Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  There are different schools of thought on the positive function of the food laws. There are scholars who say the laws originated as hygienic measures: that pork was forbidden because it goes bad quickly in hot climates. Whether or not there’s anything to that theory, it’s not very interesting, and in any case it doesn’t explain why people with refrigerators keep kosher today. I have friends, at the liberal end of Reform Judaism, who keep their homes kosher by choice, because they feel a responsibility to maintain the tradition and culture that have been made sacred by millennia of devotion and by millions of devoted lives. A colleague at the liberal end of Orthodoxy tells me the purpose of the laws is to provide an occasion for obedience. Ideally, he says, if a Jew sees someone eating bacon or lobster, he should think, That looks really good. But the Torah forbids me to eat it, so I won’t because I am a Jew. (He freely admits that if you’ve grown up kosher, the idea of eating pigs or crustaceans is just gross, but the principle holds nonetheless.)

  If you look at it this way, keeping kosher is a spiritual discipline of roughly the same sort as the Lenten fast in Catholic tradition. During Lent, every time I think, Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a cup of tea, or a donut, or a glass of wine, or a lazy evening in front of the TV, or whatever it is that I have taken on as my fast that year, I am reminded that I don’t because the Son of God emptied himself for me, poured himself out, hungered and thirsted and suffered and died for me. And here I am feeling sorry for myself because I’ve got a no-caffeine headache, which is my own stupid fault for getting addicted to the stuff in the first place and in any case hardly stacks up against crucifixion. Or for that matter against what millions of my fellow creatures go through every day. I really need to get over myself! If I go through this thought process five or six times a day for six weeks in the year, maybe I will get over myself, just a very little, and draw a little nearer to God, who has drawn near to me.

  So, by my colleague’s account, keeping kosher is like a really serious year-round fast, demanding sustained attention and care and focus and a continual reaffirmation of what God has done and what it means for his people. But he is what is called “Modern Orthodox”; my Jewish neighbors are, well, not-Modern Orthodox. Their understanding of what is going on is rather different. “Food doesn’t just feed the body; it feeds the soul too,” Chana tells me. (Chana is a baal teshuvah, a returnee: Jewish by birth but raised in a secular household, she found her way to Orthodoxy as an adult. She will admit to occasional culinary nostalgia: “I used to eat a lot of seafood!”) In her view, certain foods or combinations of foods are declared impure and forbidden, not as pretext for a bit of spiritual discipline, but because they are impure. If you eat them, the impurity will enter your soul, and your understanding of and love for Torah will be muddied. So you make very sure that your kitchen and everything you put in your mouth meet God’s standards.

  This is one of the areas in which I find it almost impossible to communicate with my neighbors, because we are working with fundamentally different sets of concepts. “What if you took every precaution,” I have asked them, “bought and cooked your food carefully, but despite all your sincere efforts were deceived or tricked into eating something nonkosher? Would it matter?”

  What I want to know is whether the problem lies in the food itself or in the attitude of mind—deliberate defiance or mere carelessness—that would result in a Jew eating something forbidden. Does what you don’t know hurt you? I have the hardest time getting an answer to this because, I think, the question grows out of notions that are specific to Christian moral theology—in particular the idea, voiced by Jesus in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, that what is in our hearts defines us more completely than our outward actions. This distinction is so much part of the way I think that I assume everybody must see things the same way. But it does not seem to be part of the way my neighbors see the world. They do their best to figure out what I am on about and give me an answer, but it is obvious that the question sounds arbitrary and pointless and we always run into a dead end.

