Dec

6

2024

This week, we welcome Jonathan Guyer in his new role as interim editor at Jewish Currents.

Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): As the days get shorter and there are more occasions for family meals, I often find myself reaching for Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. Home cooks may already know this 2001 winner of the James Beard Award as an absolute classic. But it’s much more than a dizzying array of Ashkenazi and Sephardi recipes. The cookbook doubles as one of the most in-depth studies of diaspora in general and Jewish life in particular.

Roden opens with an essay in which she explores the drama of exile and her personal pangs of nostalgia. “My own world disappeared forty years ago, but has remained powerful in my imagination,” Roden reflects. “When you are cut off from your past, that past takes a stronger hold on you.” She describes scenes from Jewish Cairo and connects her community to a “mosaic of other minorities” in the Egyptian capital, as well as across the Mediterranean and into Europe, to other Jewish families around the world. In short essays between recipes, she shares her discoveries from dinner tables in cozy homes, academic conferences, and over street fare about what makes Jewish food Jewish, in the process telling the story of how Jewish communities scattered from “Babylon to New York.” Such a broad project may seem impossible, but it is a delicious accomplishment.

Indeed, beyond telling a story of Jews through Jewish food, Roden’s work is an outstanding cookbook. Some of my favorite recipes are the chicken sofrito, a tender stew that Roden’s mother made for Shabbat dinner, and kofta bil karaz, the distinctive Syrian meatball in sour cherry sauce. (“The Jewish fondness for meatballs is legendary.”) There are helpful guides to deep-fried Roman artichokes and Austro-Hungarian blintzes, and plenty of ideas for your Hanukkah table.

Though Roden’s Cairo Jewish community has long since dwindled, with members exiled throughout the world, its dishes, like those detailed throughout the book, are “very much alive and full of movement.”

Maya Rosen (Israel/Palestine fellow): I recently reread Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave living in Ohio whose life is taken over by the specter of a daughter she had killed 18 years earlier to avoid having her returned to slavery. The book is a literary masterpiece; indeed, I hesitated to write about it here because who am I to “recommend” the Pulitzer-winning work of a Nobel laureate, easily one of the greatest American novels of all time?

If I’m writing this nonetheless, it is because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Beloved since I read it. I found the novel breathtaking—not just idiomatically but also in the more literal sense that its descriptions of slavery’s physical, sexual, and psychological violence often made it hard to read and breathe at the same time. This was true in an early scene when Paul D, who had been enslaved with Sethe and who turns up at her doorstep at the start of the novel, recalls a moment back at the plantation nearly two decades prior. Just before being sent to a labor camp in Georgia, Paul D saw his friend Sixo burned alive by the slave masters. Soon after, while awaiting transit to the camp, he also witnessed Halle, Sethe’s husband, lose his mind immediately after seeing Sethe being sexually assaulted by the slave master’s nephews. Watching these atrocities, Paul D was unable to even cry out in horror because an iron bit had been forced into his mouth. He recounts to Sethe that the worst part of it all, however, was seeing a rooster they called Mister in the yard at that moment. “Mister, he looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher,” he explained. “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead.”

Reading Paul D’s words, I couldn’t help but shudder at the eerily familiar account of a world where chickens have more rights than people. Despite the obvious and important differences between the contexts, I immediately thought of Umm al-Khair, a Bedouin village in the Masafer Yatta region of the southern West Bank which is now surrounded by the Israeli settlement of Carmel on one side, and Carmel’s chicken coops on the other. As Ali Awad and Awdah Hathaleen, two close friends of mine from Masafer Yatta, have pointed out, Carmel’s chickens, too, “get rights that we as Palestinians are deliberately denied,” including ample electricity (the wires go directly from Carmel to the chicken coops, skipping over Umm al-Khair), unlimited water, and stable shelter not faced with demolitions.

Beloved is a story about the reverberating toll that this kind of dehumanization exacts, not just in the present but for generations to come. The longevity of such suffering is brought to the novel’s fore through the haunting presence of Beloved, the young woman who appears at Sethe’s home and who, it slowly becomes apparent, is a manifested form of the child who had died by Sethe’s hand years ago. Beloved’s return, however, does not function as a reconciliation; rather, it resurfaces past traumas and drives the family to calamity. While speculating on whether Beloved is in fact the returned daughter, a local woman remarks, “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” Or as Beloved herself states, “It is hard to make yourself die forever.” As I read these words, I thought again of the present: of the overwhelming death of the past 14 months, and the unknowable ways in which those who have been murdered will refuse to stay in the ground—the calamities that yet await even after the horrors of this moment.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is a work of such moral complexity—and concerned with so many issues, both timely and eternal—that watching it is almost physically exhausting. Its making was also an act of enormous courage in itself: Before he began production, Rasoulof had already been twice condemned by Iran’s Revolutionary Courts for his films’ unflattering portrait of the nation; this new movie, which won the special jury prize at Cannes, earned him a sentence of eight years in prison and flogging. (Happily, he was able to flee the country before the punishment could be imposed.)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the massive, widespread demonstrations of mainly young people—and particularly young women—against Iran’s theocratic regime in late 2022 and early 2023, and includes actual footage from participants showing police and Revolutionary Guard violence against the demonstrators. But the film is a fictional thriller that revolves around Iman, a man recently promoted to the role of investigator for the Revolutionary Courts, who is immediately presented with a moral dilemma. He has just been ordered to sign off on a death sentence ordered for a defendant whose case is less than clear to him. Should he simply affirm the sentence as commanded—and secure his own advancement and his family’s safety and stability—or refuse and risk it all? He seems to be a good man, but the poison of the regime he supports has entered his system.

The film focuses not only on Iman, but also on his loved ones. His devoted and utterly submissive wife Najmeh supports him and deals with their two teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana, who, though not particularly political themselves, nevertheless support the demonstrators’ demand for the ability to show their hair without being killed for it—and for a freer country. Iman’s job is so dangerous that he is given a gun to protect himself against opponents of the regime and his deadly role in it; when the pistol disappears, the suspicion and distrust that suffuse Iranian society writ large invade this once-loving family. As the repression, the interrogations, the unjust imprisonments all work their way into the household, Iman’s wife and daughters begin to realize that he is not the man they once knew.

There were many opponents of the mullahs who thought the demonstrations shown in the film signaled the end of the regime. But if The Seed of the Sacred Fig ends on a hopeful note, with videos of women tearing off and burning their headscarves, the filmmaker’s fate gives little cause for any enduring optimism.

Readers of this week’s Torah portion, Vayetzei, will be forgiven if they experience some déjà vu. Just two weeks ago, we read about a man arriving at a well from far away, encountering a young woman, and a betrothal that ensued. Now, a generation later, the scene plays out again, with some variations: Rebecca’s son, Jacob, returns to his mother’s land, following instructions from his father at the end of last week’s portion to seek a bride “from among the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother.” Jacob, encountering some shepherds at the well, inquires about his relative, and is told that Laban’s daughter Rachel is on her way with her sheep. When she arrives, Jacob effortlessly rolls the large stone from the mouth of the well and waters her flock. Then, the Torah tells us, “Jacob kissed Rachel, and he raised his voice and wept.”

Many commentaries take pains to emphasize that this was a chaste kiss, not on Rachel’s lips but elsewhere—perhaps on her forehead or shoulder. It was a cousinly kiss, not an erotic one. Some interpreters add that the nature of the kiss explains why Jacob cried: either because he heard the shepherds’ whispered accusations of lewdness and their aspersions pained him, or because his kiss was an expression of emotion upon meeting a relative in this faraway place. The Zohar, by contrast, explains that Jacob shed tears because his love for Rachel—who would eventually become his wife—was so deep that it hurt: “His spirit so adhered to her that his heart could not bear it, and he wept.” The Zohar, moreover, compares Jacob’s kiss to the kiss requested by the lover at the outset of the Song of Songs: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” Wine, the Zohar emphasizes, is associated with joy. But the kiss of true love is “better than wine,” and thus linked to something beyond ordinary happiness: It is bound up with the breath of life itself, whose profundity finds full expression not in words but in tears.

In the Zohar, biblical characters function both as figures in their own right and as avatars for facets of God’s refracted revelation within the cosmos. Jacob, Kabbalistic texts teach us, is associated with divine compassion, while Rachel is associated with the Shekhinah, the immanent presence of God that descends into the material world. Thus, the verse about Jacob kissing Rachel becomes an account of God’s compassionate love for the facet of the deity’s own being that descends into earthly reality, thereby becoming alienated even from its own self. Jacob’s kiss, then, represents a divine reunion, in which God’s love for the Shekhinah manifests in the place of alienation.

The Hasidic masters teach that each of us are minute embodiments of the alienated Shekhinah. Each of us experiences our own share of cosmic alienation and suffering. Each of us, likewise, has the capacity to open up our own emotions and tap into the experience of God’s infinite love and compassion, encompassing not only our own personal suffering but the cosmic suffering of the Shekhinah.

In this sense, we can share in God’s tears. But as Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812)—the Hasidic master who founded Chabad—teaches, we can also move from acute compassion to a reunion with God that is enacted practically, through thought, speech, and action, rather than only on an emotional or spiritual level. Participation in the mystical kiss of Jacob and Rachel, in “the adherence of spirit to spirit,” Rabbi Shneur Zalman explains, is synonymous with “the adherence of one’s speech to God’s speech, which is halacha, and likewise the adherence of one’s thoughts to God’s thoughts.” He adds that each person can also participate in a bodily “embrace of God” through binding “one’s actions to God’s actions, which is the performance of the mitzvot, especially acts of justice and kindness.” Spirited feelings, in other words, must be channeled into the kinds of embodied practices that reunite this fallen world with the singular radiance of God.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.