Pleasure and Beauty

Rabbi's Notes - May 2000

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

My dad, as some of you may know, has started a new career as a newspaper columnist -- he writes a great bi-weekly computer screed for the August Tustin News (Check 'em out on Doc's webpage at www.arholub.com -- I especially like the one on hackers.) To my great delight he often sends me drafts of what's he's writing and lets me edit them. Well, I once long ago taught freshman comp, and I learned how to write in the margins of kids' papers, "Hmmm, I can't quite follow you here," rather than "That's stupid." Of course on my dad's stuff I also write things like "You're just a lackey of global capitalism," but that's my prerogative as a daughter. So he has started turning it about and critiquing my Megillah columns -- AFTER they're published, of course. Humph! Fairly often, especially if I've ruminated on anything of a spiritual or metaphysical nature, he'll fire off an e-mail to me: "Enjoyed your column, but it was too preachy."

Well he should only know what I spent today doing! In preparation for Passover I spent many happy hours dipping all my dishes in boiling water. Oy vey! What's gotten into me??? I can't believe I actually do this thing -- change my kitchen over so that it is, to the best of my ability to make it so, "hametz free." I change shelf paper, clean the oven with weird caustics, search the ingredient labels of all our food and take anything that's got grain or bean products in it out to the shed. Okay, maybe all that is just an excuse for spring cleaning (and, being the fine housekeeper that I am, it might never happen otherwise...) But boiling the dishes?

The weird thing is, I don't know exactly why I boil my dishes. Or why I enjoy it so much. I certainly didn't grow up watching my parents do it. Though I did grow up with the charming legend of my grandmother's box of mismatched Pesach dishes, odds and ends from garage sales that my mother as a child would look forward to seeing this time each year. And I do remember Mom telling me that on the day right before the first seder when she would come home from school, her mother would hand out the front door a big piece of rye bread with schmaltz on it. And she had to eat it outside, lest she track bread crumbs into her mother's hametz-free house. But it's not how I grew up.

As I dipped and dried and stacked all day today, I really did ask myself, "Why am I doing this?" I've done some version of kashering for Pesach for a number of years now, six or seven maybe (though even with days over a boiling pot I don't even come close to official orthodox standards for Pesach kitchens, but that's another story...) And a number of answers came floating towards me. I do it partly because George and Donna and Ellen and Ella, my dear Elk neighbors, all do big Pesach cleaning, and I like chatting with them about it. It was fun tonight getting my horseradish situation squared away via Ella, who will be talking to Ellen, who will be doing the Elk horseradish run tomorrow and will drop my root in my mailbox on her way back down Cameron Road. And I look forward to seeing Mina's beautiful blue and green glass Pesach dishes when I'm at her house during the holiday. I feel like part of a Jewish village, another balaboosteh doing her pre-holiday chores along with her neighbors, and I enjoy that.

Marion Kohn told a lovely little story the other night about thinking about all the seders she's been to in her life and calling an elderly aunt just to chat and reminisce about all their loved ones. And, while I don't have the same kind of memories of huge family seders, I find myself connecting with my own past in another way. I realize as I dip stuff in boiling water that almost everything in our kitchen is a gift! I have new/old dishes from Grandma Sylvia, and old/old dishes from Grandma Bern, and almost every platter and bowl was a wedding gift, and my prettiest new towel came to us after Mindy and Mischa and Jasper's bar/bat mitzvah. And some of the givers I am closer to today than I was when they gave us that gift. And others have drifted away a bit. And some are no longer alive... So part of the kitchen cleaning is about the pleasures and the twinges of these memories.

And this happens to be a special spring for me, because I'm currently deep into plans for a big trip which Mickey and I are about to take with my parents, which will include a little side trip into the villages in the western Ukraine where my mother's parents spent their youths. And I am so very lucky that my Grandma Sylvia is alive and well (and celebrating her 93rd birthday this month!) So I've been badgering her with questions about her childhood. And consequently maybe this year I feel a little closer to my own ancestors than I have in years past as I do these things that they did in some fashion as well.

But what strikes me most this year (and I don't remember feeling quite this way in years past, actually) is the vision of all my nicely boiled and dried and stacked dishes in piles on our yellow fifties Formica table (another gift, actually, from rabbi school classmates. I admired it in their basement and one day UPS pulled up and delivered it!) Everything just looks so beautiful. Way different than they do in their usual cabinets. Beautiful! Tiferet on the kabbalistic tree. Now that I think about it, Grandma Sylvia told me that in the very poor Ruthenian village of her childhood, the holidays were peaks of beauty. I remember she told me that they built sukkahs out of corn stalks and decorated them with marigolds. What a gorgeous memory!

In the Class Formerly Known as Bar Bat Mitzvah, we have spent the year studying Bachya Ibn Pakuda's book Duties of the Heart. Bachya details ten "gates," ten kinds of spiritual practice which, he believes, will lead their practitioner to a pure and loving heart. I love this book, but some of my classmates balked now and then at his dour tone. I think it may have been in the session on "abstinence" (for the record I should say that Bachya prescribes abstinence from excessive possessions, not from sex...) or maybe it was the one on "self examination," when Deena Zarlin finally blew up and said, "I think this guy is depressed! Doesn't he ever have any fun???" We finished Duties of the Heart, and, in our last class, took a look at another "ten gate" book -- a terrific modern one by Rabbi Rami Shapiro called Minyan. And then we in the class each wrote down our own picks for a "ten gate" spiritual process. My list, of course, had a gate I called "delight." I could have called it the step of "beauty" or "pleasure."

I'm not alone in this. A couple of months ago I wrote about that mysterious little passage from the Baal Shem Tov saying that sensual pleasure is the best possible bridge to experience of the divine... And Ellen Saxe always writes so beautifully here in the Megillah about the sense and taste pleasures of Jewish life, especially as she learned them from her mother. Bachya himself described a gate of "examination," through which, by observing the many wonders of the natural world, we can discover something about God. There is certainly an element of delight in this gate, even if he doesn't go on to recommend the pleasures of the sensual life. Pleasure and beauty didn't make either Bachya's list or Rami Shapiro's. But they well could have, and maybe they should have. One of many possible reasons for doing mitzvot, for adding more ritual practices to one's life, is because they add beauty. Some people might well find boiling their silverware to be weird or annoying or burdensome. I've been surprised every year to find it so pleasure-ful. I might even be able to convey some of this to my father and editor, and I hope it doesn't sound like I'm preaching. I don't think I am, actually. We all discover our own ways to bring beauty into our lives, and I'm as surprised as any by this particular pathway. (And of course if I weren't myself a bit of a lackey of capitalism, I wouldn't have so many dishes to boil!)

By the time you read this, we'll be back to bagels and Beaujolais baguettes, and my oven will be black and crusty with something or other, I'm sure. But there's Shavuot coming (blintzes, filling the shul with greens and flowers, staying up till midnight, the book of Ruth...) and of course Shabbat every week, with truly endless opportunities for every kind of sensual loveliness. And daily handwashings and blessings and tallitot and mezuzah kissing and all kinds of fun and lovely stuff. This is the May Megillah, my screed for the most sensual month of the year (well, except for... and...) so I write this to celebrate the gate of ritual pleasures. I'd better wind this up. It's late at night, and I have to get up early tomorrow to bake matzah in the "crouching beaver" wood-fired oven in Elk. What greater pleasure????

Copyright 2000 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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