Since I’m easily susceptible to guilt, religious food restrictions bring up complicated issues for me.
We’re in the middle of Passover right now. For some reason I’ve been more conscious about the holiday this year. I’ve been trying harder to observe the dietary laws of Passover than in the recent past.
When I was a kid, it was easy — I had no choice. My mom made my lunch every day, and I’d open up my lunchbox or brown paper bag at school to find tunafish on matzoh, or peanut butter and jelly on maztoh, or something similarly depressing. I couldn’t wait to get through the holiday so I could eat regular bread again. Even when I was a teenager and started to make my own lunch, I obeyed, because I was living under my parents’ roof.
When I got to college I mostly stopped observing. Then one year during law school I decided to observe for the whole eight days. Since that year I haven’t been particularly observant. I often start out intending to avoid forbidden foods, but I slip up because I like them too much. And once I slip up, I decide, well, since I’ve broken the laws of Passover, there’s no point in continuing.
But this year I’ve been paying more attention to it. I’ve slipped up a few times, but I’m still continuing to try.
Why? After all, I don’t believe in God. I didn’t affirmatively choose not to believe; it’s just that I realized one day that it makes no sense to me that there would be a God. But religious belief is not the only thing that binds Jews together. To me, my Judaism is a connection to my heritage, to my culture, to the great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents whom I never knew, to the distant relatives who died in the Holocaust.
But since I don’t think I’m going to suffer spiritual punishment if I disobey the dietary laws, it’s hard to get myself to stick to them.
One thing that makes the traditional observance of Passover so difficult is that the prohibition goes beyond leavened bread: corn, rice, and beans or other legumes are also forbidden. Since you can’t eat corn, nothing containing corn starch or high fructose corn syrup is allowed, either. I’ve often wondered why this was the case, so yesterday I googled why can’t you eat rice on passover and found the answer: it’s because several hundred years ago, rabbis decreed that these things could be confused with leavened bread, so we should avoid them. It’s not biblical — it’s just traditional. That’s how you get from Exodus to not being able to drink regular Coke.
(My friend Dan blogged about this last week, but I guess I had a brain fart and forgot.)
This is silly — how can you possibly confuse HFCS with leavened bread? But we Jews like to suffer, so apparently anything that adds more annoyance to our daily life is good as long as it makes us think about God. And in an economy where it’s nearly impossible to avoid food products containing HFCS, the opportunties for suffering abound. The whole point of the holiday — celebrating the escape from slavery — is lost, because we’re too busy avoiding certain foods. Of course, it also increases the number of opportunities to be reminded that it’s Passover, which I guess is a good thing, but it makes for a not very fun occasion. So I’ve given myself permission to eat rice and corn, although I still tell myself it’s wrong.
My own Jewish dietary rules have no rhyme or reason to them. Much of it comes from upbringing. For instance, even though pig isn’t kosher and you’re not supposed to mix meat and dairy, I’m okay with eating bacon cheeseburgers, because my parents eat them occasionally. I’m generally okay with eating sausage if I’m out at brunch somewhere. We never ate bacon or sausage at home growing up, but we sometimes ate them at restaurants. As for pork and ham — we never ate those, at home or elsewhere. I still feel uncomfortable eating pork, and I feel exceptionally uncomfortable eating ham. I ate ham for the first time a few years ago, and that’s only because they were out of sliced turkey at the grocery store and I was curious. It tasted good but I haven’t had it since.
Matt can’t make any sense of my reasons, and neither can I. Why are bacon or sausage okay but not pork or ham? And why is ham worse than pork? Because these are the same rules my parents seemed to follow when I was growing up. It makes no sense, but it’s how I was raised.
Tradition!
This rings quite close to home.
I, myself, though should probably not admit it in public, have really not kept passover for 3 years now. And I do feel guilty. 2 years ago, though, I was battling depression and decided, “Well, I have to eat something. And Jews don’t believe in hell. And even if a higher power does exist, s/he would agree that I should take care of me and live rather than starve myself to death.”
Last year was laziness, and this year, well, it’s because I just hate passover food so damn much. (And it’s so expensive!)
As for the rice thing, it’s odd. Especially because it’s a sephardi/ashkenazi split on this. My understanding is not confusion but rather regional nutrition. In the Mediterranean countries, you couldn’t eat without eating rice, so for them, no problem. Go enjoy your rice. Eastern Europeans, though, we had no rice or peanuts or whatnot, so saying we couldn’t eat them was met with the response of, “Eh. Whatever.”
The actual reason, though, is still up for lots of debate.
As for Judaism as a whole, I look at it like this. Orthodox Judaism is about Belief, Tradition, and Community. Conservative Judaism is about Tradition and Community. Reform Judaism is about Community. My upbringing falls smack dab in the middle there. My own personal feelings fall with tradition being tied to guilt as much as anything.
Either way, I don’t believe a damn bit of it…
Wow, I can really relate to everything you’ve written. My upbringing was pretty similar to yours – we didn’t have pork or any pig products at home and I don’t remember eating them in a restaurant. (Except maybe in a Chinese restaurant, of course!)