  This in itself is telling. One of the things that Christianity learns from Judaism (besides, oh, let’s see, knowledge of the one true God, his nature, his plans for creation, his expectations of his creatures, and other things like that) is a commitment to the unity of body and soul. In the early years of the Church, Christianity was in danger of being hijacked by Gnosticism, a set of ideas floating around in the weird and wonderful world of GraecoRoman religion predating Jesus. The Gnostics believed that the world and matter and bodies were inherently evil and corrupt. They thought that they were somehow stuck down here, trapped in human bodies, but it was all a dreadful mistake and they didn’t belong here at all. Those who attained knowledge (gnosis is Greek for “knowledge”) of their true nature would be able to leave this nasty mess behind and ascend to the pleroma—the region of pure spirit that was their true home. When Gnostics first encountered Christianity, they were quick to identify Jesus as a messenger from the Pleroma come to rescue them. Of course, they thought, he was pure spirit and just appeared to come in the flesh; he didn’t really have a body, didn’t really take on human nature, didn’t really suffer or die. God would never have let himself get tangled up with something as horrid as matter. (Incidentally, despite what you may have read in The DaVinci Code, the Gnostics would have been the very last people in the world to claim that Jesus got married and made real human babies.)

  Christians, like Jews and unlike Gnostics, believe that bodies—teeth, digestive tracts, sweat glands, and all—were made by God. Christians go a huge step further than Jews, though, and believe that one human body became the body of God himself, come into his creation to redeem it. Gnosticism, with its negative attitude to the material world, threatened to rip the heart out of the gospel, and the Church had to fight for its life. It is because of the Gnostic threat that John is so passionate when he insists, “We saw him with our eyes! We heard him! We touched him with our hands!” (1 John 1:1, paraphrase) and so strident when he asserts that the God who sent his Son is the same God who made sun and moon and trees and oceans and men and women, and saw that they were good, and came to dwell among them. When I try to get my neighbors to tell me whether keeping kosher is really about the body or about the spirit, they respond with polite confusion, and in their confusion I see some of the strength that enabled the Church to face down the Gnosticism that would have drained it of its lifeblood.

  It was not long before the Church decided that, with the coming of Jesus, the rigorous Jewish separation between what is ritually pure and impure had for the most part done its job. So they pared back the food laws and left only the prohibition on blood, which goes all the way back to God’s covenant with Noah. But the idea implicit in the laws of kashruth—the conviction that matter and the body are good and that we are our bodies, rather than merely spirits inhabiting them—is as true as it ever was, and the way we eat still has important spiritual implications. You don’t need to be an Orthodox Jew to know that eating microwave pizza while leaning on the kitchen counter is no good for your body and not much better for your soul. You don’t have to avoid bacon like it is poison to realize that gorging yourself into flabby apathy is not a good way to honor your Creator. You don’t need to keep separate sinks and sets of plates to sense that there is some perverse alliance between the Gnostics and the advertisers who seduce us into thinking that time spent preparing and eating real food with care, attention, and love is time wasted and that speed and convenience are prime virtues in food. Whatever God intended by forbidding his people certain types and combinations of food, the laws of kashruth make the business of eating the object of religious attention, and offer the human actions of cooking and eating as acts of worship and obedience. The Church still has something, surely, to learn from the food laws it inherited and then left behind.

  Another function of the laws of kashruth is to keep Jews from mixing too freely with their Gentile neighbors. To put it in the words of Yaffa, who is seven, “Kosh
er is because Hashem wants Jewish people to be different from goyish people.”Maintaining cultural integrity, keeping the boundaries between Jews and others clear and intact, is central to the essence of Judaism, and boundaries have a habit of dissolving around the dinner table. If you can’t go to dinner with the nice Canaanites next door, you are that much less likely to end up adopting their customs, marrying their daughters, and, inevitably, worshiping their gods. The same is true of the nice Catholics next door. This does not mean that our neighbors avoid or shun us. On the contrary, they have welcomed us and they have fed us. Over the course of many convivial evenings, I’ve become very partial to gefilte fish (not as hard as it may sound to the uninitiated: it’s really good), and I like matzoh ball soup so much that I occasionally make my own from the packet. Kosher wine, on the other hand, despite my devoted attempts to acquire a taste for it, still reminds me of Cherry Coke gone flat.

