Skip to main content

Rewriting broccoli, and my raspberries sister

I wrote an article about kosher broccoli a couple of months ago.  Not really kosher broccoli:  where the kosher broccoli went, because you can’t order it in any restaurants here anymore.

This is broccoli as synecdoche:  one object which represents the class of artichokes, raspberries, dill and every other veggie/fruit that is now trayfe here due to the difficulty and infeasibility of checking carefully enough.

Except, of course, that I really like broccoli itself, not just as a symbol.  Nothing is quite like broccoli in a stir-fry.  I eat it now perhaps because it represents an entire underdog underclass. 

For a while after my father died of cancer of the gastroesophageal junction, broccoli became important to me, subconsciously, as a super-anti-cancer vegetable.  But now, it’s more for the fact that I believe we can, and therefore, that we should.  Nobody should grow up believing broccoli means bland, greenish stems alone.

We wash it well, we rinse it well, we check every single piece.  Truthfully, I rarely spot anything living (except the organic one we bought once by accident!).  If we do, we get rid of it.  I cut off lots of spots that are probably not alive, just in case.  We eat it steamed, in salads, in soups.

So the article.  It’s good, we all agree, but my editor wanted a “strong opposing viewpoint” (which is just plain good journalism).

And there just aren’t any.  Because this is a one-hechsher town, and nobody wants to get on their bad side.   The party line is, “don’t eat bugs,” check carefully, wash well, can’t have them in restaurants.

What rabbi wants to be seen as saying, “eat bugs???”  You’re just NOT going to get a bloodbath over this issue, even though many people (including me) feel strongly about it.

But I did get one rabbi to speak to me intelligently on the issue and say he welcomes debate; he can see how people might disagree with the town’s one hechsher. 

But that’s not important, because what he also said was that I could probably eat raspberries from my garden, which often have bugs, as long as I check them reasonably well.  (I open them up in bright sunlight; if I see bugs, I toss ‘em.)

He mentioned – I like this – that the fact that I grew them myself has halachic significance. 

A farmer (even a dumb clueless urban farmer) is invested; she has more to lose than just the (low) value of a single raspberry.  You love your raspberries because you grew them yourself … I like hearing that this has halachic validity. 

This makes me feel happy about Judaism in a way I haven’t in a while.

He mentioned, for example, that a vegetarian, or a person who cares very deeply about organic or healthy foods, might perhaps find a leniency in buying certain health-food store products, even though they don’t have a “real” hechsher.  Because they’re invested, the same way I am in my raspberries. 

A real rav understands how you feel about your raspberries.

One year, my ex-husband approached a very (some might say very very VERY) chashuva (important) rabbi here in town, just before Pesach, and told him my sister was a vegetarian.  She was not at ALL observant, she was probably 16 years old, in the middle of running away from home, from life, from our family, to goodness knows what.

That rav didn’t know her, but could maybe guess that my sister had piercings and strange hair and strange friends and that still, we loved her, like my buggy backyard raspberries.  We’d grown her, we loved her… we knew she’d turn out delicious.

He said she could eat kitniyos – soy and beans and rice and corn and whatever it took to get her through Pesach.

He took the question seriously, knowing perhaps that even she wasn’t taking her Judaism very seriously, because she was precious to us, and in that moment, her soul was precious to him as well. 

For a rav of this importance to issue a heter is not a small thing; he is taking responsibility for her spiritual well-being onto his own shoulders.  He was taking her seriously at a time when maybe she was not.

She was our raspberries.

I love being reminded of why I love this religion.  Of why I love halacha.  Of how it takes my breath away sometimes, how simple and beautiful the whole thing really can be.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You,...

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful....

What do we tell our kids about Chabad and “Yechi”?

If I start by saying I really like Chabad, and adore the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, z"l, well... maybe you already know where I'm headed. Naomi Rivka has been asking lately what I think about Chabad.  She asks, in part, because she already knows how I feel.  She already knows I’m bothered, though to her, it’s mostly about “liking” and “not liking.”  I wish things were that simple. Our little neighbourhood in Israel has a significant Chabad presence, and Chabad conducts fairly significant outreach within the community.  Which sounds nice until you realize that this is a religious neighbourhood, closed on Shabbos, where some huge percentage of people are shomer mitzvos.  Sure, it’s mostly religious Zionist, and there are a range of observances, for sure, but we’re pretty much all religious here in some way or another. So at that point, this isn’t outreach but inreach .  Convincing people who are religious to be… what? A lot of Chabad’s efforts here are focused o...