixon only to suffer his own derision. Will we ever welcome the once bogeymen so much with our hearts as we do with our tar and feathers?

FLASH! IMMOLATED CHEF ANOINTED AS HIGH PRIEST

I seriously wonder whether Aaron the High Priest constantly had second-degree burns over his hands from frying up his sacrifices with olive oil. Better yet, do I become a Kohen Gadol because of all the times that I scald myself while I am attempting to cook with scorching olive oil? If so, then last week I was anointed with holy unguent and declared Kohen Gadol by a congregation of ten . . . er, uh . . . goyim.

The scenario: One of my Bar Mitzvah students is a little more eccentric than most 13-year-olds. He chants his Sidra only after he has spent time with me in the kitchen. On that one fateful day, we had planned to make a beef-barley soup. We were about to sauté some onions in EVOO (“extra virgin olive oil,” for you who don’t watch that chirping parakeet, Rachel Ray. Jealous? Me? Nah.)

Just then, flames leapt out of pot. While shoving my Bar-Mitzvah bochur to safety, I stuck my hand in the fire and burned it to what I assumed was glowing charcoal. Thanks be to God that miraculously I escaped with only two half-inch burns. Pin a medal on me. Hoo hah, such a hero.

Being of the upper middle class, our house, of course, is equipped with the biggest and best alarm, which instantly alerts the fire department every time I fry an egg.
I had already well doused the fire and sufficiently attended to my burns, when a police captain banged on the front door. He apparently handled these matters because he was so scrawny that he couldn’t save my dog from a titmouse. I calmly told him that no other emergency services were required.

By then, though, the fire department had already snaked its way down our narrow lane with a hook-and-ladder truck. Out of the truck leapt six firefighters, each dressed in full regalia and looking like a sumo, insisting on inspecting the house. They spied the minor burns on my hand and announced that they were obliged to have EMS come to check me out.

Shortly thereafter, three EMT’s arrived in their truck. They were required, they said, to examine me. Before I knew it, they were taking my blood pressure. Oh boy, they discovered that I had a pacemaker. So they demanded that I lie down and let them take an EKG – all for two half-inch burns.

By then, our kitchen was overrun by a minyan of emergency crews. Now they demanded that I be taken to the hospital. Upon arrival I was again checked out and waited an hour to have some salve schemed on my grievous wounds. The EMTs, firefighters, and cops stood by attentively.

My Bar Mitzvah student of course was aghast. By then, his mother had arrived to pick him up. As I was being wheeled out on the stretcher, they followed behind, assuring that they would pray for me. An audience of curious neighbors, God bless them, gathered outside. By the time that the petrified Linda picked me up, our doorstep was laden with aluminum pans full of meatloaf, fried chicken, the ubiquitous tuna salad, and brownies. As I say, God bless them.

Do you comprehend the significance of that momentous occasion? I had been anointed as the Kohen Gadol by olive oil, then by life-saving unction in the hospital in the presence of my motley congregation of ten weary caregivers.

Will I burn myself again? Of course. Just that this time, I will have disconnected my fire alarm. Will my intrepid Bar Mitzvah bochur return? Of course. But only after I promise that we continue our culinary ventures only if we make something innocent, like fruit salad.

No! No! Be careful with that knife!

P.S. God bless those lifesavers who were ready to save my life.

TELLTALE CULINARY POLKA-DOTS

I feature myself a fashionable man. I own ten suits and two drawers full of sweaters. I have a huge collection of designer ties, all polka-dot.

No, none of them was intended to be that way. I am not obsessed with polka-dots. They simply tell the story of another of my obsessions: sloppy food eaten by a man who cannot eat it without slobbering it on his tie.

Red polka-dots, for example, are the remnant of blobs of ketchup from a juicy hamburger that I have just eaten. Suspicion falls on me when I am nowhere near a kosher eatery. The discerning critic might assume that I have indulged in a treife hamburger at McDonald’s, to which I can only roll my eyes heavenward and swear to klop an additional “Al Chet” next Yom Kippur.

