Talmud – Jewish Independent

Comfort food and COVID

There’s been an uptick in the eating of comfort food in our house since the pandemic began. Cooking and eating are a big deal during stressful times.

Now, we were “into” food pre-pandemic. I cook a lot. However, everything went up a notch when our focus turned inwards, particularly for holidays like Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot and Thanksgiving. When our neighbourhood bakery closed down in the spring, I went from making only challah to making all our bread. My kids, surprised, said, “Mommy, you made this? It’s really good!” – as they gobbled up the crusty spelt bread I turned out. Over these months, it’s gone from bread production to canning. Once the shelves filled up with jams, pickles and applesauce, autumn became baking and roasting season.

We’ve eaten too much: apple pie and crisp, sweet potato pie, cherry pies, and more. I tried for moderation – and then my husband bought Halloween candy. He started doling out two snack-sized chocolates a day. I couldn’t resist.

In the summer, I combated all this “extra” with dog walks and playing outside, but now it’s cold out again. It’s harder to take long walks. Fall virus numbers have soared, so swim lessons, gym visits and other kinds of exercise are off the table for now.

Imagine my surprise when Daf Yomi, the practice of reading a page of Talmud a day, came to the rescue! I found good advice while reading Eruvin 82b and 83b. After all, it’s not the first time in Jewish history that we’ve gone through periods of stress. When feeling out of control, it might only be natural to struggle with basics like “how much is enough to eat?”

In Eruvin 82b, a discussion emerges. To extend the eruv, the boundary of how far you can go on Shabbat, you can place food in a location, usually cooperatively, with your neighbours, so that you all “share” the space. When you establish this with your neighbours, it’s communal space, like in your house. You can carry things within a larger area. Imagine a block party potluck, and you’re understanding this.

How much food is enough? It’s supposed to be enough when each neighbour puts in enough for two meals. However, that amount must be defined. Is that food enough for two “work day” meals, when people might be doing hard labour? On Shabbat, we eat more, so do we put more out to designate the eruv? How much should it weigh? Does it need to be expensive or fancy food?

The rabbis then do math, which is always a bit dodgy, to be honest. Why? Measurements in the ancient world varied from one geographic location to another. Food staples varied, too – for instance, some places had better access to one kind of grain as compared to others. Rice bread is acceptable, for example, but millet bread can’t be used, because the rabbis say it’s hard to make edible millet bread.

Different communities couldn’t afford the same things and, even if they could afford them, in some cases, the bread they produced was simply not edible. In Eruvin 81a, there’s a discussion about a kind of mixed grain lentil bread, a concoction of wheat, barley, beans, lentil, millet and spelt as spelled out in Ezekiel 4:9. “Rav Hiyya bar Avin said that Rav said: One may establish an eruv with lentil bread.” The Gemara determines that there was a bread made like this in the days of Mar Shmuel, and even his dog wouldn’t eat it. So, the food put out for the eruv must be edible to humans (and dogs) and taste good!

The rabbis refer to the Torah and decide that the manna the Jewish people received while wandering in the desert was about an omer (two litres) each. There’s some dubious calculating to determine how much food is “enough.” The most helpful information I found was repeated by multiple sages over more than a thousand years.

In Sue Parker Gerson’s introduction of Eruvin 83 on myjewishlearning.com, she offers some context for understanding the talmudic text. The sages say, “One who eats roughly this amount [an omer] each day is healthy, as he is able to eat a proper meal; and he is also blessed, as he is not a glutton who requires more. One who eats more than this is a glutton, while one who eats less than this has damaged bowels and must see to his health.”

Maimonides, a physician and a Torah scholar more than 800 years ago, wrote a lot on healthful eating. In Gerson’s article, she includes eating tips from him, as well as from Rashi and Adin Steinsaltz. Regarding Maimonides, he said, “One should not eat until his stomach is full. Rather, he should stop eating when he has eaten close to three-quarters of his full satisfaction.… Overeating is like poison to anyone’s body.”

It’s only natural to use food to celebrate, to comfort and to cope during this crazy time of upheaval. How can we combat this temptation? The rabbis advise: remember not to overeat, eat only what is edible and healthy, and practise moderation.

This is hard. We live in a world of plenty, possibly even including leftover Halloween chocolates. But there are Jewish teachings, over generations, about avoiding overeating. Weight gain could make us more susceptible to complications from COVID-19, and so many other illnesses. It’s not good for us, but, knowing how much food is “enough” isn’t a new issue and, like everything else, it’s a Jewish one. The rabbis probably didn’t have leftover candy or sweet potato pie, but they knew the temptations we might feel to make, or eat, too much of them.

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including 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 or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Fences and walls can be good

My household is facing a lot of upheaval. The 100-year-old house next door was recently demolished, as the new owners wanted to live in an “old house neighbourhood” but in a new house. Their choice has been hard for us. It doesn’t preserve history and it’s not environmentally sustainable. The demolition and excavation are loud, and the shaking and vibrating has damaged our house and the neighbours’ homes, too. It’s a hard situation and we’ve got nowhere else to go, especially during a pandemic.

Years ago, when our twins were toddlers, we built a sturdy wooden fence around our front yard, to match the taller fence in the backyard. This fence has been a blessing. It’s kept kids and dogs safe, not to mention balls, badminton shuttlecocks, and more. Anything that strayed over the fence in any way – like, say, squash and cucumber vines – were completely trashed during this construction, which left a bare, muddy cavern on the other side. It’s been unsettling.

