Re’eh
Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17
Isaiah 54:11-55:5
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav taught: Sometimes one person speaks in one corner of the world and another person speaks in a different corner of the world, or one person speaks in one century and another person speaks in a different century, and God, who is above time and space, hears the words of them both and connects them.
I was reminded of this when, not long ago, I read two statements on the same day. The first came from a residence hall at Harvard, and the other from a great teacher of Jewish meditation.
David Slavitt is a well-known poet who teaches at Harvard. He is assigned to eat lunch at Leverett House a couple of times a week. This is how Slavitt describes the way in which the students eat:
“I watch them sitting at the tables in this elegant dining room, earphones to their ears, computers and laptops on the tables, connecting to the Internet, as they shovel fuel into their bodies. They eat this way, not just because they are working under pressure, but because they have learned that this is the way to eat.
“The reason Harvard asks me to be at the residence hall is to try to impart to these students a degree of social poise and an example of how it is possible to combine intellectual pursuits with real life, or how to eat and converse at the same time. Harvard does what it can, but the students, bright as they are, do not respond.”
Our tradition teaches in Pirke Avot: “If people sit at the same table and do not exchange words of Torah, it is as if they are eating offerings to the dead.” I understand the passage to mean that if you only eat and do not talk, you are simply feeding the body, which is mortal, and not the mind.
On the very same day I read Slavitt’s description of the way students eat at Harvard, I also read a paragraph called “Jewish teachings regarding eating” by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. Kaplan was an insightful and prolific writer on Jewish meditation who died 25 years ago.
And this is what he wrote about the act of eating:
“When a person eats, he or she should concentrate totally on the food, clearing the mind of all other thoughts. He or she should keep in mind that the taste of food is an expression of the Divine in the food, and that, by eating it, he or she is incorporating this spark of the Divine into his or her body. This is why it was ordained that a blessing be recited before one begins eating.
“As soon as one has this awareness, the act of eating becomes an act of connecting with the Divine. The act becomes a spiritual event, a contemplative exercise. One opens one’s mind completely to the experience of chewing the food and one becomes filled with the awareness of the taste and texture of the food.”
I am sure that, some of the time, most of us eat more like the college students than how Kaplan teaches us to eat — for we are always in a hurry, even though we are not always sure where we are going in such a rush.
Here is a suggestion: Once in a while, if not at every meal, maybe one or two or three meals a week, do what Kaplan bids us do. Take a slice of bread, or a piece of fruit or a vegetable, and before stuffing it into your mouth, look at it — really look at it — and then let it dissolve slowly in your mouth, savoring it, enjoying every bit of it, realizing what a wondrous thing it is, before swallowing it and going on to the next item on your plate.
Today’s Torah reading contains three words that are part of the blessing we are commanded to recite after eating: “V’achalta v’savata u’veyrachta” — to eat, to feel that we have had enough, and to bless God. The middle word, “v’savata” — which is usually translated as “to have enough”— can also mean “to have a sense of satisfaction.”
My wish: May we eat well — very well. May we take the time to look at and to taste and to savor the food that we eat. And then may we bless God for the gift of the food.
Rabbi Larry Raphael is the senior rabbi of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco.