Sabbath Meals

Shabbat meals 9/24-9/25/05

I made:

Eggplant Marrakesh from Sundays at Moosewood
Carrot Orange Soup
baked tofu (improvised)
roasted vegetables
salad

The eggplant recipe is halved baked eggplants stuffed with an elaborate rice pilaf. The pilaf includes fried and then boiled pasta, chickpeas, raisins and tomato. It's very nice. If you make the eggplants with the absurd amount of olive oil the recipe calls for, they are excellent. I did. They were.

The carrot soup is simple and infallible. My son has enjoyed it since he was a year old.

I baked the tofu with lemon juice, sesame oil, garlic and tamari, and did that same thing of leaving it in the oven after I turned the oven off. It was great.

I screwed up the roasted vegetables (sweet potatoes and cauliflower with shallots and garlic) and had to re-roast them after Shabbat. I used instructions from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven. Use her instructions from Still Life with Menu, they work better! My vegetable combination was good, perhaps I'll try to make these work another time and post a recipe. Obviously the sweet potatoes take longer.

We had guests on Saturday whom I hadn't invited before. They are a good 15-16 years younger than we are, and are a straight couple, members of our schul. I meant to have them many times before. I think my weird moodiness lately has made me shy. We mainly shared the crucial details of our lives, since we didn't know each other that well, but it was good fun, not awkward.

I did not make it to slichot on Saturday night. My husband was going to go, and I was going to stay with the baby, but he wimped out. I had already put on my pjs or I would have gone instead. I don't feel ready for Rosh HaShanah, neither in a practical nor in a spiritual sense. My mother-in-law is coming and I do not feel proud of the state of our apartment, as usual. I am sad that we are still underemployed around here and feel guilty about my general inertia. I don't say laziness, but I could. I have taken a few steps in the right direction lately, mainly because yoga class started up again. I always feel a lot better when I'm exercising, and even just going to yoga once a week with our great teacher makes a difference.

I'll post more about the high holidays as they continue to loom.

Ooh, cinnamon and vanilla!

My web-friend Eemie just posted her challah recipe. Looks good! According to The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, cinnamon in bread dough will make the dough tear. Apparently this isn't a problem for Eemie though. I'll let you know when I get my act together enough to try this one.

Is it still tzedakah if you accept a payment from the government?

I don't usually post much about politics, for many reasons. Nor to I have the chutzpah to pretend to know a lot about halachah. This article at Truthout might give my more halachically-learned readers an opportunity for reflection.

After weeks of prodding by Republican lawmakers and the American Red Cross,   the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday that it will use taxpayer   money to reimburse churches and other religious organizations that have opened   their doors to provide shelter, food and supplies to survivors of hurricanes   Katrina and Rita.

    FEMA officials said it would mark the first time that the government has made   large-scale payments to religious groups for helping to cope with a domestic   natural disaster.

    "I believe it's appropriate for the federal government to assist the faith   community because of the scale and scope of the effort and how long it's lasting,"   said Joe Becker, senior vice president for preparedness and response with the   Red Cross.

    Civil liberties groups called the decision a violation of the traditional boundary   between church and state, accusing FEMA of trying to restore its battered reputation   by playing to religious conservatives.

    "What really frosts me about all this is, here is an administration that   didn't do its job and now is trying to dig itself out by making right-wing groups   happy," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United   for Separation of Church and State.

Now this is a good point. The reason that religious people give charity is that it's a religious imperative. For Jews, that word "imperative" is the core of the matter. We give because it's a mitzvah.

It was the government's obligation to provide for the safety and health of the Gulf Coast residents. They had committed to certain actions that they did not carry out. Now they want to give away the apparently scarce resources of the federal agency that's supposed to help hurricane survivors to religious groups.

I think it would be a good thing if religious bodies in other states would send donations to sister congregations so they don't have to take money from the feds. I don't have a problem, in general, with government grants to religious organizations for work they contract to do. I understand that makes sense for both parties and doesn't necessarily violate boundaries of church and state. But this feels to me like a way for the federal government to excuse itself for not having provided appropriate aid.

