{"id":43763,"date":"2024-03-08T01:39:45","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T09:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=43763"},"modified":"2024-03-07T13:26:22","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T21:26:22","slug":"knishes-and-relationships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2024\/03\/08\/knishes-and-relationships\/","title":{"rendered":"Knishes and relationships"},"content":{"rendered":"

My kids came home asking about knishes. Did I know how to make them? Where do we buy them? I thought this was weird. I asked for more information.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Their school resource teacher and International Baccalaureate coordinator, Ms. T, plays an important role in their lives. She does lunch time enrichment clubs, coaches sports, and her responsibilities include supporting kids with disabilities, and the IB program. When I say that I\u2019m not sure how she does it all, one of my kids springs up out of his seat, showing how she crouches in front of a computer in one office, typing madly. Then he dashes across the kitchen to indicate her rush to the next office, to crouch at another desk. She is, simply, everywhere.<\/p>\n

This is when I learned that Ms. T said knishes were not, in fact, everywhere. In Winnipeg, people buy these ethnic foods from synagogues who cater, a Jewish deli or bakery. Due to a strange confluence of events, two Winnipeg synagogues are under renovation currently and without their usual catering kitchens. Other sources for knishes apparently hadn\u2019t worked out. As a result, one of our favourite teachers was bereft of knishes.<\/p>\n

As a kid in Virginia, I experienced knishes in two ways: one involved a street cart vendor when visiting New York with family members. The other came from a frozen packet from a far away kosher grocery store in Maryland. I\u2019d never made one at home. I\u2019d never considered it. It wasn\u2019t eaten frequently in my house. Winnipeggers eat them more often. Of course, since moving here, I have, too, but I don\u2019t miss them when they aren\u2019t around.<\/p>\n

I was thinking about our relationships with knishes, teachers and community recently, when I took a class from My Jewish Learning on the Hadran prayer, taught by Rabbi Elliot Goldberg. What\u2019s that? Funny you should ask. When a person finishes studying a tractate of Talmud, they recite this prayer. I\u2019d never heard of it until I started studying Talmud daily. When we got to the end of the first tractate, I learned that, when one finishes this kind of thing, there is a siyyum, a celebration of one\u2019s completion of study. I\u2019d never heard of a siyyum as a kid at a Reform congregation. When I first attended one as an undergraduate, it seemed like something that I would never be involved in. I remember an awkward party at the Jewish Living Centre with stale cookies, juice and cheers about the gawky guy with glasses who had finished studying \u2026 I\u2019m not sure what. In a siyyum, there\u2019s food, there\u2019s a public teaching of something you\u2019ve learned, and the community cheers you on.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With the start of the pandemic, my own siyyum events have been online, usually through My Jewish Learning. There\u2019s no food on Zoom, so that aspect of the celebration is muted, as is the cheering and crowd. Nonetheless, I have grown to love these events. It\u2019s an hour that I pull out of my day at random, whenever it\u2019s held online, and even during remote school or summer break or whatever, it\u2019s \u201cMom\u2019s siyyum time.\u201d I\u2019m learning with rabbis online via an iPad, even while making peanut butter sandwiches for lunch or hiding from the whole household to concentrate. It\u2019s cerebral. It\u2019s a shared learning community. It\u2019s oddly emotional.<\/p>\n

The first time I heard the Hadran prayer read, I cried. I found myself wondering what was wrong with me, but this class spelled out why it feels meaningful. The Hadran is usually said after studying a seder (order) of Mishnah or a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, but sometimes it is said at a rabbinical school graduation, a Jewish high school graduation. It\u2019s an acknowledgement. It starts with, \u201cWe will return to you, Tractate X (whatever tractate you\u2019re studying), and you will return to us; our mind is on you, Tractate X, and your mind is on us; we will not forget you, Tractate X, and you will not forget us \u2013 not in this world and not in the next world.\u201d The prayer goes on to talk about the blessing and value of studying Torah, and the hope that our descendants will have the same opportunities. It\u2019s well worth a read. (Look up \u201cHadran\u201d on sefaria.org.)<\/p>\n

The entire text creates emotional ties and intellectual relationships. I\u2019m connected to the mysterious 10 rabbis from long ago and to unknown great-grandchildren in this text. I\u2019m connected to a cycle of learning and a return to sacred study. I\u2019m grateful for the opportunity, and mindful that it takes work to study, even if it\u2019s a holy endeavour. It\u2019s a prayer that acknowledges that readers have relationships with texts, which mimics what I learned in graduate school about some literary theory, too. That long-ago English professor taught that, when we read novels or newspapers, our life experience, reading skills and emotions bring half of the meaning to the words in front of us. We\u2019re in relationship with texts, just like we\u2019re in relationships with our teachers and communities.<\/p>\n

We had an afterschool Reach for the Top trivia tournament to attend with Ms. T. I knew what to do. I figured it out in advance. I made potato knishes. As we hopped out of our car, my twins recognized Ms. T\u2019s bright blue Jeep. They rushed towards her, with carry-out containers full of potato knishes.<\/p>\n

I joked, saying, \u201cWho makes knishes?! They come from a cart in New York City!\u201d With a sombre smile, she said, \u201cMy baba.\u201d Her grandmother used to make her knishes. Oh. I gave a flip response, saying, \u201cOK! I\u2019ll be your baba now.\u201d She put the knishes in the car and we went off to the three-hour tournament. Ms. T rushed out later. That night, she sent me an email of thanks, saying it made a delicious snack when she headed to her next meeting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re in a cycle of relationships in life, with lots of connections. A siyyum is an opportunity for us to celebrate and acknowledge hard work with a closure ritual. The Hadran tells us that \u201cwe will return\u201d to a beloved text or, perhaps, to a beloved teacher.<\/p>\n

The trivia tournament might not be Talmud. The knishes aren\u2019t always round, or even necessarily knishes, but the connections between text, teachers, generations of learning, eating and love are real and they\u2019re part of making Jewish meaning, too. A siyyum\u2019s ritual of completion is always linked to food and a sense that we\u2019re part of a bigger family and cycle of life. We return to you \u2013 whether it\u2019s a knish made with love or a tractate of Talmud.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Joanne Seiff<\/b> has written regularly for the Winnipeg Free Press and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including <\/i>From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner<\/a> or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My kids came home asking about knishes. Did I know how to make them? Where do we buy them? I thought this was weird. I asked for more information.\u00a0 Their school resource teacher and International Baccalaureate coordinator, Ms. T, plays an important role in their lives. She does lunch time enrichment clubs, coaches sports, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3584,3076,218,8302,6277,2231],"class_list":["post-43763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-cooking","tag-education","tag-judaism","tag-lifestyle","tag-relationships","tag-talmud"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}