  Our neighbors’ hospitality, generosity, and good cooking have broken down barriers of strangeness and shyness but have left other barriers perfectly intact. When we get up to go home, replete with nice gefilte fish and not-so-nice kosher wine, we can’t say what one usually says when one is a middle-class American who has just had dinner with friends: “Thanks so much; that was lots of fun. Let’s do it again soon. I’ve got a recipe for paella I’ve been wanting a chance to try. I’ll look at the calendar and give you a call later in the week.”We all know perfectly well that the next time we eat together will be at their house again, and that if they drop by our place to chat or borrow a hammer or lend a book, we can’t even offer them a cup of tea. I used to find it tempting to make polite noises along the lines of, “Gosh, I feel really bad that we can’t return the favor . . .” or whatever, but I got over it. If I talked that way, if I acted as if the boundary imposed by kashruth was a nuisance or awkward or embarrassing, if I treated it as a social inconvenience rather than as something fundamental to our friends’ identities and to their fidelity to the God we both worship, then I would disrespect both them and their hospitality.

  We are grown-ups, so we only go over for dinner when we are invited. The children, however, are in and out of each other’s houses constantly. Ours never miss a chance to scrounge food in their friends’ kitchens, but the rule for Jewish children who come to play in our home is tap water in paper cups and nothing else. We have installed a Dixie cup dispenser by the sink for this purpose, and some time ago I rashly bought a huge box of Winnie the Pooh cups. These have proven very popular, and now it’s not uncommon for visiting children to announce, “We’re thirsty!” as soon as they are fairly in the door. Of course, ours get in on the act and refuse to have anything to do with their ordinary plastic cups when their friends are over, and then there are elaborate and occasionally heated debates about who had Eeyore last time and whose turn it is for Piglet. (Piglet, for some reason, is particularly sought-after, despite being palpably nonkosher.)

  The littlest kids, who don’t quite get it yet, have to be watched, or they will wander into the kitchen and blithely help themselves to apples and cookies. I could teach Pharaoh a thing or two about the hardening of the heart; many are the times I have snatched Fig Newtons out of the reach of a small person who looks at me accusingly, big dark eyes filling with tears, and says,“But I’m hungry!”When they get a bit bigger, they try to argue the case: “Catherine had lunch at our house yesterday, so our food is kosher for you, so your food must be kosher for us, so can I have a sandwich, please?” The notion that our food just isn’t kosher, period, not even for us, they dismiss as obviously absurd. (The technical term for our food is treif ; literally it means “torn,” but the children spit the word out with such contempt that it seems to pack the meanings of “evil,”“poisonous,” and “gross” into one little syllable.)

  We do, in fact, have kosher cake at least once a year, for some birthday or other. We order it from a bakery, and when we go to pick it up, they seal the box shut with stickers that read “Under supervision of the Scranton Orthodox Rabbinate.” We get down paper plates, plastic cups, and plastic forks from the top shelf in the pantry, and then our friends come round and we break the seal on the box, cut the cake with a knife they bring with them, and all tuck in. Actually, the kosher bakery is so good that we get all our cakes there, but when it’s just us, or when our guests are Catholics or Nazarenes or Episcopalians or secular humanists, we do without the stickers and use our own plates.

  4

  The Holy God

  and His Stiff-Necked People

  Our block is an example of America as it should be. We have Jews and Catholics and WASPs and whites and blacks and some great big extended families from India and Indonesia. The grown-ups all exchange friendly greetings, and the kids ride bikes up and down the street and draw on the sidewalks with chalk. If everybody behaved themselves in their dealings with strangers like the people on our block, the world would be a much nicer place than it is. But, to the best of my knowledge, we are the only Gentiles in the neighborhood whose social lives involve buying rabbinically supervised birthday cakes. While it is in the nature of Christianity to stretch itself around other cultures—to claim as its own the best of Greek philosophy or pagan architecture or African music—it is central to the nature of Judaism, at least as it is understood and lived by the Orthodox, to resist outside influence, stick together, and remain largely distinct from the surrounding cultures.