This physical boundary reminds me of other ones with which we’re all reckoning. As the pandemic continues, mask wearing and physically distancing from others has to be absolutely ingrained in us. Yet, articles online mention parents who hate having to enforce mask wearing with their kids, or how friends must make difficult decisions about whether to hang out with others who won’t wear masks. Our public health officials warn against mask shaming but these boundaries, these masks, are part of what keeps us safer.

This goes further, when considering how people manage remote school, work and public interactions where, frankly, all the rules have changed. Every family home, workplace and even transportation has changed. We set up boundaries – we build both physical and imaginary fences, through Plexiglass partitions and dots on the ground, to keep ourselves safe.

As Jews, none of this should be new to us, because the rabbis loved a good boundary! Whether it’s deciding what can or can’t be done on Shabbat, or how to manage keeping kosher, there are rules everywhere in Torah and rabbinic teachings. The rules, however, aren’t always clear or easy to follow. It requires both study and thought to decide what will work – and it isn’t always obvious how a Jewish person should interpret those rules or what’s important to follow.

Lately, I’ve been reading about how an eruv can work, because I’m studying Daf Yomi (a page of Talmud a day) and have been working through tractate Eruvin. What’s an eruv? Well, a simple definition (straight from the internet) is: “An urban area enclosed by a wire boundary which symbolically extends the private domain of Jewish households into public areas, permitting activities within it that are normally forbidden in public on the Sabbath.”

If you’ve wondered why it’s OK, in some traditional Jewish neighbourhoods, for people to push strollers or carry food over to a friend’s house on Shabbat, well, it’s because they’ve created this special ritual space. This creates a single “private space” that connects a whole community of homes. The eruv is so important in some places that it causes housing prices to go up within its borders.

Many times, I’ve heard complaints from people about how “there are too many rules” in some context or other. Whether it’s “fences cut up the landscape in our neighbourhood,” “Why can’t we eat in this room in the community centre?” or, from parents, “It’s so hard to make kids wear masks or stick to this rigid schedule.” However, for many, creating routine, structure and boundaries, physical or psychological, helps us in so many ways.

The example of the Shabbat and festival eruv is a way to see rules in a positive light. If the “rules” state that we cannot do something in the public sphere on Shabbat, look at how we can get around this by using an eruv, the rabbis say – we create a huge private “home” out of all of our homes. What a rich way to build community, belonging and togetherness!

Even if we’re not Shabbat observant or using an eruv, this is a reminder of why fences and boundaries can be used for good. Without our sturdy wooden fence, I suspect our kids and dog might fall into the enormous excavation hole and construction site next door. Without those masks or social distancing rules, we’d have to stay home completely during the pandemic.

It takes all of us to make boundaries work effectively. As Robert Frost writes in “Mending Walls,” there is a lot of resistance to walls. From hunters to animals to elves – “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

However, Frost’s neighbour reminds us, “Good fences make good neighbours.” A boundary can keep us inside a rich and loving community. It can also keep us physically safe from harm or psychologically safe, by creating structure and limits to our days.

For now, we all need to embrace these boundaries. We must use these fences and walls to bolster us onwards, as we shelter through the winter and pandemic, even beyond the temporary walls of Sukkot.

Need to value what we have

Every fall, we go apple picking. For my husband and me, it was one of our first dates, apple picking together in upstate New York. Over time, it has become a family outing, with each kid eating lots of fresh apples with the promise of applesauce and pie on the horizon. The timing is often perfect for the fall holidays, too.

This year, though, the pandemic has drastically increased unemployment. Many people are hungry. All around our (relatively well-off) neighbourhood, there are apple trees heavy with fruit. Here in Manitoba, frost is on the horizon. I have felt a huge pressure to put up food to share, and to pick more apples. This could be a long winter.

The first apple tree we helped pick was that of an elderly neighbour. She just lost her adult son, who was disabled. She was in mourning, terribly sad and frail looking, but also isolated by the pandemic. We all masked up immediately as she came out to greet us. Her smile was meaningful. Watching my kids cleaning up the fallen apples was important. She told us a visiting relative had made her pie. I got the sense she enjoyed that, as she is overwhelmed by the quantity of apples on the tree and the effort required to make anything from them for herself, these days.

A couple days later, I dropped off four 125-millilitre (four-ounce) canning jars of applesauce and a takeout container with two generous slices of apple pie. We canned pints of applesauce, made pie and apple chips for lunches. We still had way too many apples. We took a trip to the food bank and my husband donated 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of apples, more or less, at the self-serve donation bin. He also saw squash and other large amounts of produce from Winnipeg’s gardeners and I was relieved. It sounds like our mayor’s encouragement to citizens to grow more vegetables might have worked.

A couple weeks passed. We didn’t think we had more apple tree picking on our schedule as school approached. I continued studying Talmud as I had time. In Eruvin 29, there is a section that discusses what kinds of food should be given to the poor. The list is specific, including nuts, peaches, pomegranates and a citron. It stipulates that support for the poor should offer them dignity. In essence, poor people should have access to the same kinds of good foods as everyone else. Also, the food should be luxurious enough so that, if they were to sell it, it might be equivalent to two meals of something else. The food support should be dignified. It should offer poor people the same autonomy to choose, as anyone else might.

