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Bring more Torah to your Shabbat Table
“Without bread, there is no Torah. Without Torah there is no bread.”
— Pirke Avot 3:17
Welcome.
I’m so glad you’re here.
Maybe you found your way here because you are looking for family-friendly meals that little kids and grown-ups can both enjoy.
Maybe you are looking for ways to introduce the text and teachings of the Torah to your children in an accessible way.
Maybe you are hoping to build new rituals where your family can gather and connect over a meal.
Whatever the reason, you are in the right place!
The Weekly Portion (Torah and Recipes)
When my husband and I were engaged, we enjoyed playing around with potential mash-ups of our last names to create a new “family name” that we would both take once we were married. While we did not end up actually doing this, the exercise eventually evolved into imagining what our family crest would look like, if we were somehow the kind of landed gentry that had such things (we are not). We eventually came up with a very vivid image, which I hold in my mind’s eye to this day, of a brown bear downhill skiing, a red scarf flying behind him.
This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, opens with one of the most persistent but challenging ideas in the Torah: the idea that God rewards the faithful and punishes those who transgress. This idea is, in many ways, the bedrock of covenantal theology. And yet, while not problematic in and of itself, this conception of reward and punishment easily slides towards another, more difficult theological conclusion: those who suffer must have done something to deserve it, while those who flourish must be good people.
This week’s Torah portion, Behar, introduces the economic and agricultural laws of the sabbatical and Jubilee years. These different cycles introduce a period of rest for the land, an interval during which the land is not cultivated and the fields lie fallow, but they also introduce ways to free people from cycles of debt and indentured servitude.
The opening of this week’s Torah portion, Emor, describes the special expectations that pertain only to the members of the priesthood. In many ways, it continues to elaborate on the themes of holiness that we explored last week, but with a new twist: the priesthood must be holy because they are the ones who offer the sacrifices, which are explicitly likened to food.
This week’s Torah portion, Kedoshim, articulates the central theme of the book of Leviticus: what does it mean to be holy? In Judaism, holiness or sacredness centers around the idea of making distinctions, of marking certain things as separate and thereby marking them as important.
In the holiday cycle, we are emerging from the story of the Exodus, the story of collective redemption. As Jews, this is arguably our central narrative. We recall it every Shabbat, during kiddush. It is the story that tells us about what it looks like to become a people living in relationship to God. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that immediately emerging from this collective narrative, we read a Torah portion, Acharei Mot, that reminds us of our own personal responsibilities.
This week’s Torah portion outlines an extended purification ritual, involving sacrifices, herbs, bathing, and shaving, ending with the afflicted person providing a guilt offering (a special kind of sacrifice). For many modern readers, these rituals may feel inaccessible. They speak in intense detail about afflictions we are not familiar (or which make us squeamish), about sacrifices we not longer practice, about categories (such as purity) that many of us no longer think in. And yet, I think the message of these texts is profoundly resonant.
During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial period of lockdown, a lot of Jewish thinkers were talking about this week’s Torah portion, Tazria, which describes how to handle cases of tzara’at, a skin affliction often thought to resemble leprosy. The remedies it prescribes sound a lot like our modern experiences of quarantine.
This week’s Torah portion, Shmini, provides the basis for the many of the most well-known laws of kashrut, namely the prohibition on consuming specific types of meat. Interestingly, it presents those prohibitions in two different ways.
This website is all about celebrating Torah, and there is no holiday more focused on Torah than Shavuot, when we celebrate receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai. So, with that in mind, this week I am interrupting our regularly scheduled programming to bring you some Shavuot themed activities and recipes to do with your kids.