Food is more than fuel; it's packed with cultural symbolism and significance. Through our food, we declare and affirm who we are.
The serving of food can also provide personal gratification. Everyone needs some ego stroking, and the way I got mine, when I started cooking as a newly ordained rabbi, was to prepare fancy Sabbath meals and savor my guests' commentary. But even more important than the praise were the intangible dividends that came from transforming and enhancing an occasion through the dishes I created.
I found then, as I do now, that meals are further enhanced by incorporating traditional foods into contemporary recipes. The Talmud goes so far as to make this menu recommendation: "Wherewith does one show delight in the Sabbath? With beet greens, a large fish, and garlic." Why these three? Many traditional Jewish foods derived from items that were plentiful in a particular season, could be kept without refrigeration, or were especially wholesome and tasty. Plus, some Talmudists say that these three items were all considered aphrodisiacs, representing the fertility aspect of the Sabbath evening.
The Shabbat dinner presented here should please both a modern family and a Talmudic scholar. It is based on root vegetables (including the beet root and the greens), so it is very healthful, totally vegetarian, and seasonal. Winter is the prime time for root vegetables—it's when they are the freshest and most plentiful.
These dishes are culled from cultures around the world, which gives the meal an international character.
Jews and Vegetarianism
Man was originally vegetarian—this according to Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel and himself a vegetarian, who says that vegetarianism is "a condition that will be restored in the time of the Messiah, when ‘the lion shall eat straw like an ox.'" Biblical commentators explain that before Noah and the Flood, the eating of meat was forbidden and only afterward was humanity, now on a lower level, allowed the concession called basar ta'avah (meat of lust).
Many modern Jews opt for vegetarianism for reasons concerning health, ecology, conservation of resources, or rejection of antibiotics and other drugs, or as a reaction to inhumane (and, therefore, un-Jewish) animal-raising practices in factory farms. Vegetarianism also provides a simpler way to keep kosher: After all, a meatless diet never conflicts with dairy foods. Even among those who don't completely eschew meat, many recognize that too much is consumed in our society and, as the Talmud declares, "the Torah teaches a lesson in ethical conduct that man shall not eat meat unless he has a special craving for it…and even then he should eat it only occasionally and sparingly."