We received an email from another neighbour. Her apple tree had grown a lot of fruit this year. She still had a lot of apples left. Did we want to come?

We began to pick what looked like an untouched, heavily laden tree. It had so many low-hanging apples that my 9-year-old twins and I easily reached up to pick many with our hands. Again, we picked far more than we could use. The apples were so ripe though, that we had a lot of “drops.” These are the apples that fall when you jostle a branch even slightly – you just can’t catch them all.

We make the drops into applesauce or apple chips, but bruised apples have to be processed quickly. You don’t want to donate them to the food bank. I remembered this part of Eruvin, which reminds us that the best produce, not the bruised ones, should go to the hungry. Meanwhile, I tired of pleading with my boys to be careful, that they were wasting food. To them, it was just a bruised apple.

I tried to help them see it differently – to imagine it as the apple in a kid’s lunch. You’d be hungry without it. Days later, we are still processing bruised apples, but donated at least 100 more pounds of nice apples to the food bank. The tree’s owner asked us to come back again if we could manage it before the first frost.

At the end of Eruvin 29 and the beginning of the next page, Eruvin 30, there’s a reminder that we can’t allow the customary practices of the wealthy to be the ruling for everyone, including the poor. The way it’s explained is through the roasted meat that Persians eat (the wealthy are extravagant) and the fact that even a small scrap of fabric is valuable to the poor, so it matters if it should become impure or soiled.

During the pandemic, we’re all now wearing masks – small amounts of fabric that were previously considered waste. I made many kids’ masks from cotton shirting fabric I’d bought long ago, sold in small rectangles as discount samples. This experience is a reminder that is reinforced at this time of year – although we often live in a “land of plenty,” Yom Kippur helps us remember what it is to be hungry. Sukkot reminds us to value harvest. Scraps of fabric and apples make a difference. We can pick the apples before they fall, and offer others the same gorgeous produce that we take for granted.

In some ways, the Talmud seems ancient, but, thousands of years later, issues around disease, hunger and waste are still relevant. It’s great to have “roasted meat,” but even fabric scraps and bruised apples are important. It’s a Jewish thing to try to be grateful and value small things, even though we might have been tempted to waste them. We can use every fabric scrap and apple – and we should, because, as Rav Abaye notes, not everyone can afford lush roasted meat meals.

New measures for milestones

This summer, we passed signs along the Trans-Canada Highway. These are the ones that mark 10 kilometres, one kilometre at a time, allowing drivers to see if their vehicle’s odometer is properly calibrated. My kids haven’t done much in the way of long-distance car trips, and this was a novelty for them, like seeing horses, cows and fields of canola and flax flowers.

I was driving my kids out of town to social distance and pick berries at a farm on the prairies. In the middle of the day, we took a dip in Lake Manitoba at Delta Beach before driving home. The water was shallow and tepid, the sand dark-looking and the humidex 40. I sat huddled under a towel, trying to keep from roasting in the sun. My kids had a blast. I think this kind of outing will be something they’ll remember for a long time, even as I think of nicer beaches we should have tried, perhaps on a cooler or breezier day.

I was considering this afterwards, “in the rear-view mirror,” as I continued to read my page of Talmud each day. Part of doing Daf Yomi, for me, is seeing how the rabbis compare and discuss things. For instance, one rabbi might indicate the custom or halachah (Jewish law) in his town, while another says, no, that’s not how it’s done … someplace else. Even when the rabbis are living right in the same place, their perception differs in terms of how things go and what is acceptable. It’s all relative. Their efforts to define and shape Jewish law in a new age, after the loss of the Temple, required all kinds of careful legal arguments, and much of it is illustrated with anecdotes and backed up by quotes from Torah.

However, in Eruvin 6b, it’s made clear that one can’t just decide to follow “all the stringent rules” or all the lenient ones. Instead, we must choose one or the other, and demonstrate internal consistency and intellectual integrity. You can’t just follow parts of Beit Hillel or parts of Beit Shammai. A person who just does the strict things laid out by both Hillel and Shammai, who is he? “The fool walks in darkness.” (Ecclesiastes 2:14) The person who always chooses the easy, most lenient path is flat-out “a wicked person.”

Much of daily life revolves around these comparisons and measurements we make. As a parent, I’m often striving for internal consistency, while knowing all the time that much of what is going on in the world doesn’t make sense to me. It certainly isn’t consistent! How do we find helpful rules and guidelines as everything changes around us?

For one thing, we can look back through literature (Talmud) and (Jewish) history to find comparisons and role models, and this helps me at times. I know that, while this particular virus, COVID-19, may be new, many of the challenges we’re facing aren’t. Just as the rabbis used their experiences to compare and measure and create talmudic Jewish guidelines, we must rely on our education and experiences to navigate this time.

When I thought about it, I realized how many of my usual kilometre markers had changed. A “normal” summer for me as a kid involved summer camp and a family vacation, neither of which happened this year for my kids. A “normal” school year, beginning in September, might revolve around school bus rides, tests, grades, holiday gatherings and aiming towards things like bar mitzvah or graduation or other life events.