Then there is the yellow polka-dot, a sure sign that I have recently returned from New York. There I have certainly indulged in a hot, thick corned beef sandwich slathered in bright yellow mustard. Thank God, it is not the chazzerei that pretends to be a corned beef sandwich in my rural South – a single slice of smoked beef on white bread slathered with mayonnaise and served beside a glass of chocolate milk.

What about my fashionable pink polka-dots? Ah, that was when a snooty congregant insisted that I try her specialty: gefilte fish congealed in raspberry Jello. A huge polka-dot of it plopped onto my tie as I tried surreptitiously to feed it to the dog.

Finally, there is the telltale green polka-dot, whenever I swear to Linda that I’ve had a healthy salad for lunch. She knows that the green is simply a cover up for the fat, juicy, carcinogenic steak that I had really eaten.

My brothers: If you enjoy the same eclectic cuisine that I do, make sure to purchase a multicolored polka-dot tie that confuses your messy eating with haute couture. Better yet, take a job that allows you to leave your tie at home. Become an artist and spatter your smock with today’s lunch. Only you will know the truth while everyone around you will think that you have become the next Rembrandt.

LUTHERAN NEW YEARS

Last year, Linda made the mistake of telling my colleague Steve that we had “no plans” for New Years Eve. “Wonderful!” Steve said, “Then you must spend the evening with us.”

Steve is a Lutheran pastor whose social life is less exciting than watching paint dry. His anemic wife, nebbish, suffers from chronic depression. Steve goes on to say that since I was a “Jewish scholar,” we might spend the evening viewing Rosenstrasse, and discussing its implications for a “true understanding” the Holocaust.

Rosenstrasse is at least as depressing as his wife. It sugar-coats the Holocaust to a distasteful romp. The ghetto is a strict summer camp, the Nazis are its crabby counselors. Ah, this is precisely the movie that gives Steve a “true understanding” of the Holocaust.

But, enough of the film and on with the food:

First, a perspective on what the typical American Jew eats on New Years Eve: a corned beef sandwich on rye, potato chips, a sour pickle, a bottle of beer, a Tagamet, and then off to bed.

But, what did we eat at the buffet that they prepared? Wisely, he told us that they would serve no meat because of “your dietary restrictions.” Instead, we dined on what a Lutheran pastor must think is a feast: Eight cubes of cheese, eight slices of pickled herring, eight gherkins, eight slivers of Stollen . . .all stabbed with toothpicks.

When the Bavarian cuckoo-clock struck midnight, Linda and I embraced. Pastor Steve and his wife sat on opposite sides of the room and nodded at each other.

As I picked up a pizza to eat at home, Linda asked why the wife was so depressed.

“Are they getting divorced?”

“No, silly!” I answer. “If that was a feast, what do you think they eat every other night, stuck with toothpicks? Prozac won’t help. We need to fatten her up on brisket and kugel.

“Well," Linda responds, “let’s have them over next New Years Eve, watch cartoons, and show them what a festive dinner really is.”

“I don’t think so,” I tell her. “But for God’s sake, from now on let me be the one who answers the phone.”

TINY’S "BAR MITZVAH EXPRESS“

Some things about Judaism have gotten better and others worse. Then there are those that have stayed the same in the half-century since my childhood.

Take the Bar/Bat Mitzvah celebration. My father was a postal clerk, so we were poor compared to the Jews who lived nearby. In 1963, my Bar Mitzvah consisted of a Kiddush after schule to which my parents invited 40 relatives.

But friends who lived in greater affluence did not simply have Bar Mitzvah parties, but extravaganzas – A hotel ballroom. An orchestra, chanteuse, and master of ceremonies. A bacchanalia of hors d’ouvres, martinis, and dinner. A candle-lighting ceremony to honor special guests. A machine popping popcorn. Personalized tee-shirts reading, “I Overate at Scottie’s Bar Mitzvah.

