NHC Summer Institute 2009: Day 1.5

05 Aug 2009

I had intended to write last night about the first day of Institute, but was too tired. Thus, this post is going to try to cover yesterday and some of today.

I started off the day yesterday, after breakfast, with text study. There were only three people there, including the teacher, who it turned out lives in Northampton as well. We looked at a parable attributed to the Baal Shem Tov. In the parable, there is a fiddler, who plays a certain tune that the king likes very much. He commands the fiddler to play it for him many times a day. In order to prevent the fiddler from growing tired of the tune and playing it with less inspiration, the king brings a man off the street into the court every time the tune is played, someone who has never heard it before, so that the fiddler is always playing to a new audience, and feels inspired every time. Eventually, the king realizes that he can’t keep pulling dudes off the street, so he is advised to blind the fiddler, so he won’t know if there’s a new person or not. Thus ends the parable – rather inconclusive, but with a lot of food for thought.

The classical interpretation is that the king is God, and we are the fiddler. The particular song represents prayer or worship. The parable tells us to find new ways of keeping our prayer meaningful and applicable. Although I don’t pray regularly, this was the part I liked. When we get to the blindness part, there’s an issue. What this seems to be saying is that we are blind to God’s plans in the macro sense. I don’t like that idea. To me, it engenders willful ignorance; the idea that we should assume we can’t understand the universe, so we shouldn’t try. It implies that we should become more insular, caring only about our supposed personal relationship with God, and not about trying to discover anything else new.

That being said, it was an intriguing story, and a good way to start the day, particularly because it remained applicable to a lot of the other stuff I did, surprisingly enough. In my morning baking class, we talked about the spiritual and philosophical implications of preparing food, and looked at some historicaly Jewish rabbinical writings on this topic. Some of them dealt with what you do to make eating unique or worshipful. For instance, there was a rabbi who said that if you are eating while walking, you should stop walking to eat. If you are eating while standing, you should sit. If you are sitting, you should recline. And if you are reclining, you should wrap yourself in a prayer shawl and then eat. The idea is that you need to distinguish what you’re doing; you need to take a break and step back. I like this idea very much, especially considering the economic and social context of food in our society today.

My afternoon class began with an introduction to the historical definitions and derivation of Shemitah, the Jewish sabbath for the land that occurs every seventh year (depending on where you are and how you define it). This class as well is going to talk a lot about the politics and economics of food. Yesterday (and today as well) we worked on understanding the various perspectives on the practice; we haven’t really gotten to the meat of discussing how this practice should be applied today. However, it fit in nicely with the theme of yesterday’s text study; how do you keep a regular practice (agriculture) relevant? The agricultural justification for this law is somewhat questionable; you can farm land pretty constantly without depleting it (enriching it, in fact), if you do it properly. At the very least, a mandatory year-long break every seven yeasr doesn’t provide the flexibility I imagine a farmer would need to keep the land healthy if there was reason to cease farming entirely. But it does raise questions about how we should think of that practice to avoid abusing the land or ourselves in its context. More on this later, I imagine.

One of my friends accompanied me to this morning’s text study. There is a different teacher each day. Yesterday’s teacher wasn’t there as a participant, but the other participant from yesterday was, plus one more. We looked at the origin of Tu B’Av, which is rather grisly. In outline form, the story takes place during the period of Judges. The tribe of Benjamin commits a heinous crime against a traveler and his concubine, and in return all of the other tribes except one swear to never let their daughters marry Benjaminites. They also go to war and kill a lot of the Benjaminites. A ways down the line, they all realize that they’re about to entirely exterminate an entire tribe of Israel (which they surprisingly didn’t have any qualms about before), and they change course, working out an elaborate solution that involves abducting women to be brides (from a different tribe, one that had taken the oath, but since the women are taken without their father’s consent, it’s a loophole), but not before also killing a bunch of the tribe that didn’t take the original oath. I guess the whole being married without permission part is the origin of the festival’s tradition of women going out to get guys; I’m not really that familiar with the current-day practice (by which I mean that I didn’t know it existed until yesterday).

Obviously, this is a rather troubling story. The women leading the study pointed out that this story contains the first steps of Teshuvah (repentance). This is true, but it’s difficult to really give the repenters credit, because they haven’t admitted that what they did was wrong. A participant in the text study insightfully pointed out that what they were really donig is approaching a series of problems. They had the problem of the possible eradication of the tribe, so they dealt with it in a way that would create as few other problems as possible. But along the way, they killed a bunch more people, and abducted a bunch of women. In short, I don’t know enough about the holiday to say anything about how this might affect my perception of it as a modern practice, but its origin is pretty screwed up. This is true of a lot of parts of Judaism.

Today in the baking class we made seven-species bread, which has turned out fabulous (as did yesterday’s oatmeal-maple bread). Our teacher told us about his personal history with baking, and how it has affected his life as a rabbi and a person. I’m looking forward to discussing a lot of food issues in this class as well.

I seem to have unintentionally picked two classes that are both about the economic, social, political, and spiritual implications of food. I’m glad it’s worked out this way (it didn’t occur to me until yesterday), because this is something I’ve been getting increasingly interested in recently. Food is a big problem facing our society. I’ve heard it claimed that we can’t fix the health care system without fixing the food system. That’s true to a certain extent; we could save a lot of money if we were just healther in the first place, and many of our current health problems can be traced to poor dietary habits as a culture. But I do think that food change is going to be more of a grassroots effort than a legislative one. Ultimately, the system will correct itself as oil prices rise (with the passage of Waxman-Markey, I hope), and as we run out of the stuff. Michael Pollan puts it best: the corn industry is floating on oil. That can’t last by definition, if nothing else. The question is how many people will starve and be harmed before we get there. And that’s an issue the government can’t fix; as long as there’s cheap food available, people will buy it. It’s up to us to recognize the hidden costs of food. Food is not cheap. It’s probably one of the most labor-intensive commodities on the market. We need to make the choice to pocket the full costs of food by buying locally, organically, and sustainably.

Programs like this one give me hope that that kind of change can be effected. A lot of people come here to get educated and to educate, and there’s a lot of really important learning going on. That kind of education is self-replicating. Ignorance can only hold sway as long as no one is smart. The nation is getting smarter. We’re getting closer to real change, change we can, finally, believe in.