I know of one tragic anorexia case that has a clear connection to kosher law. A girl, let’s call her Rivka, began having panic attacks after her bat mitzvah over animal blood somehow invading her body. The fear didn’t subside even though her mother and father assured her that her terror was irrational. And why would it subside since the Law is full of tenets that were just as irrational!
Rivka cleaned and cleaned the house, cleaning after she finished cleaning. She couldn’t eat anything because everything she put in her mouth might have some drop of blood hiding in it. Even in an orange she peeled herself!
Ultimately Rivka had to be admitted to a hospital. The last I heard of her, a fistula had been created in her stomach so she could directly inject a substance into her stomach that it would be a sin to call food. It was a soft, light brown ooze broken down with artificial enzymes into basic nutrients: glucose (energy for the cells), amino acids (building material for the organs), and glycerol (building material for the cells).
Each and every bag of this stuff was packaged as if Rivka were on her way to outer space, and each and every bag was blessed by a rabbi who pledged, in the name of God, that there was not a drop of blood mixed in with the sludge.
*
Animals must be slaughtered properly (shechita) and the meat must be prepared carefully. Soaking and salting ensure that the blood has been removed from the meat. Because a calf cannot be boiled in its own mother’s milk—what a macabre idea!—meat and milk products cannot be combined or consumed during the same meal.
For some, a quick swish of water in their mouth is enough if they want to have some meat after a piece of cheese. Others wait an hour. If you want to eat aged cheese, the waiting time increases significantly. If you want to have a piece of hard cheese after enjoying your beef, the wait is from four to six hours. Of course the cheese can’t contain rennet, which means it has to be purchased from a store that specializes in kosher products.
A doctrinaire kosher kitchen will have two sets of dishes, two sinks, and two refrigerators to separate meat and milk products. Cleaning dishes is an art in itself. Fire or boiling water destroy any foodstuffs that have soaked into the pores of a metal dish. But ceramics are so porous that they have to sit empty for a year if you want to serve a cheese soufflé on a ceramic plate after a meat pie. Glass is the only material immune to this sort of absorption.
Unleavened matso bread is dear to the Jewish heart. At the Pesach or Passover seder, leavened breads are absolutely forbidden. In Jewish culture, leaven (chametz) represents egotism and a proud heart.
Because sudden, undesirable departures have been a recurring part of Jewish life, unleavened dough has become a reminder for members of the community that they must always be ready to flee again. In passing let it be noted that preparation for departure and leaving the past behind made the creation of the Book possible. When the Temple was destroyed and the Jewish diaspora began, religious knowledge had to be portable. Interruptions in knowledge are unacceptable, so the recorded and copied Word is significantly more reliable than a religious scholar, who can always be killed or silenced.
Preparing for Pesach includes removing all flour products from the home to ensure that no traces of leaven are left behind. All food must be absolutely kosher during Pesach. Even the wine is grown in vineyards that specialize exclusively in the production of Pesach wine. No one is allowed to eat anything in the areas devoted to producing the wine in order to prevent any cross-contamination.
*
Identification with the skeletal bodies of holocaust victims is also another partial explanation for the prevalence of anorexia in Jewish society. We all know the myth of Simone Weil, who empathized so deeply with the concentration camp prisoners that she died of a heart attack brought on by severe malnutrition at the age of thirty-four.
Simone Weil’s example, whether true or not, has spurred many young Jewish women on the road to anorexia. This has served as a more noble and spiritual excuse for refusing food than the narcissistic ideologies of the Internet, like thinspiration and pro ana.
The concentration camp connection is not as fanciful as it might seem, since the Shoah still haunts us particularly in the Jewish kitchen. Parents often force their small children to eat by saying, “Take this bite for your uncle who passed in Treblinka, take this bite for your grandmother who never left Sobibór.”15
So food is fundamentally a struggle for survival, the opposite of slavery, and we actively try to nurture this memory. The Pesach meal I mentioned a moment ago begins with the words, “Let all who are hungry come to eat, let every slave taste of freedom during this meal!”
At the same time, Jewish culture is full of contradictory messages. A grandmother might say to her rail-thin granddaughter, “You look good, child. You’re so thin! Now come, the food is on the table!” Mothers who cook send the same sorts of contradictory signals to their daughters, “Eat! Eat!” and then, “Diet! Diet!”16
*
I’d like to end my lecture with my personal experience at the kibbutz, but before that a few words about the foundations of the kibbutz movement.
The kibbutz ideology was born as a counterpoint to traditional Jewish culture. The Hebrew word “kibbutz” means a group. The first kibbutz was founded in 1909 in Degania, and the movement enjoyed its golden age after the Second World War. Jews moving to Israel wanted their own land where they could have peace from their persecutors. They also wanted to make a break from ghetto culture, whose conventionality, family focus, and Jewish religious rituals they experienced as oppressive.
Jewish religion encouraged men to thank God each day