An occasional Bar Mitzvah celebrant would later rebel against his parents’ values by becoming a political radical or a Lubavitcher. The vast majority embraced their parents’ ways and are now, in 2006, honoring their progeny with the same decadence.

Having spent 35 years in the rabbinate, it still never ceases to amaze me. Should a rabbi attend? I confess that I frequently am present, in part out of morbid curiosity, and in part because I get to drink good Scotch.

Just recently, I conducted the Bar Mitzvah of a boy fondly known as “Tiny,” because of his 140-kilo girth. Tiny’s performance from the bima was rotten. But who cares? In front of the schule was parked a bus to take the kids to the party, emblazoned with, “Tiny’s Bar Mitzvah Express,”

The Shabbos-afternoon decadence began: shrimp on ice, cheese rolled in salami, bacon-wrapped filet mignon. The band played, the chanteuse sang, the master of ceremonies cracked offensive jokes.

Finally, silence fell upon the crowd. It was time for the candle-lighting ceremony. Instead, the master of ceremonies dolefully intoned, “With regrets, we will refrain from the candle-lighting ritual, in order to properly honor the holy Sabbath.”

Whether the traumatized Tiny will ever become a Lubavitcher who observes “the holy Sabbath” is anyone’s guess. But this I do know: At the very moment of the aborted candle-lighting, God was sitting on a rock, eating a cheeseburger, and declaring, “They just don’t get it, do they?”

IT’S HARD TO BE A JEW . . . ON SUNDAY

Any time I have the opportunity to escape my highly-gentile hometown of Greenville to visit New York, it is as if I were on a pilgrimage to the Holy Wall in Jerusalem. New York’s plethora of outstanding, or at least passable, kosher restaurants is a special treat for gluttons like me who lives to eat.

But, this time, that wonderful experience of brisket, pastrami, and falafel was overshadowed by attempting to buy a Coke and and a snack on my way back to the airport that Sunday.

Ah, behold the telephone-booth sized joint across the Yeshiva campus. As I enter the place, I realize that it is simply a dump that observes kashrut. Strutting up to the counter, I behold a rack of pizzas festooned with green pepper. But oy, green pepper hurts my stomach.

I assume – wouldn’t you? – that a simple cheese pizza would also be available at a dive across from Yeshiva University, touting itself as Yahkel’s Pizza. No, they inform me, all the cheese pizzas were frozen before Shabbos and would take at least a half-hour to thaw.

Oy.

“OK, then let me have a salad.” The menu says that I have my choice of between “iceberg” lettuce and “mixed greens.” As a gourmand in training, I select the mixed greens. The server brings them to the counter, but then proceeds to chop three heads of iceberg lettuce and adds huge amounts of it into a huge bowl to accompany three or four puny leaves if raddichio and arugula. Without apology, he tells me that the other bags of greens had spoiled because they were “left over from before Shabbos.”

Oy.

“OK. the menu says I get a selection of toppings for my salad. I’ll have the ‘fresh albacore tuna’.” But I see that the tuna bears a dark brown crust, making it look like cat food. “Is that fresh albacore?” I ask. “It was,” he says, “but that was before Shabbos.”

Oy.

“Then give me the black olives.”

“You should know that we mix them with the green ones before Shabbos.”

Oy.

“Then what about the sweet red peppers?” But I already know the answer: You can’t light Shabbos candles until the you’ve mixed the red and green ones together.

Then I ask for falafel . . . but you already know the answer: The grinder broke, so we couldn’t grind the chickpeas, and you know that we couldn’t get it fixed on Shabbos.

Oy vey.

“How about a cup of coffee.”

“You want cream with that?” I nod in the affirmative. “Sorry, all we have is black because we haven’t had a delivery from the dairy since before Shabbos.”

Oy again.

“What about a can of “Coke?”

“I hope that you like regular, because we weren’t here on Shabbos to get a delivery of Diet.”

Noch a mohl oy.

