Presence

As you can tell from the previous post, my mind is prone to creating elaborate theories connecting seemingly (and often actually) disparate ideas. I rarely have the time or perserverance to follow through on most of them. In the rare case, I find that someone has done the work for me. In the comments of the previous post, someone known only as "M" (working for MI-6, perhaps?) mentioned an article by Leon Kass, MD in the June 1994 edition of Commentary entitled, "Why the Dietary Laws?" Commentary does the world a disservice by locking up their archives (M, if you read this, please ask Moneypenny to forward me an electronic copy by the usual methods. The password is 'fiber'), so I went to Amazon and discovered a book entitled "The Hungry Soul," by Leon Kass, MD. A brief exerpt:

Compared to wisdom eating may be a humble subject, but it is no trivial matter. It is the first and most urget activity of all animal and human life: We are only because we eat. Much of human life is, in practice, organized around this neccessity. Enormous time and energies are poured into growing, harvesting, rearing butchering, preserving, cooking and consuming food. The manufacture of tables, chairs, stoves, refrigerators, dishes, glassware, utensils, and kitchen gadgets; the provision of homes with fuel for cooking,...-all these and more follow from the increasingly complex ways in which we arrange ato meet our most basic need. Indeed, at least indirectly, the need to eat makes the world go around: Most of sociery's work gets done largely because we workers need to make living - that is, to earn enough to fed ourselves and our families. If we lived in a bountiful Garden of Eden, who would work? Who would do much of anything?

Reading this, and silently thinking of Bereshis (eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, followed by the punishment of 'by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread'), Shabbos (on which, 75% of the creative work proscribed is 'seder hapas,' in the process of making bread), Mikdash (which was created through the aforementioned creative works), not to mention the central role eating plays in the Temple Service (cf. Parshas Shemini) adds new insight into the nature of eating, and verifies, for me, the reality of the Torah's deeper philosophy of consumption. The book's purpose, as the author states, is to "invite relfection on the meaning of eating."

I've already bought my copy. The soup, my friends, is on.

Posted by Greg at August 11, 2005 3:47 PM in Kosher Food | TrackBack