By Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
As a consummate foodie, my mind makes instant connections between food and people. It’s like I’m wearing Google Glass with an app that sends me food information about everything I see, whether I know it or not. The other night, for example, I was attending a function at a beautiful home in Beverly Hills and when I got to the backyard with a highly manicured lawn all I could think of was how many veggies I could grow with a lawn like that! In my mind’s eye I imagined row after row of chard, carrots, or tomatoes! The same type of thing happens when I think of my friends and family. Take my Bubbie for instance, I can’t listen to her voice or see her picture without immediately thinking, “stuffed cabbage!” It’s not because she looks like stuffed cabbage (I’m a nice Jewish boy) but because that was her favorite special dish to cook. She spent hours boiling down cabbage and stuffing them with rice, meat, raisins (I’m Hungarian) and spices. I’ve come to naturally associate her with the stuff – it’s how my brain works.
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By Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
Last week I walked around the tidal basin in Washington DC. It was a beautiful spring day with the famed cherry blossoms in bloom, boaters on the water, and tourists scampering about. I came to DC for a conference and ended up meeting with several legislators on a number of issues important to me and too much of the Jewish community. What was not on the docket of the conference nor on the minds of the legislators were issues of food justice. Immigration, gun control, entitlements, education, labor rights, LGBT rights, and even genocide were all major topics of discussions from the plenary to the breakout sessions. When we “hit the hill” members of the house and senate came and spoke to us about what they were working on, and none of them mentioned even once, the 50 million Americans who do not know where there next meal will come from.
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By Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
As we prepare for Tu B’Shvat, I can’t help but grow more introspective. Over the past century, Tu B’Shvat has evolved into a primarily
mystical food holiday incorporating a Kabbalistic seder, dating back to 16th century Tzfat.
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By Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
If you’re like me, January prompts you to reexamine a few bothersome behaviors — and make a few (or more) resolutions for the coming year. Making resolutions is a dangerous proposition, of course. A strictly goal-oriented approach gives us a flat, “all or nothing” mandate that can lead to failure. By February, our resolution has dropped off our spiritual radar, and we marinate our inertia in the guilt of giving up. As the negative emotions pile up, we risk (as the rabbis say), “begetting one sin with another” — creating a vicious cycle that leaves us in a spiritual mess. Instead, let’s take a deeper approach. Make a few life adjustments — for promises that you can keep.
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By Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas
My fondest memory of our Rosh Hashanah table is from even before we sat down to eat. As I was growing up, one of my chores on the Jewish New Year was to help set the table. Every year, as my mother would leave the plate of apples and honey on the table while she attended to some other kitchen task, I would sneak over and try to grab an apple slice off the pile, dip it in honey, and sneak out. The trick, of course, was making sure that pile of apple slices looked undisturbed. I had to choose my apple slice carefully, making the whole effort sort of like a fruit-base Jenga puzzle. Pulling on the right slice was crucial. Once I achieved success (yes! no one would know!) dipping it into the honey presented its own challenges. How to get the delicious bee-nectar out without spilling a drop on the white table cloth? It took a few years, but I mastered the art of rolling the apple slice just right so the honey would curl its golden fingers around the wedge like an infant reflexively grabbing his mothers finger. And then, crunch!
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