Perspective: Finding Mitzvot at the Dinnertable and by the Roadside
Luria, Yaacov
Finding Mitzvot at the dinnertable and by the roadside Perspective/Yaacov Luria Even after several months have gone by, a letter to the "Living" section of the New York Times on May 25 still...
...We have bade monotony goodbye, and have begun to see things as if for the first time...
...Nothing less, I think, than that we experience our allotted time with all our senses alive and alert...
...The writer, a single man, confessed that he prefers "to eat out alone only in a pinch and only in a restaurant where one does not feel conspicuous with one's nose in a good book...
...Every other month for the last four years, my wife Miriam and I have been making a 550 mile car trip to West Virginia to visit our daughter and grandchildren...
...The scent of honeysuckle struggles above the smell of damp manure, the liquid tattoo of a cardinal accents the steady swoosh of our car wheels...
...Through repetition the trip had become wearily routine, and what should have been a pleasure became an ordeal...
...We no longer consider the trip as only the means to its end, but as a beautiful experience in its own right...
...if but one of these be opened, or if one of these be closed, it would be impossible to exist in Thy presence...
...I would like a peek at his special lexicon...
...so did I and so did my sisters...
...We should increase, not lessen, our involvement with what finds its way to our stomachs...
...Finding Mitzvot at the dinnertable and by the roadside Perspective/Yaacov Luria Even after several months have gone by, a letter to the "Living" section of the New York Times on May 25 still bothers me...
...Emma, full of romantic notions of elegance, is repulsed by what seems to her his insufferable vulgarity...
...Now, as if to sabotage the efforts to eat-and-read addicts like me to rid themselves of their affliction, along comes the President himself to trivialize the problem...
...Since this isn't a mitzvah rabbis are likely to stress, most'of us have to jolt ourselves into an awareness of it...
...If even God has to rely on nature to work his wonders, man and God move closer to each other...
...every glass of blackberry wine I ' drained had a drop of my sweat in it...
...But like the anti-hero of Camus' The Stranger we pay a penalty for non-feeling...
...What passes for "rude" in it...
...Judaism believes that God works in and through nature, so that it takes a strong east wind to get the Israelites across the Red Sea...
...As a boy reared in a devout Jewish household, I was indoctrinated with the sacredness of the commonplace...
...Blessed are Thou, O Lord, Who healest all creatures and doest wonders...
...It's a mistake to turn eating into a dull routine...
...Throwing a cloak of sanctity over a loaf of bread, I admit, may be excessive, yet I prefer it—if I must choose—to the barbarity of fast food chains and TV dinners...
...Yaacov Luria, whose work is included in the New Yorker, Commentary and Harper's, appeared in the September issue of MOMENT...
...Since, as my father repeatedly refreshed my memory, food was once sacrificed to God in the Temple at Jerusalem, not even a morsel of it could be wasted or thrown away...
...we cannot avoid the pain without losing the pleasure of living...
...The reader-eaters like me must relearn what we have forgotten, to open ourselves to the unsophisticated joys of our five senses...
...It is worth quoting: "Blessed are Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has formed man in wisdom, and created in him a system of ducts and tubes...
...When the patrons cut their onions open, they manage to cry, capturing the appearance at least of feeling...
...A tumbledown barn takes on the aspect of a piece of avant garde sculpture...
...And I had no compunctions about my bibulousness...
...My mother always read at the meal table...
...So did my brother Billy, and we don't consider it to be rude...
...But it isn't food and drink alone to which attention must be paid...
...He brings a pear to his nostrils and savors its fragrance before eating it...
...It's a nice way to add a mitzvah to our depleted account...
...Charles has shown us by his simple gesture that he is in touch with a reality that will forever elude his wife...
...Very well, then, as a Jew I know that lightning and rainbows and blossoming trees are all miracles even though there is nothing supernatural about them, and I am bidden to bless God for my experience of them...
...But it is all too easy to become surfeited with splendor...
...The prevalence of tranquilizers is a measure of our efforts to wall ourselves off from feeling...
...Grow, gather or—at least—prepare your dinner if you want an I-Thou connection with it...
...I don't know whether the finished product was as good as the commercial stuff or not...
...Who would invite a table reader to dinner a second time...
...But it's not the rudeness of the practice that niggles at me...
...He doesn't consider his daughter Amy's reading at a state dinner a breach of decorum...
...We look, we listen, and we even smell...
...Eating was a religious ritual, so that I had to wash my hands and make a blessing over bread before I could start my meal...
...Thus spake the Man in the White House...
...A table, therefore, became a kind of altar...
...I'm fond of expounding, to anyone who will listen, that my religion goes beyond that to exalting the entire natural world into the realm of the miraculous...
...The onion cellar is a night club with a single attraction—onions on every table...
...It is the disrespect for the integrity of each human faculty, the blurring of distinctions, which concerns me...
...Alex Comfort's titillating sex techniques do little for those of us who live in emotional deserts of our own making...
...I can report, however, that the winter that followed my first foray as winemaker was full of gently giddy intervals before dinner...
...Should we be cramming our gullets while we are feeding our intellects...
...Eating alone is an unavoidable occasional consequence, I suppose, of being single, but eating and reading simultaneously is a willful diminishing of two pleasures of living...
...One of the most beautiful blessings of all is the one observant Jews make to praise God for allowing them to perform bodily functions, like urination, in a normal, tranquil way...
...One small incident in Madame Bovary stays in my memory: Charles Bovary, tired after a long day with his patients, has just eaten dinner and is having a piece of fruit for dessert...
...Eating without tasting and reading^ without reacting could serve as a metaphor for our times...
...A lover of Shakespeare who consumes a truffle souffle as he devours Hamlet savors neither omelette nor Hamlet...
...Our route down Interstate 81 takes us through the magnificent Shenandoah Valley, with a constant vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east...
...Two summers ago I picked blackberries for three or four gallons of wine, which I made according to a formula in Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons...
...It is a nasty habit with which I have been struggling my entire life...
...Having stopped reading while we eat, we look forward—to mix a metaphor—to our next trip...
...In Gunther Grass' novel of the absurd, The Tin Drum, there is a memorable chapter called "The Onion Cellar...
...By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," we are sternly—but wisely— commanded in Genesis...
...Birnbaum Siddur) What does the Torah mean when it tells us, "U'vaharta b'chaim"—"and ye shall choose life...
...We need the capacity to feel, to take pleasure in even mundane experiences...
...Knocking one's great-grandmother down and kicking her in the bridgework...
...A single sycamore on a distant knoll looms into our sight like a sentinel guarding the wide sweep of the valley...
...The reader sees what Emma cannot...
...Walt Whitman came close to Jewish doctrine with lines like, "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars . . . and a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels...
...Rudeness, like overindulgence in garlic, has inevitable natural consequences...
...Luckily, once our malaise became apparent, we found the remedy for it...
...Reading while eating would obviously have been a sacrilege...
Vol. 3 • November 1977 • No. 1