A cup of coffee with real cream at Starbucks in the airport would have to suffice until I got back home. Now Greenville wasn’t looking so bad. I daydreamt about my flight back. Ah, Greenville, where black and green olives come from separate jars and you can get fresh milk seven days a week. On my return, I lustily ate mixed greens and white albacore tuna at a treifeh restaurant, and I washed it all down with a cup of creamery-rich half-and-half-enhanced cup of real coffee. The restaurant will remain unnamed.

Oy, a mechayeh!

The next time I returned to New York, it was for my kids’ wedding at the rococo catering hall, Razag, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. For that joyous occasion I had the chutzpa to tell the machatonim that they might do whatever they please, even the garish smorgasbord. But this I begged them: not to have the wedding too soon after Shabbos, so that at least the pizza will be hot and the Diet Coke cold.

BLAND AND THE BOYS

Linda is the perfect Rebbetzin. Had I been a chef, we would have visited divorce court. I call Linda a “selective anorexic,” who will not eat the foods that I adore. Her bland tastes have fallen into the hell created by a husband who lives by chili pepper and Geschmorte Rindszunge.

Sushi is slimy fish, so we don’t eat Japanese together. Mexican food reeks of cilantro, so we do not venture south of the border. Indian? The odor of cumin is too strong. Thai? Too spicy. German? Ach du lieber! Too rich!

What should I do if my wife refuses ceviche and considers meat loaf haute cuisine? Without her cooperation, who might enjoy sampling my offerings in Greenville, a town so backward that a fancy dinner means pizza?

But, there is a tidbit of good fortune for us. In this ultra-conservative town, we have the mazal of living next door to one of the few gay couples in the county. We simply call them “the boys,” and they will eat anything that I serve and take home the rest. They call me “the food pimp.”

They have their own rating system: how much my creations resemble their goische counterparts: “Ah, the chopped liver might as well be pate de foie. The cholent is better than cassoulet. The apfel schalent surpasses any American apple pie.”

There are, of course, foods so noxious that even the boys refuse them. They will never try pitscha just by looking at it: Viscous, grainy, and that disgusting cow’s foot. Spinach borscht looks like . . . well, you know what it looks like. A gelatinous pickled fish head is just creepy.

I have taught the boys many Jewish words in the process: milchig, pareve, kugel, gefilte fish, matzo balls. They love trying to say words when I invite to dinner: “This kishke is wonderful! The kugel is simply divine!”

One Shabbos I decided to bake a special challah for them. They looked at it, sniffed and announced, “Berches? We thought that only Yekkes ate that! Aren’t you an Ostjude? Next you’ll be feeding us Bohnen-Suppe! What’s wrong with you?”

THE GANGSTA BOCHUR EXTREME MAKEOVER

Have you ever noticed how many no-brainers need an Einstein to figure them out? Let’s not talk about mega-no-brainers like the debacle in Iraq. Instead, let’s talk about a really dumb no-brainer (you’ll pardon the redundancy) on the near-and-dear Jewish home-front:

People have forgotten how to dress their kids – and themselves – when they come to schule.

My peeve transitions to full-blown rant when I go to schule on Shabbos and hear Shmerel squeaking out Ashrai to rehearse for his Bar Mitzvah. Mom and dad sit in their places as Shmerele reluctantly shuffles up to the bimah in grubby tee-shirt, faded jeans below his pupik, and oversized Nikes.

At first, I thought it was just Shmerel’s slack-jawed “why-are-you-bothering-me-this-is-a-waste-of-time” indifference that galled me. Regarding that, the rabbi and his parents should give him a swift dose of attitude adjustment and tell him to straighten up and fly right.

Then I realized that Shmerel’s his hip-hop uniform was as annoying as his attitude. Each Shabbos, Linda has to restrain me from asking his parents why they let the kid out of the house looking like a rapper. That would be too embarrassing and just not nice.

As a guy who always wears a suit to schule and has seen that his kids do the same, I would say, “If he visited church with a friend, you and I know that you would make sure that he dressed appropriately. And I daresay that his church-going friends would already know what to wear to synagogue.”

