In the Kitchen/At the Table
Food is essential to Jewish spiritual life. So too are food preparation, cooking, eating, and enjoying the experience of eating. As the Rabbis wrote centuries ago in the Talmud: "In the world to come, we will be asked to give an account for all things which were excellent to eat that we did not enjoy!" Here you will find articles about food, about its preparation, consumption, and spiritual significance. Here too you will find our favorite recipes and food-related rituals.
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Preparing a Family Recipe
You are about to cook a "traditional" family recipe…Grandma’s soups, your cousin’s easy-mix cake—or a "new traditional" recipe…your son’s vegetable lasagna, your mother-in-law’s low-fat latkes . These special foods connect you to people you love. They create as sense of home, no matter where you are, no matter how far away you’ve gone.
Ritual
If the recipe is still an oral tradition, now is the time to write it down. "Torah" must be written to assure its transmission from one generation to the next! Include on your recipe card a note about who gave it to you, and any special memories it evokes. Make copies later, and share them with family members. Consider gathering many family recipes and creating a family cookbook.
Blessing
You sustain all life providing us with foods that nourish life and create nurturing
memories.
Blessed is the One who gives us the food and the love that sustains us.
Teaching
"Dishes are…a celebration of roots, a symbol of continuity. They are the part
of an immigrant culture which survives the longest, kept up even when clothing, music,
language and religious observance has been abandoned. Although cooking is fragile because
it lives in human activity, it isn’t easily destroyed. It is transmitted in every
family like genes, and it has the capacity for change and for passing on experience from
one generation to another."
(Claudia Rodin, The Book of Jewish Food, p.11)
R. Jose the Elder would not permit his students to prepare him a meal until he had first
prayed to god for sustenance and spent a moment in meditation. Then he would say to them
"Now that God has sent us sustenance, let us prepare it."
(Zohar ii 62)
(CLAL Faculty)
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