Shabbat cooking, right! meals 9/16-9/17/05

I have not been keeping up with posting my menus, recipes and recipe links. For one thing, my cooking is getting boring again, especially as I haven't been planning the menus in advance. This week the food was delicious, though, and I guess kind of typical of my Ashkenazi cooking.

red lentil soup (improvised)
carrot kugel (improvised)
baked tofu (improvised!)
rice noodles from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cookery
potato salad with pesto (improvised!)
steamed broccoli
fresh tomatoes (present from guests!)

The red lentil soup was a variation on the famous Claudia Roden recipe. I put a cup of lentils and four cups of water in the pot with a finely diced shallot, and cooked them together until the lentils were a fine purée, about 30 minutes. Then I added a teaspoon each of turmeric and cumin, a tiny pinch of powdered chili pepper, the juice of a lime (out of lemons!) and a can of the Muir Glen roasted organic tomatoes.

The kugel I also improvised using the famous "shit method." I grated about 6 carrots. I did it by hand because I just couldn't find the grater attachment to the food processor. I added a little less than a cup of wheat germ (of course, I am the wheat-germ-in-kugel person) a big spoon of tofu mayonnaise, four eggs, a dollop of honey and a big handful of yellow raisins. I baked it in my fabulous oval casserole dish on 375  (fahrenheit, because I am an American you know) for 40 minutes, until the top was nicely brown. My son really liked the kugel! He's often nervous about eating mixtures of things, but not this. Since it was little better than a carrot cake, it's not a surprise.

The baked tofu was two sliced cloves of garlic, sprinkle of soy sauce and sesame oil of random proportions, baked in oven with kugel. Why did it taste so great? Don't know. When the kugel and tofu looked done, I just turned the oven off and didn't take them out, so maybe that helped the tofu absorb more marinade.

I improvised the basil pesto for the potatoes (basil, walnuts, garlic, olive oil in food processor) and then the potato salad (boiled potatoes, pesto, champagne vinegar and more olive oil, salt.) But it was good. Better with the tomatoes from our guests' garden.

If you don't have the Julie Sahni book, it's not from my not having flogged it sufficiently. That rice noodle recipe is the best of a whole book of fabulous bests.

Sometimes I can cook well even when I don't feel like it.

Jewish responses to Hurricane Katrina

What is an authentic Jewish response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina? I started this post in the immediate aftermath of the storm when I couldn't think about anything else, but then I sat on it because I didn't know what to say. Also I don't want you to think I'm obsessed with authentic Jewish responses. (Of course I am, don't be silly!)  This is the most obvious, generic and religious response, to me anyway:

Soloveitchik points out that on the contrary, Judaism actually refuses to make peace with death and tragedy. When someone dies, Jewish law requires that we mourn bitterly and tear our clothes. This is because Judaism demands that we be enraged by tragedy.

To Solovietchik, the real question is: How do I respond to tragedy? Our obligation in the face of a catastrophe is to act: to comfort and aid those who have suffered, and to use human creativity to prevent future catastrophes. The only Jewish response to tragedy is to restore human dignity and rebuild the world.

The most important lesson of any large-scale disaster is the commonality of all human beings; we all have the same vulnerabilities and the same aspirations. Most importantly, we are all created in the same image of God. It is up to us to learn how to live together as brothers and sisters, and help each other with our burdens.

Is that sanctimonious, or does it ring your chimes? I can't decide.

My Jewish cultural response, for the first week of photographs, was hearing the opening lines of the book of Lamentations, as it is chanted on Tisha b'Av.  As I heard it in my head for months after 9/11. Well, years, actually. "Eicha yashva badad, ha-ir rabati am, hayitah k'almanah..."

In her September 4 "Give Thanks for Infrastructure" post, Adina found another cultural resonance in the "asher yatzar" blessing.

