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I roll up to the Gourmet Ghetto post office in my ’88 Volkswagen Vanagon to send my friend the tickets to Burning Man I can no longer use because the dates interfere with my body-focused, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy training. At that moment, I spot Alice Waters, the famed chef, author and restaurateur who helped galvanize California cuisine and the farm-to-table movement.

I am having what we call a very Berkeley moment. 

Waters stands outside of her famed Chez Panisse receiving a delivery of new linens for the weekend. Beans, summer squash, tomatoes, melons, pluots and wild king salmon — a sliver of an entire ecosystem of flavors, farmers, purveyors and supply chains that Waters helped will into existence — soon will show up at her door too, just like they have before lunch and dinner service for the last five decades.

The closest I have come to eating there myself is having put almost every book Waters has written on hold at the North Berkeley branch of the public library. My daughter incurred her first late fees at the library when she refused to return “Fanny at Chez Panisse,” the story of the restaurant’s history through the eyes of Waters’ daughter. I got my wife Waters’ Masterclass cooking series for Hanukkah. 

Even as a rather unorthodox Orthodox rabbi, the way my family and I keep kosher means that I live just a few blocks from one of the most influential restaurants in the world, yet choose not to eat there. In the language of the Zohar, the central work of Jewish mystical literature, we are “touching, yet not touching.”

I walk by often and stop to peruse the menus hanging from the sign outside Chez, mostly to stay inspired for my own home cooking. Greens cappelletti and lemon verbena profiterole? Yes and yes. But I also like to marvel from afar at a person who created something over 50 years ago and still shows up to receive the tablecloths. 

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov tells a mythic parable about a gushing wellspring at the top of a mountain and the very “Heart of the Earth” on the other side of the world.

Nachman writes that this heart “remains in its place far at the other end of the Earth, but it is filled with an unutterable longing, it burns with an endless desire for the distant fountain of water.” Because of its tenderness, this heart cannot stop its urge to reach the wellspring, but neither can it endure the harshness of the journey to get there.

All of existence, Nachman teaches, depends on this great yearning, and the work of the Jew in this world is to watch over and renew this sometimes beautiful and sometimes brutal dance between what is and what can never be.

My spouse and I frame the choices of our Jewish observance in this way: My son would love to go to the Old Car Picnic in San Francisco on Saturday, but it is Shabbos and we don’t drive. We could really only afford to buy a house west of San Pablo or in Albany, but we value the possibilities of living within Berkeley’s eruv. We would lick clean the plates of Waters’ grilled breast and confit leg of Sonoma County duck with roasted Black Mission figs, haricots verts, Tokyo turnips and Jimmy Nardello peppers, but the restaurant, sadly, is not kosher.

But what can we do? We are in a loving relationship with our Divine Parent. We feel the heart’s unrequited love for the wellspring. This creates a tension, yet that tension can lead us to meaningful and textured alternatives to the initial object of desire. 

When I approach Waters, who is diminutive compared with the tall, bearded Jew now in front of her, she graciously accepts my extended hand and holds it with hers. Like a Hasid getting a brief moment of yechidus (private audience) with a rebbe, I share my longtime love affair with her work and the heart/wellspring conundrum I find myself in. 

She replies that the food is organic, “better than kosher.” I allow for her gentle rebuke — she’s earned it. And I tell her that her work and influence — coming from a woman whose name is literally “Waters” — have flowed into our hearts nonetheless. 

On most Shabbos mornings before or sometimes instead of going to shul, my kids play in the Edible Schoolyard she helped found at MLK Middle School. We delight in our Berkeley Bowl trips like sacred pilgrimages, saying Shehechiyanu on locally grown fruits in their season — the Masumoto peaches and River Dog Farms sweet baby melons in the summer and the tiny kishu mandarins in January. We set the table with care, and we eat together every night. To our kids, so much of her philosophy is simply the way our Jewish family lives in and cares about this world of earthly delights. 

Before we part, I tell Alice that it feels impossible to imagine ever leaving Berkeley, even with all of the challenges. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a map of every Edible Schoolyard around the planet. Like a Chabad emissary eager to help me find a Shabbos dinner in a faraway land, she smiles and tells me, “We’re everywhere.”