However, thinking critically doesn’t always mean that we must compare something to a fixed standard, or the way things ought to be or used to be. It might mean that we’re able to take the available evidence, compare things, and make meaning about what’s happening, instead. It may mean drawing conclusions from the available evidence.

Our evidence? This summer, my household has had far more family time. There’s been time for free play and day trips, spontaneous water play in the yard, long dog walks, ice creams, gardening, and even time for reading in the cool basement on very hot days. Despite some car repairs and the loss of much of my freelance work, our finances have actually been OK – because we have nowhere to go! (We haven’t spent money on a big trip to visit our relatives in the United States, for one thing.)

Like nearly everybody else, we’ve skipped big gatherings for school, holidays and birthdays. We’ve charted a different course. And, when I thought back to the markers on our day trip, I realized something. My car, purchased in the United States, measures distance in miles, so I can’t check my odometer on the Trans-Canada! Comparing kilometre markers in a car odometer that works in miles? That’s an apples to oranges comparison. It doesn’t work.

So, the introverts in our house didn’t have camp or anything “normal,” but also didn’t really mind missing the annual big events – no weddings, bar mitzvahs or graduation parties this year. Instead, my kids grew big cucumbers, learned to swim better, dug sandcastles, read many mystery stories out loud during our family “reading group” and practised cursive. Small markers, but still important ones.

Like the rabbis, we parsed out what made the experience meaningful during a difficult time. In the end, miles or kilometres, we made the same trip. Comparisons bring us understanding, order and sometimes even enjoyment, no matter how far we drive or how we measure it. If you’re sad about missing major milestones, it might be time to change the measurements you’re using. No matter what markers you use, you’ll find you still traveled a long ways this summer, metaphorically or literally. It’s all in how you use and view the comparisons.

We always find ways to learn

All over the world, students will be continuing a different school experience, one that began soon after the pandemic. Some face a new academic year with entirely virtual learning. Others are going back into classrooms with many adjustments to allow (theoretically) for safer, virus-free learning. Still others face a hybrid approach, with small amounts of time at school but more time with parents, in daycare or even without any supervision at all as their parents work.

It’s a precarious time. Most of us haven’t experienced anything like this. Yet, there have been moments throughout history when the school rules changed. Imagine the European parents of the 1930s, faced with the Nazi rules, where their kids weren’t permitted to learn in the regular schools. There were families who left everything they knew to escape and start new lives anywhere they could go. There were parents who sent their children away to English boarding schools or on the Kindertransport, knowing that they themselves might not ever be able to leave Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia or Danzig.

Those who say children must go back to school because “school is better for them than the alternatives” make arguments like, “We don’t know what the effects of this absence from school will be.” When I hear this, I immediately think of the settler children, perhaps 150 years ago, on the prairies, who spent long winters in sod houses or log cabins. Jewish immigrant families arrived in the 1880s in Manitoba and many spent time in immigration sheds or shacks by the river – it’s unlikely those kids had formal schooling. Many immigrants taught their kids as they could. Schooling was intermittent at best.

Don’t get me wrong, for kids who are hungry, neglected or abused, school is a refuge. For refugees with traumatic pasts, interrupting school learning is not a good thing. However, many kids with stable, financially secure families are doing just fine while staying at home. It’s the safest choice.

Were all these people who lived in sod houses or who had lapses in their formal schooling permanently marred as adults? I don’t think so. I pondered all this recently as I celebrated finishing the Talmudic Tractate Shabbat – by myself. I started Daf Yomi in January of this year, and I’ve read my page online every day, often late at night. Aside from a few online exchanges, it’s all alone. I know this study is better done with a partner or chevruta (small group). This would be preferable. However, during the pandemic, at home with my family, I was lucky to squeeze in a solitary 20 minutes to study before bed. It’s been hard to listen to podcasts or chat online in a forum, and I certainly wasn’t regularly meeting with anyone in person.

I didn’t have any formal training in studying Jewish texts until I was a teenager in a summer camp program. I didn’t learn Talmud in an organized way until I was in graduate school. Yet, here I am, actively learning as an adult. Does interrupted or unconventional schooling mean less learning? I don’t think so.

In an informal survey of the online Jewish world, we’re finding learning opportunities all over the place. Whether it’s religious schools, congregational adult education, Jewish institutions for higher education, publications or more, we’re offered countless ways to listen, watch and discuss in online classrooms. My kids, age 9, were deluged with online Jewish opportunities, even outside of their bilingual Hebrew/English public school curriculum. My parents report that they are doing something interactive and learning with their congregation nearly every day.

Learning is happening in many traditional and hands-on ways. Often, it’s just having time for reading or making food from scratch. In some ways, the pandemic has motivated people of all ages to try new things. For many in the Jewish community, the pandemic has allowed us to jump into Jewish learning or to attend synagogue (virtually) more often. The need for stimulation while staying home has wakened many people’s intellectual curiosity.

For me, at least, and for my kids, school wasn’t usually the place to satisfy that curiosity. Sure, yes, we learn essential things at school. But the exploring of the outdoors and science, the building and construction with Lego, the art and design we see and draw and the music we listen to – our appetite for all this was never fully sated at school. Or, at least, not as of yet.

I have one twin who is desperate to get back to school to see his friends. He cannot wait. The other twin is not at all sure he wants to return to school ever. Given the situation we find ourselves in, each kid may get some of what he wants. A little school, and a little time at home.

