HIGHLAND PARK, N.J. — Planting and harvesting are key components to the Jewish holidays. Yet when was the last time most Jews grew parsley to dip in Passover saltwater or planted flowers for the Shabbat table?
“The Jewish Gardening Cookbook” guides readers to venture back to biblical times and use what they grow for Jewish holidays.
“Jewish Gardening” is not just a cookbook; recipes are actually just a small fraction of it.
Author Michael Brown, who lives in Kendall Park, N.J., offers hints for planting and cultivating plants, fruits and vegetables for particular holidays and lifecycle events. At the end of each section, he provides vegetarian recipes, from fig jam to his wife’s Shabbat specialty from India — peas with rice. He also includes Torah quotations, folk songs and poems as well as other writings that associate Jewish life with gardening.
Brown, a middle school librarian, said recently one of his main goals was to create a “gardening book that has things to do with what you grow…It is primarily a book that is a tool to relate gardening to Judaism.”
During research for the book, Brown took his questions about Jewish law to Rabbi David Eligberg of Conservative Congregation B’nai Tikvah in North Brunswick, N.J.
Eligberg describes the book as a special “combination of a little cooking, a little history and a little bit of Israel.”
According to Brown, one does not necessarily need to have a yard to have a garden. Potted plants are easy to maintain and take up less space, he said, and a garden can grow in the corner of one’s living room or on window sills.
Brown himself has a fig tree and a lemon tree growing inside his home.
One major influence on the book was the 10 years that Brown lived in Israel. While there, he began to associate feelings and memories with the smells and images of the Holy Land. Thus, another facet of his book was bringing “back images from Israel to New Jersey.”
“Jewish Gardening” encourages growing what Brown refers to as a “Jewish garden.”
“You can call this ‘hands-on-Judaism’ — growing something with your own hands, watching it grow and develop, flower and fruit,” Brown writes in the book’s introduction. “With our Jewish garden, the year takes on a whole new meaning. Instead of living in our world, dominated as it is by the secular calendar, we can begin to see a rhythm develop within the Jewish year as it revolves around our Jewish garden.”
Expanding on that idea, he encourages families to create biblical gardens with their children.
“For many children, the Bible is a distant, somewhat abstract text,” Brown writes in a section titled “A Bible Garden for You and Your Children.”
“They hear the Torah read in temple. If they attend Hebrew school, they will probably learn some Bible stories. Generally, however, it has little impact on their lives. Competing as it does with schoolwork, TV, Nintendo and other activities, the Bible is given little time and thought.”
Planting a Bible garden can make the stories come alive, he asserts.
“You can obtain a list of Bible plants from a number of sources…Once you have a list, a Bible concordance will give you the relevant passage where it appears in the Bible. Read these over as a family to see which ones particularly interest you. With your children, draw connections between the plant as they see it today and how it was used thousands of years ago.”
Brown asserts that learning a bit of history and tradition while working with family members in the garden is extremely valuable.
“It is not just the simple act of a parent going out to work on a garden with a child, ” Brown said. It is also the incorporation of an “added Jewish aspect.”
Homegrown corn, for example, can be used in many ways for Sukkot. Brown’s family places bunches of corn at the corners of the Sukkah, uses it as sekhakh (roof covering) and eats it.
Though some black thumbs fear venturing into new territory, Brown said the book isn’t simply for avid gardeners. He also hopes to reach anyone “who wants to explore their Jewish observance and take it in an additional direction.”