Making Peace While Breaking Bread

By MARK ZANGER AND LYNN KAYE

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T EAT IN MY HOME?
A Guide to How New Observant Jews and
Their Less Observant Relatives Can Still Get Along
By Azriela Jaffe
208 pages. Schocken. $23.

Both Mark Zanger, the Boston-based food writer, and his niece, Lynn Kaye, grew up in kosher homes. But nowadays Kaye, a doctoral student in the field of Rabbinics, has become far more observant than Zanger—and his parents, and hers—while Zanger has bid adieu to kashrut. Nevertheless, the pair has been able to work things out for Kaye and her husband to eat in Zanger's home. Together they cooked up a tag-team review of Azriela Jaffe's What Do You Mean, You Can't Eat in My Home?: A Guide to How New Observant Jews and Their Less Observant Relatives Can Still Get Along, and it has the across-the-table feel of, well, dinner at the Zangers' house. So pull up a seat. Read. Enjoy.

Lynn Kaye: I liked Jaffe's attitude. She values family, like we all do, and writes with love, sympathy, honesty, and, at times, pain. The only problem, her book seems to be addressing an extreme case, in which the families have a lot of resentment and little will to help, as well as a bare minimum of Jewish knowledge.

Despite this, many of the questions she asked of the non-observant relatives, such as "What's wrong with joining us for a tuna sandwich, isn't tuna kosher?”, resonated with me. And I liked that there's a section affirmatively entitled "How to prepare, cook and eat kosher food in non-kosher kitchen." It's often assumed that such things are impossible, which can lead to distance among families. Jaffe also had some creative ideas—like placing a glass plate over the regular china to reserve the uniformity of an elegant table.

I noticed that occasionally the law and custom Jaffe calls "observant" is more stringent than some observant people believe is required by Jewish law. For example, when she discusses buying fish at a regular fish-and-seafood market, she suggests purchasing a whole fish and filleting it at home, or bringing one's own knives and wax paper for filleting the fish and weighing it. But it's also acceptable to buy a fillet of fish at a non-kosher market, as long as the skin remains on the fish, and then rinsing the fillet before preparing it.

Similarly, Jaffe's explanations of why women do not participate as prayer leaders or speak before large groups may not be expressive of the attitude of observant feminists. While the Jewish law quoted is accurate, a feminist may not be satisfied with it, or might choose to highlight leniencies in these laws that Jaffe does not.

Nevertheless, the book does perform an important role. Jaffe encourages sensitivity for newly religious person and for the family. She stresses that if either side is unnecessarily obdurate, the entire family suffers. Chapter Four, for instance, had some important general advice: "Here's something else your parents need to know. You are grateful for everything they have given you: your moral and ethical values... the passion they instilled in you to be true to your beliefs and ideals, which is what got you interested in exploring an observant lifestyle in the first place." And: “However genuinely fulfilled you feel by your observant life, you must take great care not to communicate… to your parents that your ‘real’ life began only when you became observant… your life began in your parents’ home, and your parents’ influence… will continue to have an impact on the person you will become.”

Mark Zanger: I was less charmed than you. First of all, I thought her blanket explanation—that the Orthodox believe that all the laws of the Torah and the Talmud and the rabbis since are the word of God—makes Jews sound like fundamentalist Protestants. The Talmud is written almost entirely in dialogue, preserving minority opinions. It is also quite clear in Talmud that the Torah resides on earth, not in Heaven. There are stories like those of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanos and Choni HaMagal, in which people who have direct pipelines to God are rejected in favor of the designated leadership of the community.

Indeed, many of the rules which Jaffe discusses in the book, such as separate dishes and men wearing yarmulkes and women covering hair, are post-Talmudic. She tells people how to insist that what they do they do in the name of Hashem, which is right and reasonable, but also that they are following the literal word of God, when in fact her lifestyle is the product of millennia of sophisticated commentary. I find her much better on the role of women, where she makes a rational explanation [that the Orthodox rulings are designed to protect the dignity of women].

Meanwhile she doesn't answer what I think are some typical stumpers, such as, "What exactly is accomplished by having a woman wear an attractive human hair wig to cover her own hair?"

She also dodges the issue of other kinds of newly Orthodox Jews, such as Lubovitcher Hasidim, who might have different tactics in her situation. I have heard of some Lubovitchers who insist that the Fifth Commandment, about which Jaffe has intelligent things to say, requires them to find a way to eat in their parents' houses. There are some stories in Talmud of the spiritual advantage of difficult parents who provide opportunities to honor this Commandment, even of a Roman official, Dama ben Natina, who has a place in the world to come because he honored his mother while she was behaving badly in public (Talmud Kidushin 31a).

Jaffe might volunteer she would drive or make phone calls on Shabbat in a medical emergency. Maimonides insists that violating the Shabbat to heal cannot be delegated to ordinary people but must be taken on by the leadership of the community.

She's also not as resourceful as your family. She doesn't mention how to play Scrabble on Shabbat (keep score by putting bookmarks at the page number of one’s score). And for that matter, why is it such an issue that her mother still calls her Linda [Jaffe's birth name]?

I concede that her positions are not my positions, but I wish she had a more consistent and developed explanation of hers. Maybe with another 10 years she will work more things out.

Both the late Lubovitcher Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneersohn, and the late dean of modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph D. Soleveitchik, had secular educations, and both in their separate ways encouraged their followers to follow stringent halacha and yet live in the contemporary world. But even people like me can warm ourselves with some of their teachings. Jaffe would not pretend to be a Soleveitchik, but I wish she had a little more of his spirit. She is perhaps too protective of what she has, to be able to share well.

Lynn Kaye: I agree that Jaffe did not portray a multi-layered approach to Jewish belief or flexible character of Jewish law and legal argument. I thought that she used a simplified philosophy of Judaism and account of Orthodox practice in service of her pragmatic goal—making it possible for families to do things together. Perhaps the philosophy and legal background were secondary Or perhaps she did not want to write a book explaining Judaism, but a book of excuses and practical strategies for implementing them. But I thought that the new material that she contributed was helpful, that is, directly addressing how to eat together and so on. There are other books out there explaining how Jewish law works and discussing Jewish philosophy.