I felt I didn’t need a fancy siyum (event to celebrate finishing the study of a talmudic tractate) or a seudah (celebratory meal). However, at the last moment, I signed up for a Zoom event hosted by My Jewish Learning online. Three distinguished teachers spoke, one taught the last few lines of the text, and another recited the Hadran, the special short prayer one says at the end. It says, “we will return.” We pray not to forget the tractate we’ve just studied.

I was moved by the Zoom siyum. More than 450 people attended! Although I listened while I answered kids’ questions and made salad for lunch, I still learned a lot.

I also realized that, as long as we’ve been studying Talmud, we’ve been hoping for a return, a review and a chance to learn in the future. We may sit in virtual classrooms, all alone, or in a real classroom, socially distanced, but we will return to learning – no matter what our age.

The pandemic is possibly the biggest event in our lives for some of us. To paraphrase what we say in the Hadran, we must remember that we’ll return to learning and that learning will return to us; that we will not forget you, learning, and the learning will not forget us, “not in this world, and not in the world to come.”

Wishing you a healthy and positive back-to-school learning experience – however differently we might experience it this year.

Rabbinic planting advice

My family plants a garden every summer. We live in a city and don’t have lots of room. Since our house is more than 100 years old, we created small raised beds, filled with compost and soil, to avoid growing veggies in what is potentially contaminated soil.

Although my husband and I have gardened together for years, when our twins were younger, we developed a haphazard technique. Before twins, we might have studied companion plants, figuring out what would grow best and where, but all that disappeared after two babies came on scene. Since then, every year, right around their birthday on June 1, we’d throw a planting party with some friends. First, we had the birthday ice cream cake and, then, we’d dig together. Within an hour, the entire garden was planted.

Sometimes, a retired history professor was in charge of bean planting. Our actor friend, who also worked as a mother’s helper for us when the kids were small, was in charge of squash. It was sometimes a surprise to see what the garden produced. We left it all to chance – what grows and what fails would be a surprise.

This year, no parties, of course. With two kids home from elementary school in mid-March, we started seeding. We planted lettuce, radish and spinach outdoors. We followed the advice of Winnipeg’s mayor, who suggested people “plant an extra row” for the food bank, as so many are out of work. We planted sprouting potato peelings as one of our home-school science projects, and filled every extra pot with potato plants.

In the Babylonian Talmud, in Tractate Shabbat, starting page 84b, the rabbis discuss how to plant a garden. What is an acceptable plan for a garden bed, which avoids the prohibition of sowing diverse kinds of seeds together, they ask? The rabbis engage in a level of landscaping planning that my gardens have never seen. In the Vilna edition, there are even illustrations and sketches provided.

This year in our garden, for the first time in awhile, we know where everything is and who planted what. I don’t have to call any of our friends to find out which variety of squash seeds they used and if they will be close enough to the others to pollinate properly!

What struck me though was that, unlike past years, we had time to spread out and enjoy the gardening experience. Yes, we’ve had virtual meetings for school and work, but the summer unfurls before us with practically nothing on the calendar – no traveling, no festivals, no big obligations. We’re still waiting to hear, but suspect there will be no summer camp or swim lessons at the lake either. Staying home is where it’s at.

Long, unplanned stretches of weekend time and summer evenings spool out ahead. We can stream services or watch a Jewish music concert from home, play on the porch or water the garden. True, we may not be able to travel to see grandparents or have big Shabbat dinners. We do miss our friends and family. However, we’ll have leisurely morning dog walks to explore new places and greet neighbours, long afternoons to help our kids learn to bike, fly kites, or just scooter up and down the block.

This scary coronavirus is stressful, don’t get me wrong. We’ve already felt its serious effects on relatives in New York and New Jersey. It continues to affect us in many ways and, even if summer’s a reprieve, the danger hasn’t passed. Yet, in the virus’s shadow, we’ve been offered a moment to adjust and experience an entirely different pace, and it’s a surprising gift on its own.

Yes, our garden is more orderly this year than it has been in at least 10 years, but it’s nothing as tidy or thoughtful as the rabbis’ landscaping guides. I suspect, if the rabbis were to see our garden beds, they would be upset. We squish way too many varieties of tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuces, cucumbers, herbs and more into these small spaces.

At the same time, our pandemic-enforced break may offer us the chance for longer conversations, more time off to enjoy family and Shabbat, and more learning, too. I can’t pretend the rabbis’ advice made us plant more tidy rows of beans, carrots or nasturtiums, but the pandemic likely gave me the time and space to read their advice, and actually think about it.

We’ve eaten two salads full of microgreens and herbs, straight from the garden, and I got to share with you what I’ve learned about 1,500-year-old planting advice. That’s not a bad start to the season. It’s also a reminder: get out in the sunshine! (With sunscreen and social distancing, of course.) Summer lies ahead – with newfound time to enjoy it.

Be sure to wash your hands

Before bed each night, our kids practise their reading, both in Hebrew and in English. We have a routine where I knit and sit next to a kid, listening to him reading his Hebrew Grade 3 stories, and their dad does English with the other kid. Then we switch. Recently, I’ve heard two separate easy-reader versions of the story about Hillel and the mitzvah of cleanliness.