What else would I say?

I’d say, “My parents insisted that I wear Shabbosdik clothes to schule as a rite of passage when I started first grade of Sunday school. To this day, my regard for the honor of schule and Shabbos derives in large measure from that guidance. I went on to become a rabbi, and when I left the rabbinate, at least it was not due to my attire.”

Wait a minute. I apologize for boasting about my lifelong commitment to the appropriate rabbinical dress-code. Noop. I did go through a period as most rabbis do, of believing that I would bridge the gap between me and my younger congregants by becoming “Rabbi Skippy,” just one of the boys, jeans and work-shirt, even to the office. Wrong. As much as a rabbi’s credibility rises and falls on his menschlichkeit and scholarship, we also weigh it by the dignity with which he presents himself. Thus the words of one of my mentors: “You need not become like them in order to influence them.” Had I only listened to his sage advice sooner.

I recently attended a meeting at which a friend peevedly told me that his rabbi attended a bris in a work-shirt and khakis. Known for his candor, I asked my friend how he responded. “I told him,” he said, “that a rabbi should dress like a rabbi!”
I know. You will say that this rant is just the crankiness of a crabby man on his way to old age. Possibly. But, think about it this way: We buy our kids the most extravagant tallesim and the most ornate zeckelach. Their yarmulkes are works of art and they will receive sterling Kiddush cups that you will proudly display. And guess what? There’s nothing wrong with any of that.

Perhaps we do it as a sign of our conspicuous consumption. But perhaps we also buy, wear, and display religious finery for our kids because we know deep down that they those objects belong to ages; they endure eternally.

In some mystical way, maybe we should start thinking about ourselves as the tallesim that wrap themselves around eternity. How do we embrace eternity when we dress ourselves down in vintage Pig Pen?

We know what to wear when we embrace a Bloody Mary at a cocktail party. Why should it be any worse when we ready ourselves and Shmerel to embrace the Eternal One?

SUNDAY MORNING IN SOLITUDE WITH MY NY TIMES

My hometown in Greenville, South Carolina, still has a few redeeming qualities. Premier among them is a tiny Jewish-style delicatessen, Greenfield’s. I say “Jewish style,” because it serves outstanding bagels imported from New York, but slices ham on the same slicer as the kosher corned beef.

Yet, I enjoy an occasional lox-and-bagel at Greenfield’s on Sunday morning. My only problem: Half of the Jewish community does precisely the same. Had I been a plumber, this would not pose a problem. But I am, after all, Herr Rabbiner, the know-it-all of everything Jewish.

As I try to spend a moment reading my beloved New York Times, I am relentlessly interrupted by the local Yehudim. Uninvited, they pull up a chair and ask penetrating questions that I would have happily answered them on Shabbos – had they only been in schule:

“Rabbi, I’ve always (this in itself is a sign of danger) wanted to know,” one gushy congregant asks, “whether I should put up a tombstone for my baby . . . Fifi my poodle?”

“I’ve only got a moment, Rabbi, but a gentile friend wants me tell him why Jews don’t believe in Jesus instead of going to hell.”

“Is it true that some people think Jews have horns because some fanatics still wear those little black boxes on their heads?”

“Rabbi, if I wear my toupee to schule, do I still have to wear a yarmulke?”

“If they really cared, why can’t the Rabbis change all of the holidays to weekends?”

Alas, no one has yet to ask me “How many rungs were in Jacob’s ladder?” or “How many commandments are in the Ten Commandments?”

Then one Sunday morning I was approached by a youngish woman who whispered in my ear, “Rabbi, Jack and I are getting divorced.”

“How sad,” I tell her.

“Sad?” she smiles seductively. “Not me. Now I have a chance to have an affair with you!”

Without responding yes or no, I finally closed my New York Times and drove down the street to MacDonald’s to have a biscuit and a Coke . . . ah, a mechayeh, uninterrupted.