There's a traditional Jewish blessing said after using the bathroom, expressing awe at the complexity of the human body and thanks that we can rely on this system. Atheists and agnostics can search-and-replace God with Nature.

"Blessed are You, Hashem, our G-d, King of the universe, Who formed man with wisdom and created within him many openings and many hollows (cavities). It is obvious and known before Your Throne of Glory that if but one of them were to be ruptured or if one of them were to be blocked it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You (even for a short period of time). Blessed are You, Hashem, Who heals all flesh and acts wonderously."

The Katrina disaster shows how much we have become utterly dependent on manmade systems of wondrous complexity:

* water
* sewer
* electricity
* telecommunications
* natural gas
* gasoline

When these sytems are disrupted as with Katrina our civilization dissolves. This is incentive to give thanks every day for systems that we take for granted and for their maintainers. Every day there is light and water and indoor plumbing and net access is a day to be thankful.

My father had another classic Jewish cultural response; he said that he wished that the Head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, was not a Jew.  My dad heard an interview with Chertoff  and thought he must be lying. My paternal grandfather, z"tz"l, had very little Jewish education and taught us only this: being Jewish means being honest. I don't know whether my dad or my grandpa thought this was the heart of the matter because of the principle of not angering the gentiles, or because of the principle that Jewish people must sanctify God in our actions.

Either way, my dad was miserable about Michael Chertoff's seeming abdication of his responsibilities as head of Homeland Security to know what FEMA was doing and to make relief efforts go smoothly. I mentioned this to other Jewish people my own age, expecting them to not have thought of this as my dad did. But every Jewish person who knows what happened seems to wish Chertoff was an Episcopalian.

Or unemployed, it would be good if he were suddenly unemployed.

My dad also got tears in his eyes when I listed all the countries who had offered emergency relief to the US. (Unfortunately this was in the context of enumerating all the aid that FEMA initially rejected or delayed.) I love my dad for a lot of reasons but I especially love that he taught me to take what happens to the United States so personally. Is patriotism an authentic Jewish response? Because it's patriotism that makes us feel a strong connection to the people of our country, and that makes us mourn the loss of unique places and their cultures.

My husband is angry. He considers the Bush administration's policies to be nothing short of murder. I think this is also an authentic Jewish response. I can't say why. Maybe because we argued over a Shabbat meal about it. He is angry that people did not engage in political protest against the Bush administration for their inaction.

Perhaps the lack of political response is because we think you shouldn't have to exert political pressure in order to make aid available. I know that there has been a huge outpouring of charitable donation from everywhere to help the hurricane evacuees. If you want to donate to benefit New Orleans and Gulf Coast hurricane survivors who have been displaced, you have many options:

• United Jewish Communities has a Disaster Relief Fund, as does Mazon, a Jewish response to Hunger. You can also donate through the Shefa Fund and the Jewish Fund for Justice. So if you want your donation to come from the Jewish community, those are good options. You can find more here.
• HungryBlues has a post about the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. This is a project organized by civil rights and grass roots organizers to be truly accountable to people on the ground.
• Sharon Wachsler, a disability rights activist, put together an email listing the organizations that are helping people with disabilities on the ground in New Orleans. She recommends donating to Food Not Bombs.

Giving tzedakah is an authentic Jewish response. Nevertheless, I think my husband is right. I think this post from Orthodox Anarchist, "Katrina: Bush Admin Knew, Couldn't Give A Fuck" sums it up just about right. You wouldn't think that making federal agencies do their jobs would become a major civil rights issue, but of course it has. In a comprehensive critique of the emergency response, Kaspit points out the environmental effects of the massive conflicts of interest and other forms of corruption. I just don't know where you go, as a US citizen, to lodge your complaint. I think the next step is to bug congressional representatives and senators to investigate this formally. Maybe not as authentic as hearing Hebrew in your head, wishing that incompetent and/or dishonest public officials weren't Jewish, or donating to tzedakah. But if you are like me and you think "What would Grace Paley do?" (or "WWGPD?") perhaps indeed this is the way to go.