What is it about Jews and food? Why are we always eating?
For many of us, the last crumbs from the leftover Purim hamantaschen were wiped away not long ago, and the kitchen and pantry are now colonized by shopping bags of Pesach food.
Having a preschooler has brought home to me how much our experience of Judaism revolves around food. My daughter and her classmates taste apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, fry latkes for Chanukah, bake hamantaschen for Purim and roll out matzah dough and chop nut-free haroset for Pesach.
We Jews certainly are not the only people to have distinctive food-based folkways that tie into our religious and cultural traditions, but we do have a curiously strong relationship with food. Food communicates our spiritual and emotional states, it mediates our experiences of family and tradition, it becomes a vehicle for the creation of memory and meaning.
It’s significant that our religious calendar includes six yearly fast days through which we express our desire for repentance and cleansing and/or our grief over historical tragedies like the destruction of the ancient Temple. Even when we’re not eating, we’re using food (or the deliberate absence of food) to express ourselves.
All of which provides an interesting backdrop for the release of a community study by the Jewish Education Project (“Engaging Today’s Families: Parent Research Findings,” January 2013) focusing on first-time mothers of young children. For the study, researchers conducted focus groups with mothers in the New York metro area who had children younger than 2 and who did not have formal connections to organized Judaism. Not surprisingly, the study found that most of the mothers interviewed were ambivalent about participating in Jewish life. They yearned for connection and community, but were wary of settings in which their lack of Jewish knowledge might become apparent.
What was significant for me was the researchers’ finding that these women’s “interest in a new Jewish opportunity mainly revolves around connection, community and cooking.” Some of the mothers interviewed longed for communities in which young mothers would pool cooking resources to help each other at busy or stressful times, like at the birth of a child.
It doesn’t take much analysis to figure out that what Jews like these are looking for goes much deeper than the stress of figuring out what they are going to serve their families for dinner on a particular night. It’s not a support group or a carpool that these young mothers want, it’s the kind of nurturing that’s served with a ladle and shared around a table.
Of course, Passover is the quintessential holiday for making connections through food. Many Jews, even those who have little other connection with the Jewish community, look forward to enjoying family favorites on Pesach, the smells and tastes of brisket and matzah ball soup evoking feelings of connection and tradition. At the same time, many view Pesach preparations with fear and trembling, trying to keep track of the multitudinous rules and regulations: What foods are OK to eat? What dishes and utensils am I supposed to use? Can I eat rice? What if I can’t have gluten or eggs or nuts?
For all of these reasons, Pesach presents a unique opportunity for Jewish organizations to reach out to Jews at all levels of affiliation, using food as a valuable means of connection.
Many synagogues and schools host communal seders or invite families to matzah-factory events, but how many organizations truly put into practice the haggadah’s inclusive call and reach out beyond their mailing lists to involve Jews in the wider community who are hungry for friendship and for a sense of belonging? How many synagogues strive to guide the perplexed in making sense of Pesach’s tricky kashrut rules, and how many just announce that the rabbi is willing to sell your hametz for you? How many organizations confuse being “welcoming” with having an overly child-centered educational approach, losing the opportunity to introduce loosely engaged Jews to the richness and depth of Jewish tradition?
Inviting families to bake matzah or make haroset is a great place to start, but Jewish organizations shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that adults can go beyond the basic mechanics and facts to engage with the deeper meanings of Pesach food traditions, the ways in which the foods we eat on Pesach challenge us to grapple with the themes of slavery and redemption that run throughout Jewish history and reverberate within our own lives.
Love Pesach food or loathe it, matzah is here for a few more days. Let’s make sure that our institutions reach out on this holiday — and on all days — to help Jews nourish each other, body and soul.
Rabbi Cara Weinstein Rosenthal is the PJ Library coordinator for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, helping synagogues reach out to include young families. This piece originally appeared at eJewishPhilanthropy.org.