  It is no accident that our neighbors dress, speak, act, and eat differently from most of America. To understand why this is so—in fact, to understand most anything about the Orthodox—you have to look to history, because history is where Jews themselves look to understand their identity and their calling. A central theme of the story of the Jews, from the moment God singled out Abraham and promised to make of him a great nation, is holiness. At Mount Sinai God said to the children of Abraham, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2b). The word “holy,” kodesh in Hebrew, is tricky. We tend to use it, rather vaguely, to mean extra-good, super-spiritual, or even just really, really nice. The original meaning of kodesh is actually “separate” or “set apart.” When God tells his people that he is holy, he means that he is different—nothing remotely like the gods of the Egyptians or the Canaanites. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” he tells them. “And my ways are not your ways. I am utterly unlike anything you have experienced or could imagine” (Isa. 55:8, paraphrase). If you try to understand the nature of God and decide to worship him by doing what the Egyptians and the Canaanites and everyone else does—creating and bowing down to images—you will get it wrong. No images. Nothing in the world, nothing that can be represented in matter, can adequately communicate God’s essence.

  Holiness is not only strange; it is dangerous. If you see God, you die. If you touch the mountain where the presence of God has entered our universe, you die. If you panic because Moses, who is the only person who seems to have any idea what is going on, has been up the mountain for forty days, and you need something that you can understand and touch and control, and you pool all your gold and make an image of a calf and worship that, then lots and lots of you die.

  So when God says, “I am holy,” he doesn’t mean “I am nice.” And when he says, “You shall be holy,” he doesn’t mean “You ought to be nice too.”He means that, although his people can never imagine or understand him, they are to be like him. This is the outrageous job that God gives to the Jews: the job of making manifest in their lives the holiness, purity, absolute justice, mercy, and goodness of God. It is not a job they can begin to do if they care, even a little, about being normal, fitting in, going with the flow. To be holy means precisely to be different: set apart, proudly weird, bizarrely countercultural, and defiantly unlike the business-as-usual world all around them. That is the task that our neighbors have inherited, and they give themselves to it heart and soul.

  Throughout the Bible God rails at his people again and again for being stiff-necked—stubborn, disobedient, un
biddable. He threatens them with dreadful consequences, and in the short term the consequences of their stubbornness and disobedience are indeed quite dreadful. But I imagine that when God calls his people “stiff-necked,” he feels rather the way I do when I yell at my daughter to get her nose out of that book right now and come down to dinner or else: secretly proud and delighted that she is a hopeless bookworm like her old ma. Stubbornness can be inconvenient and exasperating, but it can also be a very useful quality—and it is a quality that God knows his people will need. It’s not easy being different, and the stiff necks of the Israelites will, in the long run, be the key to their holiness and to their very survival as a people.

  Before the Israelites crossed the Jordan to take possession of the Promised Land, Moses warned them of the temptations ahead. “When you have your own land,” he told them, “life will be a lot easier and more secure than it has been in the wilderness. When that happens, when you feel that you can finally relax and enjoy life, don’t forget. Don’t forget who you were and where you came from. Don’t forget who got you out; don’t forget who gave you all this; and don’t forget what he has commanded you to do. Stick together and remind each other. Put reminders everywhere—on your doorposts and on your hands and on your foreheads—so that never for a minute will you be able to forget. And don’t get too comfortable with your new neighbors. Don’t marry them; don’t adopt their culture; above all, don’t worship their gods. There is only one God for you, and you must never forget him even for a minute. Raise your children in a world that revolves around remembrance and identity and obedience. It won’t be easy, and it will be even harder for your children, who will grow up with ease and stability and comfort. They will fret and complain: ‘But why do we have to keep all these rules? Why can’t we just be like everybody else?’You will sit them down and tell them, ‘Listen, kids,we were slaves. It was horrible, worse than you’ll ever know. It was the LORD who set us free and brought us here. We owe everything to him, and these are his rules, and we are going to keep them.’”