Spirit and Story Archive
Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!
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Gardens and Blessings: Digging in the Dirt
By Janet R. Kirchheimer
I’ve been thinking about brachot (blessings), the brachot said before eating food. To be honest, I’ve never been very consistent about saying them, but that’s been changing. My father has taught me to be a gardener.
Needless to say, it’s given me another perspective on food and how it gets from the ground to the table. I grew up in Connecticut and now live in New York City. Living here, it’s become easy to think that vegetables come from Fairway or Food Emporium, and that they really grow with that shiny spray stuff on them.
I’ve never been a nature girl and wanted nothing to do with my father’s garden for many years. But that changed as I became interested about two years ago. My father welcomed me into his garden. He taught me how to smell the soil to see if it is good, how squash should be planted close together in a circle and then thinned out, how cucumbers need to be planted near a fence because their tendrils need to climb, and that parsley can last until January or February if it’s covered at night when the frost hits. We worried about what would happen if there was no rain or too much rain. Many times, we were in the garden urging the plants to grow or just sitting on the lawn, watching, and talking about how each plant was doing.
My father taught me that I had to get my hands in the dirt. He said if I wore gloves I wouldn’t be able to feel it. He taught me to feel the connection between the earth and me. It took time to get used to that. I was constantly on the lookout for worms, snakes, and bugs, but once I got over that fear, I couldn’t wait to wake up early in the morning, go to the garden and see what had happened the previous night.
When I was back in New York, I would call home and my father and I would discuss the garden. Even when I wasn’t there, the garden was present in my life.
My father showed me how to hill and weed the plants as they were growing, and I began to feel like a kid again, covered from head to toe in dirt. I began to re-connect to those experiences of seeing things for the first time. My heart jumped when I saw the seeds push their way up through the soil. I ran screaming into the house when we began harvesting the plants to show my mother the first bunch of carrots, the first tomatoes, and ears of corn. I began to understand why my father was always in his garden, and I wanted to be there, too. I enjoyed being in the dirt. If there wasn’t something to be hilled, weeded or planted, I was disappointed.
Before becoming a gardener, when I would recite a bracha over food, it didn’t contain much meaning for me. I could recite the blessing in the morning: “Blessed are you, Sovereign of the Universe, who dresses the naked” because I knit and know the amount of work that goes into making a garment, and as I would put on my clothes, I could relate to the seriousness and intention of this blessing. I don’t want to recite a blessing in vain, and I think the fact that I couldn’t connect to an experience made it hard for me to consistently recite the brachot over food.
And the garden got me thinking about figure 8’s. The more I gardened, the more I saw and felt the growing process, the more I saw how brachot are related to experience, and how experience is related to brachot and how they are truly inseparable. I understood how brachot and experience constantly flow back and forth into and out of each other. I think that’s probably what the rabbis had in mind when they created brachot.
My experience with brachot has been enriched because I made the connection that the rabbis were trying to teach. I don’t mean to say that one must have a deep experience in order to recite a bracha. That’s not possible every time and one doesn’t need to have my type of direct experience either.
I want a bracha, which is really an acknowledgement and doesn’t need to always be formal, to sustain me, to relate to an experience, and I want my experiences to make me want to acknowledge them with brachot.
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