THE BLOOD-SUGAR CONSPIRACY

Do you have diabetes? If not, are you sure that you’re Jewish? Remember a generation ago? The misery of sterilizing the equipment, watching Mama stab herself with a dull, thick needle, trying to calculate the right injection of insulin, and maintaining a stringent diet.

My mother was meticulous. Not like crabby Mr. Finkelstein who lived next door, the one who hated children and chased them off his property with an outstretched cane. He browbeat his mousy wife into buying him chazerai. He inhaled it with a grunt, as his helpless children watched his blood sugar rise and plummet.

Finally, his son Irving moved in with Papa and Mama to police him. He straightened out his diet, got his medications in order, watched him like a spy, and suffered great abuse.

But, Mr. Finkelstein’s blood sugar remained perilously high. The doctor hadn’t a clue. The children said that everything was under control, each meal measured, and insulin dispensed.

Mr. Finkelstein tolerated only one child. Me. It was probably because we walked to schule together on dark, frigid Chicago mornings, as he would rasp bitterly about his children, his idiot-son Irving, and of course, how “none of my rotten kids go to schule.”

The schule was a cabal of crabby old men griping about their children. Each one had an assignment. Every morning, Mr. Finkelstein’s mission was to put out breakfast for his conspirators. The aroma of brewing coffee was so enticing that we could barely finish Alenu. Always the same menu: sweet-sour herring, kichel rolled in coarse sugar, coffee, and always a l’chayim over a shot of schnapps, hidden under the bimah. Every once in a while, Mr. Finkelstein would surreptitiously pour me a schnapps, so I “wouldn’t be too cold waiting for the bus.”

Aha! A robust breakfast, just like in the Old Country, was the secret to the old man’s rocketing blood sugar: sugar in the herring, the kichel, the coffee, and of course, the daily l’chayim.

I kept our clandestine breakfasts to myself, now being one of the cronies. Off I would trudge to school. But, one day at 9:00 AM a teacher smelled alcohol on my breath. I was hauled off to the principal’s office and my mother summoned.
“What did you do? Is this the son we raised?” my mother barked. I knew that I would be black-and-blue by lunchtime and slashed by her well-honed tongue. An explanation wad demanded. Finally, they tortured the truth out of me about schule, the old men, their secret breakfast, and starting the day with a schnapps.

“And Mr. Finkelstein has this breakfast with you?” My mother smelled the rat.

I got my swift, exacting punishment. But, before we walked in our door, Mama appeared before Irving and ended his quest for the ultimate answer.

The Finkelstein’s held a family meeting. They decided that the old man should no longer go to schule. He was ferocious. Irving would stand guard at the door every morning, and from next door I would hear: “Anti-Semite! I’m going to schule! You are not going to schule! All right, so I won’t eat breakfast! Why should I trust you? Because I’m your father! You’re not my father when you act like a baby!”

Ah, so what became of Irving? Truth be told, his kidneys failed and he went on dialysis at the age of 48. Mr. Finkelstein, though, lived to a crabby 93, a refugee from too much schnapps and too little insulin.

I am certain that when Morris Finkelstein arrived at Heaven’s gate, God was right there waiting for him. Then He hoisted a shot-glass twinkling with schnapps, offered Morris a l’chayim, and welcoming him home.

WHO ATE THE MEATBALLS?

No one will ever be able to convince me otherwise. The manna that rained down from heaven was ground beef. It is the most versatile of all foods:

Hamburgers. Meatloaf. Sausage. Ragout. Meatballs. Spaghetti sauce. Meatballs and beans. Meatballs in cholent. Creamed ground beef on toast.

In our family, ground beef has attained legendary proportions. The story is told of how my Aunt Leah made a pot of meatballs to be served the next evening.

Aunt Leah was a huge woman who, as I remember, snored loudly, suffered from sleep apnea, and slept the sleep of the dead. Her husband, Uncle Izzy, was puny and hyperactive. Most nights he wandered the house, turning the radio on and off, ruffling the newspaper, starting but never finishing the crossword puzzle.