For those of you who might not be up on Grade 3 curriculum, Hillel was a great teacher of Torah. One day, he is rushing off and his students ask him, “Where are you going?” He answers, “To do a mitzvah!” And they say, “What is the mitzvah?” And he says, “Cleaning is a mitzvah!” as he heads to the bathhouse.

In one story, it points out that Hillel was also trying to show that, in general, keeping clean is important. We should clean our fruits and vegetables before eating, clean our bodies, clean our houses, etc. This is obviously a useful lesson for kids. It’s good to know that Hillel taught us to keep clean. (I’ll need to mention this next time I’m asking everyone to tidy up their toys and things!)

Even in the Torah, there are multiple reminders to wash. While this isn’t news for Jews, frequent washing isn’t every culture’s practice. During outbreaks of the Black Death in Europe, Jewish communities were often spared because of their insistence on cleanliness, while those around them were dirty and, therefore, more prone to catching this illness. This meant most Jews avoided the plague (Black Death), which was transmitted by rats and fleas. Unfortunately, this also led to situations in which the Jewish community was blamed for the illness, because why weren’t the Jews getting sick, when everyone else was? Through the lens of history, we know why – they washed and, therefore, had fewer fleas and rats around.

In the Torah portion Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35), G-d tells Moses to construct a fancy washstand for Aaron and his sons in the Tent of Meeting. Essentially, being clean is part of doing holy work.

The weird thing about all this isn’t that our tradition spends a lot of time on how to properly wash and keep clean and, therefore, be ready for holy work. The weird thing is how often we forget to wash despite this information.

The outbreak of COVID-19 (the coronavirus) is a firm reminder of what we can do, every day, to stay well. We can wash our hands, with soap, with some frequency. You can recite the alphabet or the aleph-bet to be sure you’ve washed long enough. Washing well is not some mystical religious ritual. It’s essential to our health and well-being.

We can also practise social distancing, another tradition straight out of the Torah. Lepers had to stay outside the camp for several days, for example. This is not new information, folks! It was old news by the time the rabbis were creating our oral tradition, what became the Talmud.

The advice around a virus outbreak changes every day, so I cannot predict what officials will know or say when this article is published. However, disease outbreaks aren’t new. We’ve been wrestling with how to deal with them for as long as the Jewish people has been around. Considering things like skin diseases and leprosy as part of this, then, as mentioned, there’s information about how to deal with that going to the Torah.

One parallel that I can’t skip is – remember the golden calf? When Moses was getting the Ten Commandments, there was a mad rush to collect valuables and build the golden calf as a way to reassure the scared and frustrated Israelites. But it didn’t turn out so well. Acquiring wealth or idols didn’t help us avoid scary or frustrating things. We can’t know the future and alas, no amount of gold – or toilet paper – can keep us healthy.

The gold calf story reminds me of the reports of preppers, who are madly hoarding hand sanitizer, toilet paper, masks and other essentials. They are afraid, of course, but this illogical amount of acquisition causes shortages. It also gouges others by trying to resell these items at high prices. Of course, medical professionals haven’t advised anyone to do this hoarding – and Moses didn’t tell anyone to build a golden calf either.

We have to rely on the best medical advice we can get and do practical, everyday things to stay safe, like washing and social distancing.

I hope everybody stays healthy, but it would be wrong of me not to do my part in encouraging that. So? In the words of another famous character in our household, Ernie from Sesame Street, “Now everybody wash! Everybody – wash your hands!”

Some things just don’t change.

A page of Talmud each day

Jan. 5, 2020, was a momentous day in the Jewish world. It was the start of another cycle of daf yomi. What’s daf yomi? It’s the tradition, about a hundred years old, of studying a page of Talmud a day. It takes more than seven years to read it all. At the end of the cycle, after reading the entire Talmud, there’s a siyum hashas, a celebration of learning. The last one was held Jan. 1, in the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, to a sold-out crowd.

There are also smaller siyums (celebrations) to commemorate finishing a talmudic tractate. Being invited to a siyum was likely the first time I ever learned about this kind of study. Sure, I learned snippets of Talmud in religious school or when I heard sermons at Temple. When I got to Cornell University as an undergraduate though, I met a small but thriving group of Orthodox Jewish students who lived together while attending school. One of those students had a siyum, and invited other Jewish students. I had no idea what was going on.

I was reminded of this when I read an article by Rabbi David Bashevkin on the JTA website online. It was about what it was like to take a bunch of teenagers, doing a weeklong NCSY Torah learning program (run by the youth movement of the Orthodox Union), to the enormous siyum in MetLife Stadium. He defined the teens as “not attending Jewish day school” and explained that the Yinglish at the event and the Talmud study process were all foreign to these teens, but that they understood the deep meaning of the gathering.

I struggled with the article’s headline – it called the teens “secular.” Any kid who attends a weeklong event run by the Orthodox Union is choosing a Jewish lifestyle, even if it isn’t the same as those who attend Jewish day schools or yeshivot.

Beyond this headline definition of “secular,” I saw the great divide not mentioned. This chasm – of being a liberal Jewish woman – caused me to feel, for years, that I was not capable or worthy of studying Talmud in depth, never mind daf yomi.

