Food Is Never Just About Food

The familiar phrase “man does not live on bread alone” is often used to suggest that we require more than food (or material wealth) to sustain ourselves. Spiritual fulfillment is fundamental to our existence.

The Torah adds emphasis it proclaims, “God subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your ancestors had ever known, in order to teach you that a human being does not live on bread alone, but that one may live on anything that the Lord decrees.” (Deuteronomy 8)

Our lives, and our spirits, are in God’s hands! Apparently, God even fashions the menu.

And yet much of our spiritual lives are dependent on a meal. The hallmark of a Shabbat dinner is a hallah. On Rosh Hashanah it is imperative that we have a round hallah, and often with raisins to add to the hoped for sweetness of the coming year. Chicken and brisket are favorite main courses for the holidays—at least in the Ashkenazi home in which I was raised.

In fact, many people think it is not a fitting meal if there is no protein. “What meat are you serving?” is a question I am often asked given that we mostly prepare vegetarian meals. Those of us raised in the last half century when chicken and beef (and even fish) became mass produced and inexpensive expect meat whenever they sit down to eat. Otherwise, it is not a meal.

We were raised with the notion that it is not a Shabbat meal without chicken and most of the time, chicken soup. But the reason we associate chicken with a typical Shabbat dinner is because that was the one day a week our relatives could afford to purchase chicken. What makes a meal a meal is a product of our cultural surroundings. And the so-called traditional meal is different depending on where your family came from. In the Ashkenazi family in which I was raised it was chicken.

Back to bread. It is not a seudah, a festive occasion, without a hallah and the most senior relative offering the motzi. The band leader declares, “And now Uncle Bob is going to come forward for the motzi.” In America we have added the super-size hallah to this moment. Where else but here would we bake one bread that can serve two hundred people

Then again it is not so much about the size of the hallah—although that’s America for you. It is not so much about the food. It is about being together. When we gather, we sustain our spirits. When we sit and eat, sing and drink, we create memories.

And when we cook, we sustain our spirits. We bring people, and family, together. Claudia Roden in her landmark cookbook, The Book of Jewish Food, comments, “Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds. It lives in people’s minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes.” When we cook, we sustain memory.

Food is never just about food.