Jag prenumererar på ett antal olika פרשת השבוע - Parashat haShavua-mejl, olika tankar och tolkningar på veckans Torah-avsnitt. Jag har inte alltid tid att läsa dem alla, men man vet aldrig när man får tillfälle och blir inspirerad.
En av mina favoritmejl är A Taste of Limmud (klicka om ni också vill prenumerera) som kommer från organisationen som står för Limmudkonferensen. Där har de gästskribenter som står för innehållet varje vecka och de väljer personer som har varit med och undervisat på konferensen.
Denna vecka har de en kille vid namn Nigel Savage som gästskribent. Han grundade Hazon - en organisation som "arbetar för att skapa en mer hälsosam och hållbar judisk gemenskap - som ett steg mot att skapa en mer hälsosam och hållbar värld".
Ni ser en bild av Nigel här till höger på sin tillbaklutade cykel. Hazon leder cykelturer för flera hundra deltagare genom USA och Israel. Min bror deltog i en sådan i Israel och var med när de cyklade ner till Döda havet (jordens lägsta punkt, mitt ute i öknen) och upp igen!!!
Hazon leder dessa turer för att engagera människor, fundraisa (dvs. samla in pengar), och få mer uppmärksamhet för ett judiskt, miljövänligt tänkande.
Hazon gör mycket annat också. De har även en judisk ekomatsblogg: The Jew and the Carrot, som jag kan varmt rekommendera!
Nu får ni läsa vad Nigel Savage själv skriver om veckans parasha:
I’m writing this in New York, but by the time we’re reading parshat Eikev this Shabbat I expect to be at LimmudFest itself, in Derbyshire. Between times I’ll have flown over the Atlantic (I hope), and hiked for two days in the Peak District as part of Tikkun Trek. So it’s appropriate that this week’s parsha is a powerful stepping-off point for a reflection on our relationship to the physical world.Väldigt spännande och inspirerande, tycker jag! Hoppas att engelskan inte var för svår för er (kommentera om ni känner att ni vill ha en sammanfattning på svenska).
The famous phrase “v’achalta, v’savata, u’veirachta” in chapter 8 is the rabbinical basis for birkat hamazon, and that is why this phrase appears in the first paragraph of the traditional bensching. (The words mean something like “you will eat, and you will be full, and you will bless.”) The Talmud, in Sota 33a, understands this phrase to mean “in every language you will bless.” I didn’t understand the full significance until I read something in 1995 that placed it very powerfully in context.In 1990 a group of Jewish leaders went to meet the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, his home in India in exile from Tibet. It was estimated at the time that roughly half of the Westerners in Dharamsala were Jewish, and the Jewish leaders wanted to know what it was that the Buddhists had that we didn’t. Meantime, the Dalai Lama had fled Tibet in 1959, assuming he would be gone for perhaps 3 months. Now 30 years had gone by and a generation of Tibetans was growing up in exile in India and the UK and the US. The Dalai Lama wanted to know how this first exilic generation might retain a connection to the all-embracing confluence of Tibetan religion and peoplehood – language, culture, life-cycle, relationship to place.
Rodger Kamenetz wrote a well-known book about the trip in 1994, The Jew In The Lotus, and in 1995 I read a review of this book by Rabbi Joy Levitt, one of the participants on the trip. In her review she recounted a story not in the book itself. They had eaten a meal with the Dalai Lama that had begun with bread, and thus with motzi, and were now about to end with bensching, and so before bensching they translated it and explained it. When do you say this? asked the Dalai Lama, and they said, any time we’ve eaten bread. In what countries? – in all the countries we’ve ever lived in. For how long? – well, probably for at least 3,000 years, because the oldest part goes back to that phrase, v’achalta v’savata u’veirachta. And you bless the food and connect it to your hope one day to return to Israel? Er, yes, said the Jewish leaders.
And at that point the Dalai Lama commissioned two young Tibetan monks to write an equivalent prayer for the Tibetan people.
In the review, Joy wrote that she had bensched after meals on Shabbat her entire life, and yet she never truly understood the bensching, and its extraordinary power, until that moment.
When you read this week’s parsha, therefore, you read the phrase in its original context, surrounded by the pesukim before and after it – a celebration of the land of Israel and its bounty, and a warning that we not abuse the abundance we are blessed with. When you read those words in the bensching – now or any week – the rabbis intended that we would hear echoes of the context in which the phrase appears in this week’s parsha.
Both the food that we eat, and the words of the blessings, are a bridge. We cross-over that bridge many times each day, sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously – with these three words acting as a marker to bring us back to awareness. Where did our food come from? Who grew it, who raised it; perhaps who slaughtered it? Who packaged it and how did it travel? Who prepared our meal? And where will our waste go; our leftover food and also the food we have ingested, – within our bodies, and when its residue leaves our bodies? How does eating connect us to friends and family, to the Jewish people, to the wider world we’re part of, and to the land and history and future of Israel?
All this in these three words – and in the food we eat.
So whether you’re in Derbyshire this weekend, or London, New York, Jerusalem or anywhere else: may the words of our tradition help us to eat with mindfulness, and may our food and our food choices be a source of blessing.
Vad har ni för tankar om mat, judendomen och relationen däremellan?
Kol tuv,