I wasn’t taught the skills to study Rabbinic Hebrew or Aramaic in my Reform congregation’s religious school. I learned basic prayers, Hebrew and knowledge of Jewish holidays and customs. When I lived in Israel on a kibbutz for a year in high school, I immersed myself in Modern Hebrew every day – but I never saw anyone studying Talmud!

At Cornell, I took Modern Hebrew classes and one Biblical Hebrew literature course. I met the students who lived in the Cornell Centre for Jewish Living. I got “closer” to knowing Orthodox people than I’d ever experienced growing up in Virginia. When I returned to graduate school in religious studies, I began learning basic talmudic terminology. Slowly, painfully, I made my way through the text with lots of dictionaries and help.

About 20 years ago, you could get a CD-ROM with the whole Talmud on it, and some of it had stilted English translation available, but not all of it. Otherwise, one had to have access to a whole set of Talmud or a good library and be conversant in Rabbinic or Modern Hebrew (Adin Steinsaltz was slowly creating translations of Talmud for those who spoke Modern Hebrew) to make it through the text.

Over the years, I had occasional study partners. We worked our way through a few pages of Talmud. In every situation, my partners were unconventional. They had to be willing to study with a woman, willing to study in a slow mishmash of what we understood in Hebrew/Aramaic and English – and, further, willing to make the modern, 21st-century connections offered by my academic (not yeshivah) training.

This fell by the wayside when I had twins. Study time was nonexistent, although writing this column let me study the Torah portions as they seemed relevant. To learn more about Talmud, I signed up to get Ilana Kurshan’s memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink – it was an adult selection from the kids’ PJ Library book program.

I never finished the book. I felt ashamed instead. Here was Kurshan, an author and translator with several kids, including twins, and she had time to study daf yomi. I ignored the fact that she lived in Israel, where access to both Talmud study and childcare was much easier to find. I reminded myself that everyone is different. Our challenges might not be the same, and I returned to working as a freelancer, looking after twins, and running our household.

Then something miraculous happened. My Jewish Learning, a Jewish online resource, started a new daf yomi program. I signed up for my email a day. A friend of mine, a rabbi who is also a knitter, is chatting with me online about the new cycle of study, as a kind of study partner. And, through the miracle of technology, I have managed – so far – to keep up with my page a day. Through sefaria.org, we now have free access online to both the original and (a mostly decent) English translation of these texts.

It’s early days yet. However, today’s page, Berachot 5a and 5b, touches on twins, health troubles, commitment to learning, and, for me, it’s relatable. Most important, it teaches that, in our rich Jewish tradition, it’s never too late to commit to learning more, no matter when one begins. I started on Jan. 5. It’s never too late to start!

The knowledge that we die

Shabbat, Oct. 26
B’reishit, Genesis 1:1-6:8
Haftarah, Isaiah 42:5-43:10

One Yom Kippur, a rabbi was warning his congregation about the fragility of life.

“One day, everyone in this congregation is going to die,” he thundered from the bimah.

Seated in the front row was an elderly woman who laughed out loud when she heard this.

Irritated, the rabbi said, “What’s so funny?”

“Well!” she said, “I’m not a member of this congregation.”

Membership and affiliation aside, the most important lesson we learn in life is that one day it will end: one day we are going to die.

This is the great lesson and gift of the parashah B’reishit, with its iconic tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Amid all the lush greenery, flowing rivers and natural beauty of the garden, at its centre stood two trees. All of the trees and their fruits were permitted to human beings as food, except for the Tree of All Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We read: “God Eternal then commanded the man, saying, ‘You may eat all you like of every tree in the garden – but of the Tree of All Knowledge you may not eat, for the moment you eat of it you shall be doomed to die.’” (Genesis 2:16-17)

When they eat from the Tree of All Knowledge, the knowledge they get is that, one day, they are going to die. Before the forbidden fruit, they didn’t even know death was part of the equation. Now they know and it scares them – to death. They like the garden: life there is beautiful, they don’t want it to end and, standing right next to the Tree of All Knowledge, is the answer to their anxiety – the Tree of Life. One bite from that fruit and they will live forever. This terrifies God. We read: “God Eternal then said, ‘Look, the humans are like us, knowing all things. Now they may even reach out to take fruit from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever!’ So the Eternal God drove them out of the Garden of Eden to work the soil from which they had been taken.” (Genesis 3:22-23)

God kicks them out of the garden – not as punishment, but as a blessing. If they think they will never die, then how will they truly live? If you have eternity, then there is no urgency for anything; with unlimited tomorrows, everything can wait.

The German existentialist Martin Heidegger, in his masterwork Being and Time, taught this: he said that, in order to truly live authentically, we have to confront death head-on. In other words, knowing that I am going to die is what allows me to truly live. Heidegger wrote: “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.”

But, as Ernest Becker wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork The Denial of Death, even though we objectively know that we are all going to die, we don’t actually believe what we know to be true.

Becker’s work is important because of his astute observation that our obsession with not dying actually gets in the way of our fully living.

We are so focused on outwitting, outlasting and outplaying death, staying in our own Garden of Eden, that we make amazingly selfish choices in life. We set up what Becker calls “immortality systems” – non-rational belief structures that give way to the belief that we are immortal.

For example, we try to buy immortality by accumulating possessions and wealth, as if our things will somehow protect us when death comes knocking. We take on heroic roles in our business or our household: we think that, if we make ourselves indispensable, death can’t touch us. “I can’t die this week; I have a sales meeting on Thursday.”

