Re’eh
Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17
Isaiah 54:11-55:5
A few years ago I read two statements on the same day. One came from a residence hall at Harvard, and the other came from a teacher of Jewish meditation. Together they form a commentary on a passage in this week’s Torah reading.
First, the story from Harvard: It comes from David Slavitt, a well-known poet who teaches there. Slavitt says that he was assigned to eat lunch at Leverett House at Harvard a couple of times a week. This is how Slavitt describes the way in which they eat:
“I watch them sitting at the tables in this elegant dining room, earphones to their ears, computers and laptops on the tables, a WiFi connection providing them with access 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.
“Two-income families don’t dine together very much anymore, and when they do, they have no time to talk. The family meal was something civilizing, enlarging, enlightening. But it has been virtually abandoned in the frantic effort of upwardly mobile people to succeed, to do well, and thereby, maybe even get their kids into Harvard!”
Our tradition teaches something very different from this scene. In Pirke Avot it says: “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.” If you only eat and do not talk, you are simply feeding the body and not the mind.
On the same day that I read David Slavitt’s description of dining at Harvard, Rabbi Jack Riemer directed me to “Jewish Teachings Regarding Eating” by the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. Kaplan was an insightful and prolific writer on Jewish meditation who passed away some years ago. This is what he wrote:
“When a person eats, he or she should concentrate totally on the food and on the experience of eating it, clearing the mind of all other thoughts. He or she should keep in mind that that by eating, he or she is incorporating a spark of the Divine into his or her body. This is why it was ordained that a blessing be recited before one begins eating.
“The blessing that we say over food is phrased in the present tense. ‘Ha-motzi lechem mein haaretz — who brings bread forth from the earth,’ not ‘who brought bread forth from the earth,’ in order to indicate that God’s creative power is in this bread that is in front of us right now.
“The act of eating can become an act of connecting with the Divine. The act becomes a spiritual event, a contemplative exercise. If you open your mind completely to the experience of chewing the food you become filled with the awareness of the taste and texture of the food.”
Put these two statements side by side, and you have the difference between two worlds. One talks about the human price college students pay for living at such a frantic pace. The other talks about how the act of eating can be a spiritual event, about how it can not only satisfy the body but how it can also elevate the soul.
My suggestion to each one of us is at least once in a while, do what Aryeh Kaplan bids us do. This week’s Torah reading says the words that we are commanded to recite after eating: “V’achalta visavata uveyrachta” — to eat, to feel that we have had enough and to bless God. The middle word, “visavata,” can mean “to have a sense of satisfaction”; you can’t have that sense of fulfillment when you eat hastily.
May we each 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 and for the guidance that the Torah gives us on how to eat.
Rabbi Larry Raphael is the senior rabbi of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco.