Aaron S. Gross - Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food

Edited by Aaron S. Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum

With a Foreword by Hasia R. Diner and an Afterword by Jonathan Safran Foer

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

A previous, modified version of Chapter 15 was published as Loving the Stranger and the Fall of Agriprocessors in Jewish Ethics in a Post-Madoff World, by Moses Pava, published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan. Reproduced with permission of SNCSC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gross, Aaron S., editor. | Myers, Jody Elizabeth, 1954 editor. | Rosenblum, Jordan, 1979 editor.

Title: Feasting and fasting : the history and ethics of Jewish food / with a foreword by Hasia R. Diner and an afterword by Jonathan Safran Foer ; edited by Aaron S. Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019015755 | ISBN 9781479899333 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479827794 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: JewsFoodHistory. | Jewish cookingHistory. | Jewish ethics.

Classification: LCC TX724 .F3715 2019 | DDC 641.5/676dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015755

To the Jewish Community

Hasia R. Diner

Aaron S. Gross

Jody Myers

Elaine Adler Goodfriend

David C. Kraemer

Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus

Jody Myers

Jordan D. Rosenblum

Jordan D. Rosenblum

David M. Freidenreich

Susan Marks

Rachel B. Gross

Zev Eleff

Katalin Franciska Rac

Aaron S. Gross

Jennifer A. Thompson

Adrienne Krone

Daniel H. Weiss

Elliot Ratzman

Moses Pava

Jonathan K. Crane

Aaron S. Gross

Jonathan Safran Foer

HASIA R. DINER

Food matters. Without it, pure and simple, there can be no life. Because it matters so profoundly, it informs human behavior and concern about itincluding the material details of getting it, preparing it, and consuming itinfuses every aspect of all human cultures. Food provides a, or possibly the, key to understanding each and every social and cultural system that ever existed across time and place.

Wherever human beings lived, they concerned themselves first and foremost with food. Their societies took their shape around the tasks of satisfying peoples daily needs for something to sustain their bodies, whether by hunting and gathering, fishing, farming, or laboring to purchase the food they needed. Wherever human beings have lived, they fretted over the innumerable physical and material matters of eating, concerning themselves with ingredients, modes of cooking, and decisions as to who got to eat what, when, and with whom. Their pots and pans, cutlery and plates, meal formats, and so many more minutiae of the day-in and day-out aspects of their food worlds defined them. All human beings worry about food, consume it as they must, and build their daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly calendars around it.

All of human history can be considered in light of how changes in technology, in the environment, and in lived economic relationships impacted the human-food equation. Did these changesmigrations, wars, the enclosure movement, industrialization, and on and onprovide women and men with more and different foods, or did these events jeopardize their chances of getting enough to eat? Droughts and insect infestations, floods and earthquakes made access to food difficult, if not impossible. How did such historic happenings complicate and leave their marks on the ways women and men in a particular place at a specific time literally got their daily bread?

Foods influence, though, extends far beyond the mundane and material. All human beings also make sense of themselves through the foods they eat and do not eat. They all do so differently but do so nonetheless. Food defines the boundaries of the group at the same time that it serves as a bridge between people, often individuals thrown together through circumstances beyond their control. Whether boundary making or bridge building, food historically went hand in hand with transformative shifts in peoples lives and with their quest for order and identity.

Not surprisingly then, food has always existed in the realm of the religious, rendering forks and plates, spoons and tables, fruits and vegetables, meat and fish, feasting and fasting as not just ordinary items and acts but props in a vast, sacred drama. Food and religionall religionscannot be disassociated from each other. Since food constitutes the core of life and religion seeks to imbue meaning to life, a deep and inextricable bond must bind what we humans eat with our understanding and engagement with the sacred.

Women and men have variously sacrificed food, prayed to it for rain and dew to ensure an ample harvest, and defined some foods as inedible and as an affront and other foods as worthy of blessing. The connection between food and religion, performed everywhere and at all times, involved such matters as thanking their god or otherwise displaying gratitude for the food about to be consumed, eating or abstaining from special foods at holy times, or symbolically breaking bread with other members of their community under the shelter of their many sacred canopies (to borrow a phrase from religious studies scholar Peter Berger).

The twined relationship between food and religion surely deserves study, and no relationship can be said to be more important, richer, or more complicated. The range of these different relationships and the similarities between them lurking under the surface can give scholars of religion and scholars of food much to think about together.

The subject of food andor inJewish traditions provides one such place to stop and think together about food as an engine that propelled the Jews through history. Indeed, scholars of food claim that the deep and complex history of Jewish food served as the springboard for nothing less than the creation of cultural anthropology. Both Mary Douglas and Marvin Harris, pioneers in this field of study, began their academic work by trying to parse out the cultural origins of kashrut, the biblical and Jewish dietary laws that segmented the universe into the pure and polluted, the edible and the inedible. These anthropologists sought to understand how these laws began and how Jews dealt with transgressions of the sacred binary of kosher and treif.

Wherever Jews lived, on whatever continent and in whatever era since ancient times, food defined them. As a people who entered the world with a compendium of sacred texts, the Hebrew Bible and its authoritative interpretations and then the Talmud with its multiple subsequent commentaries and responses to questions, they recognized at a visceral level the importance of food, a topic that never strayed far from their minds.

The first of these works, the Hebrew Bible, known to rabbinic tradition as the written law, might be read as a long origins story that went from food story to food episode as it described how the Jews forebears concerned themselves with eating, sacrificing, and dividing the world into the edible and the forbidden. The later rabbinic compilation of the Mishnah and the Gemara, what they called the oral law, provided intricate and exquisite detail as to how Jews should actually conduct their lives and structure their communities in relationship to food. Later works by rabbis and other commentators devoted much time and energy to the task of further elucidating food matters.