In this season of early sunsets, chilling winds, snow and ice and freezing temperatures, our holidays offset the bleakness and despair we might otherwise feel with joy, optimism and celebration. Thanksgiving has now come and gone. For Christians this is the season of Advent and preparing for Christmas. Two weeks from now Jews will be celebrating the first night of Chanukah. The new year is just a month away and will be ushered in with parties, with hours of viewing parades and football bowl games on TV, with hopes for a better year ahead, and with resolutions to change the ways we think and act. This is a season of gift-giving, of sharing with others, of donating to charities in the community and striving to be kinder to and more thoughtful of others.
One of the main ways we celebrate holidays is with food. Family and communal dinners as well as gatherings of friends around the dining table are a highlight of the season. Charities, religious institutions and generous individuals within our community provide those who are alone or in need with the food to prepare and/or with a place to enjoy a holiday dinner. Most familiar to me are the Thanksgiving baskets assembled and delivered to several hundred individuals and families in the community by members of Temple B’rith Sholom, First Congregational Church and Temple Israel. To me this endeavor echoes the commandment of the Torah (see Deuteronomy, chapter 16) that the celebration of the festivals must include the widow, the orphan and the stranger within our gates. Sharing with others is not a choice but an obligation.
Volumes could be written about feasting and fasting and about the role that food, eating and dietary restrictions play within our religious traditions. Judaism and Islam both have extensive codes of law regarding what animals may be eaten and how ritual slaughter is to be performed. Christianity nullified the Jewish laws of kashrut but does apply restrictions on diet during the Lenten season.
Thanksgiving to me includes turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish and pumpkin pie. Jewish custom likewise associates particular foods with the various holidays of the Jewish calendar – honey and honey cake with the fall New Year (expressing the wish for a sweet year ahead), oily foods such as potato pancakes and jelly doughnuts on Chanukah (recalling the oil used to kindle the Temple menorah), bitter herbs and matzah on Passover (to remember the bitterness of slavery and the hurried flight of the Israelites to freedom).
In our religious traditions, gratitude to God as the source of sustenance is expressed every time we sit down to eat. In Judaism there is not only a blessing before eating but also a lengthy prayer following a meal. This has been explained as a means of reminding us that, even after our hunger has been satisfied, we must remain thankful and aware of our dependence.
We humans have both a spiritual and a physical side. We eat, because we are physical beings, to maintain and support life and health, but eating nourishing, healthy and tasty food is also a pleasurable experience that enhances our sense of well-being. Judaism is not an ascetic religion and does not denigrate pleasure.
I conclude with words that I acknowledge to be aspirational. There are many holiday meals where political arguments become shouting matches or where more attention is paid to our cell phones or to the TV playing in the adjoining room than to our dinner companions. Ideally, however, meals enjoyed in the company of others are an occasion for bonding and for strengthening the ties of family, friendship and community. To be grateful, to acknowledge the source of our blessings, to share with those in need, and to connect with our fellows over food is what elevates the physical to the plane of the spiritual.
Rabbi Barry Marks is rabbi emeritus of Temple Israel in Springfield.