As an adult, I haven’t been very observant. But like you, some things just make me feel more uncomfortable than others. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a pork chop but I’ve had plenty of ham sandwiches. So I know how frustrating it must seem to Matt!
Once I went to college I didn’t really pay much attention to what I ate on Passover and that’s the way it was for years.
But after I came back from spending a year in Israel I decided I would try to be more observant on Passover and in avoiding pork products. It wasn’t religious so much as it was cultural. I wanted to maintain that tie to Israel, to Jewish peoplehood.
Well, since then my enthusiasm has waxed and waned. There’s just too much going on in my life, the time I spent in Israel seems so long ago.
But the cultural pull dies hard. I felt weird about going out and buying a sandwich for lunch, so I had a peanut butter & jelly sandwich on wheat bread that I made myself. Somehow it didn’t seem as bad. ;-)
Before I lived in Israel, I never realized that Sephardi and Azhkenazi Jews had different rules during Passover. Someone told me that if you marry into a Sephardi family you adopt their traditions. So you should just consider yourself an honorary Sephardi for the holiday and eat rice and corn!
Just responding to Esther’s last paragraph:
The man carries your lineage as far as Sephardi/Ashkenazi. My sister married an Israeli, and she spoke to me last night about how odd it is for her to be eating certain things on passover because she hadn’t done it her entire life. (She’s been married for 9.5 years now, though. Still weird.)
Halakhah and observance are favorite topics of mine. Here are most of my posts on the subject and on the Jewish religion in general in case anyone is interested.
My situation is different from yours since I did not have any Jewish upbringing to condition me: as a convert, I’ve had to come up with everything for myself. Still, I totally sympathize and identity with what you’re saying.
I do not believe in a personal commanding God, therefore I do not believe that the mitzvot and halakhah are the commandments of a God that we must obey. The ideology which I most identify with is the Reconstructionist movement of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. Jewish observance is not a duty or obligation that we owe to some fictional deity: it is the collection of the traditions and (his term) “folkways” of the Jewish people that we actively choose to participate as expressions of our Jewishness, of our identity as a people, as the expression of our values and history.
Therefore, the importance is not in how strictly you observe rules but that you observe any of them at all. The core of Judaism is the ethical laws. The ritual laws are meant to foster group identity and cohesion and to reinforce our consciousness of and adherence to the ethical laws.
My opinion is that you should look at religious observance not as obligations or prohibitions but as positive things you choose to do because they hold meaning for you and the community you belong to. The major distinction between Reform and Reconstructionism is that Reform locates authority in the individual and Reconstructionism locates it in the community. I locate it in the dialectic between the individual and the community.
Moreover, there is no such thing as not doing enough in terms of observance. You yourself determine what is “enough,” what is meaningful to you, and then you do it. The key is to be willing and open to study and learn more about traditions and observances and the rationale behind them and to be willing and open to incorporate as much as is meaningful to you into your life. Finally, the prime imperative is to not mistake the directions for the destination: the obsessive/compulsive details of the ritual laws must not be allowed to eclipse the greater importance of the ethical laws.
I personally don’t eat pork, don’t blatantly mix beef and milk, and have avoided food products perceptibly made from the five grains so far this week, but that is what is meaningful to me and I don’t my observance to be meaningful in the same way to others. That’s what I hate about Orthodox Judaism: the belief that one’s own observance is the one true correct way to live and everyone else is inferior.
Because I believe halakhah to be purely symbolic and man-made, I reason that if a symbol is to be meaningful it has to be perceptible. Avoiding leavened grain as a symbol is only meaningful if the thing you are avoiding is obviously a leavened grain product. Even if I accepted the kitniyot argument, as you say corn syrup is not bread. Corn syrup stam, much less corn syrup an ingredient in soda, is not bread. You cannot look at a glass of Pepsi and see anythign even remotely suggestive of fermented leavened grain. Therefore, the prohibition of corn syrup — and kitniyot altogether — does not convey symbolic meaning and thus I see no reason to observe it.
Likewise, I cannot discern any difference between cookware and dishes used for chametzdik food and cookware and dishes used for Passover. The symbol is the avoidance of leavened grain. Even if I believed that microscopic particles of leavened grain adhered to pots and dishes and could cross-contaminate food, there is no way I could ever perceive or notice this. A symbol that cannot be perceived is not a symbol at all and therefore is meaningless and need not be observed.
I see no difference between the Orthodox obsession with scouring the house for Pesach — and keeping separate meat and dairy dishes — and Howard Hughes’s paranoia about germs.
I do take it a step further and check the ingredients on a package. If wheat or rye or oats or barley or spelt is listed, I won’t eat it during Passover. Even if I can’t detect the ingredient in the finished project, its mention on the igredients panel is still perceptible enough for me to consider the symbol viable.
Last night I had Chinese food with rice and right now I’m drinking Coke Zero without a KP heksher — and life somehow still goes on. :)
I am looking forward to ordering pizza tomorrow night, though (I also see no sense in the second day of yom tov, so I follow the ritual calendar as observed in Israel).