Knowing that Aunt Leah slept deeply, Izzy would occasionally raid the refrigerator. That night, he ate half the pot of meatballs. It wasn’t until Leah came to warm them that she discovered the great escape. She instantly lined up Izzy and the four kids, ready to prosecute with a leather sharpening strop, her favorite weapon of inquisition.

“Who ate the meatballs?!” she demanded.

Silence. Then, one by one, she seethed at the children: “Did YOU eat the meatballs?!” For the first time in their lives, the kids told the truth, “Ma, honest, we didn’t eat the meatballs!”

“And Izzy, what about you?”

”Sweetie, how could I have eaten the meatballs? I’m always sleeping in bed right next to you”

Oh no, that was not the end of the story. Aunt Leah, you see, was a plodding woman. At an occasional Purim party or Pesach Seder, she would announce, “I still can’t figure out who ate the meatballs.”

Years went by. Uncle Izzy lay on his death bed. As the end neared, he beckoned Aunt Leah to draw near. Then he gasped and whispered, “I ate the meatballs.” That was his final breath.

The children cried and hugged, but Aunt Leah smugly announced, “Aha, I knew it all along! The red on the towel wasn’t because he cut himself! It was tomato sauce!”

HEAVEN – A NICE PLACE TO SPEND SOME TIME

A few days ago, I spent five minutes in hell. As I left the doctor’s office, I was accompanied by a pathetic woman struggling to negotiate the few steps outside the building.

Dressed from Salvation Army counters. A two-year-old on one hip. A baby-bag slung over her shoulder. Hugely pregnant. And wincing with such horrific pain each time she stepped forward on her tiptoe that her hair was matted with greasy sweat. I swear that I saw white-hot sparks crackle from the blacktop.

I offered her my arm and asked if I could carry the baby. I brought her to her battered car and asked how I could help. No, there was nothing more I could do.

Please don’t see this as a plea for adulation. I was simply doing what Momma taught me. And I knew that if I didn’t, she would instantly have reached down from heaven and administered an omnipotent frosk, “Let that be a lesson to you!”

Besides, I did not create heaven. I spent five minutes in hell.

Ironic thing about heaven. When we talk about heaven, the conversation is usually so contention and shrill. “Our side will get there. You won’t get there. It’s in this book. No, it’s in that book. Follow him. Follow me. Blah, blah, blah.” In my own times, I have added my own voice to the shrillness, and I dread to say that in moments of weakness, I might do it again.

But, an inner whisper that has lately brought me to unrelentingly bitter tears has given birth to a more calm and measured vision of heaven. It did not come to me as a theological epiphany, so I confess in advance to its doctrinal impurity.

Life batters me, and it batters you. Life can be so damned mean, and for every time we deserve it, ten times the meanness comes by way of people who are greedy, ruthless, and just plain heartless. Sometimes it is so unbearable that it can no longer be numbed by a martini or hope in a heaven that is a contentious and smug place where I get in and you keep out.

To the broken of heart and those who withstand the worst of unbearable meanness, this is the peace and healing that I believe heaven will bring:

Heaven is a place where everyone is nice.

No stiff, fancy doctrine or hoo-hah to obfuscate the basic promise.

“I see you need a job. I’ll take a chance on you. I’ll train you. When can you start?” Nice.

“I see that you’re crying. Would you like a tissue? Would you like to talk? Maybe I can help.” Nice.

“I see that your family has no place to eat. Come, eat and stay with us. Tomorrow we’ll go find someone who can help you get on the right track.” Nice.

“Let me carry that bag. Help you cross the street. Hold open the door. Give you my seat on the bus.” Nice.

“Let me prop you up and help with your baby, walk you to your car. Let me give you at least a moment of heaven before you must descend back to your hell.” Nice.

Heaven is a place where everyone is nice.