Judaism suggests a different approach to death and to life. Rather than deny death, Jewish tradition instructs us to embrace it. Judaism teaches that we should live each day as if it is our last because we don’t know, it very well may be (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 153a).

Imagine, as God does in this parashah, if human beings directed all the energy they focus on not dying toward the more sacred goal of truly living. How would you fill each moment of every day if you truly knew and understood that you will never get that moment back once it has passed; that it is gone forever?

The psalmist declares: “The span of our life is 70 years or, given the strength, 80 years … and they pass by speedily and we are in darkness; teach us to count our days rightly, that we may attain a wise heart.” (Psalm 90:10, 12)

The wise person, our rabbis teach, counts each day and makes each day count. Knowing that our days are numbered helps us clarify our priorities and our purpose. Our most precious possession is not money or things: you can always get more of those. No, our most precious and finite possession is time.

Henry David Thoreau wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life, and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.” (Walden, reissue edition, Princeton University Press, 2016)

When Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden, the Torah records the very first thing they do. “And Adam knew his wife Eve and she bore him a son.” (Genesis 4:1) They have a child: the very realization of “I’m not going to live forever” is answered with our best attempt at immortality – progeny.

And so, a final question remains. Where is the true paradise? Is it in the Garden of Eden where no one ever dies and time is limitless? Or is it East of Eden, outside the garden, where every moment is precious, every decision is life-changing and the fruit, sometimes bitter, compels us to appreciate the sweet?

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is senior rabbi at Temple Sholom and author of The Men’s Seder (MRJ Publishing). He is also chair of the Reform Rabbis of Canada. His writing and perspective on Judaism appear in major print and digital media internationally. This article originally appeared on reformjudaism.org.

Talmudic advice on life, work

If you listen to lifestyle advice, finding one’s work-life balance has never been harder. Indeed, work obsesses many of us 24/7. We’re always struggling to find time for family, household and leisure activities. Like every generation, we think we’ve invented a new problem.

It only takes a little while studying Jewish texts to respond to this with a “Don’t be ridiculous!” Yes, our technology makes our work lives faster and more omnipresent, but, in Jewish tradition, we’ve been discussing and debating how to balance these issues for thousands of years.

When I started thinking about this, I remembered how many detailed tips are available to us by studying Midrash and Talmud. There are discussions about how much sleep we need. Depending on their profession, there are views about how many times a week men are obligated to be intimate with their wives. There is advice on how to raise your (Jewish) children and how to take care of your livestock.

By the way, in case you raise livestock (for work or fun) or have pets, you should always feed them first, before you eat. Is that irrelevant? Not in my household, where we conscientiously feed our dogs first every morning and evening, before breakfast and dinner. (It cuts down on begging at the table, too.)

A few weeks ago, a new start-up that works on networking and advice for people in university alumni communities asked me to participate in a career path interview. It was done entirely online. I was happy to do it, because it struck me as a useful exercise. New university graduates might be able to learn from older peers, and gain useful information and connections. I responded to the questions without hesitation.

Although I listed plenty of professional qualifications, I focused on how important it was to be flexible, evolving and intellectually curious as your life changes. In my experience, things like getting married, having health issues or kids, or moving affect your career path enormously. I figured this was not news to anyone, but that it was advice worth offering to 20-somethings or career changers.

To my surprise, someone at the start-up contacted me and asked if they could feature me in a “career journeys” email. At first, I thought, “Sure, why not?” I even wondered if it might bring in more writing or editing jobs. Then I read their draft.

Their draft email sandwiched my photo and quote in between two male professionals, a medical physician/specialist and a virtual reality DJ. The quote they chose for me highlighted that moving for my husband’s academic career forced me reinvent myself to find paying work and to stay competitive.

I was the only woman featured, and the only professional whose married status was mentioned first. I felt angry. Why were my peers’ work credentials front and centre but, for me, it was about marital status and career sacrifice for a partner?

I asked them to cut me from their interview or significantly revise what they posted. I pointed out why. They responded quickly, apologized, and let me revise the text so that it featured what I brought, as a professional, to the conversation rather than my gender or family status. In the end, my quote read: “You do not need to know ‘what you want to be when you grow up’ when you are 18 or 21. We need to be flexible, evolving and intellectually curious.”

So far, at least, I have heard nothing as a result of the e-newsletter’s publication but, at least, I’m not embarrassed by it.

Twenty years ago, this past June, our wedding program featured a quote from Bava Metsia 59a. It came from what Rav Papa said to Abaye: “If your wife is short, bend down and listen to your wife, and whisper in her ear.” If you’ve ever met me (and my partner) in person, you know that I am certainly short … and the key to keeping a healthy balance is in these discussions, too. If we want to maintain good work lives and, more importantly, healthy, happy overall lives, we need to listen to one another, and value what we each bring to the table.

Sometimes, it’s hard work to maintain a marriage, raise kids, or even feed the dogs promptly before we eat. The technology aspect of the work-life balance makes us think that it’s all new, but something was always the newest thing in every generation. Rather, look at it another way. We aren’t alone. Network backwards. We’re lucky to be bolstered by thousands of years of good Jewish advice. Just like our ancestors, we’re free to sift through it and take what works best for us.

Joanne Seiff writes regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.