Ah, sounds like a heaven we could replicate on earth. Right. Right, were their no insurmountable walls barring a world full of niceness. Not merely the Saddam’s and Hitler’s, but a receptionist who doesn’t offer a wheelchair to someone wincing in pain or a boss who won’t give a kid a chance.

This is precisely why the broken of heart and the spat-upon need keep faith in a heaven boding peaceful, calming niceness. Meanwhile, we who are blessed with the ability would do well to share some of the appetizers of heaven to folks here on earth. Perhaps that will tide them over by the reassurance that there is a good measure of niceness yet to be found among us.

HIGH HOLIDAYS TORTURE TABLES

“Good things come to those who wait.”

So, I waited and waited for 35 years to abdicate the rabbinate. For the first time, I will spend the Yom Tovim with my family, not having to worry about my sermons or whether the chazzan would take too long singing Kol Nidre.

After all those years, I will finally have the time and energy to prepare my own gourmet holiday feasts. Whether they are delicious or not, my family and friends will have to feed my fragile ego by telling me that they were “marvelous,” and once again, I will have to klop an Al Chet for the sin of arrogance.

But how many years did I spend in other people’s dining rooms futilely trying to ingest Yom Tov meals that we would universally declare torturous?

Have any of you had gritty gefilte fish? No, not gritty from too much matzo meal, but gritty because they were riddled with shrapnel of fish bones that the balaboste was either too lazy or too cruel to remove.

While we are on the subject of appetizers, how could I not forget walking with a congregant to his house for lunch on Rosh Hashanah. He prated on and on about his wife’s cooking, every superlative synonym, as if he’d swallowed Roget’s for breakfast.

Nu? You have already figured out the rest of the story, but not the magnitude of its horror. Each place was set with a reddish-brown lump atop the customary leaf of lettuce. After Kiddush and Motzi, the balabos insisted, “Go ahead, try it.”
I tried. And the liver oozed blood. Rare chopped liver. The prospects of chug-a-lugging liver blood and contracting e-coli ran neck-and-neck in my imagination. Then, an atypical stroke of genius: I reached under the table with my fork and stabbed my hands and arms with the tines. Reaching up, I asked the balaboste what kind of oil she used.

“Canola.”

“Canola?” I shrieked. “You can’t imagine how allergic I am to canola,” and displayed the horrible “rash” on my arm. Beware of rare chopped, and keep your fork nearby.

What do you eat before Yom Kippur? Scientists have debated the issue, but none of them has found anything yet to prevent my backache. Beside, isn’t rotten the way we’re supposed to feel on Yom Kippur?

One Erev One Yom Kippur dinner was particularly memorable. To set the backdrop, the hosts had a huge parrot that kept screaming, “Elliot!” throughout the meal. The lady of the house preceded the main course with a chicken soup that shimmered with layer of fat so thick and shiny that women were furtively checking their hairdos in it. Not to be outdone, the turkey was so hairy that it begged fitting as a toupee.

Then there was another Erev Yom Kippur trying to go into the fast on a dinner of Froot Loops Chicken. Someone must have thought that it was the culinary equivalent of A+B=C. Sweet chicken tastes good. Breaded chicken tastes good. Therefore, Froot Loops Chicken must taste good. Maybe in your world. In my world, it’s one of those “funny recipes from kids” on Leno. How about chocolate-dipped herring?

A girlfriend once took me home on Rosh Hashanah to meet the family. The aroma of holiday dinner wafted from her aunt’s kitchen. A beautiful table was set with honey, apples and round challah.

I recited the Kiddush. They were impressed. They presented the appetizer. Hmm. It was too smooth to be gefilte fish. And besides, it was pink. I tentatively tasted it.

“This is delicious,” I said to the host. “What is it?”

“It’s crabmeat salad. It’s our tradition to eat it on the first night of Rosh Hashanah.”

Fortunately, the dog ate it ravenously. Afterward, I asked my girlfriend if there were any other family secrets that I should know about. I made it plain that crabmeat salad even once a year was a deal breaker. Then I told her that if we were to go any further, I would happily dye the gefilte fish pink.