Kubeh Disasters & Amsalem PDF Cookbook – Recipes for Hope
- When They Go Low, We Go Chai!
- Kubeh disasters
- Amsalem – Recipes for Hope
- NEW from the Amsalem – Recipes for Hope PDF cookbook
When They Go Low, We Go Chai!
It has now been 41 days since 239 people, plus a baby born in captivity have been held as hostages in Gaza.
I am not naive; I am not stupid. I am not blind; I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. I am a Holocaust educator, a history teacher, and yet I was surprised and not surprised by this war. I was not surprised about the Oct 7th unprovoked massacre and subsequent kidnapping of 240 people. I am not surprised by the barrage of missiles and the downright nastiness our soldiers are encountering while trying to eliminate the terrorist chokehold in Gaza. I am, though, surprised at the virulent antisemitism being displayed in the West, most especially by the educated.
Last night, I was privileged to lead and speak at a Challah bake at LSE (London School of Economics), the third top-ranking university in the UK and one of our bastions of higher education, where students told me that their classmates and professors stopped talking to them overnight. Not for anything they said or did, but because they are Jewish. Not because they expressed any sentiment or allegiance, but because they are Jewish. Not because they wore a Star of David or a kippah, but because they are Jewish.
Three of my children live in Israel, with one serving in the IDF. They are, in some ways, safer than their brother who is still at home taking the tube (the London subway system) every day to school.
I am surprised and not surprised, notwithstanding the 10 years worth of interfaith work I have done, that only a couple of people have reached out, and when I reached out expressing my concern that the pro-Palestine rallies had their starting point outside our synagogue, I was shut down.
But here is what will never cease to amaze me: our People. Despite the vitriolic baseless hate being leveled at us, we respond not with hate but with song, with prayer, with cheering every single non-Jew who says, ‘actually, this is wrong.’ I wonder, are we crazy? Did two millennia of hate directed towards us not teach us that we need to hate back? No, it didn’t.
Let me tell you, though you already know this, but it bears repeating. Just watch the way we protest to understand who we are:
- We don’t cover our faces.
- We congregate in one designated spot and don’t walk through neighborhoods intimidating locals.
- We don’t cry for annihilation; we sing about peace, about ‘one day’ (when things will be better), about faith and about not being scared.
- We quote sacred texts that champion life, not chant for death.
- We do not use God’s name in vain.
- We do not abuse police; we thank them. One policeman from the March on Washington this past Tuesday said he received a career’s worth of thank-yous in one day.
- We do not tear down flags of our host countries; they stand side by side with our Israeli flag.
- We sing, we dance, we pray, we cry. We do not call for murder.
There exists a reason for all of this, and it goes all the way back to the Bible, and we have passed it down generation by generation: the principle is this ‘U’bachartem ba’chayim.’ – Choose Life.
“I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today. I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life – so that you and your children may live…” Deut. 30:19
Judaism is unique; it always has been. Rabbi Sacks reminds us time and again in his writings that our uniqueness comes up over and over. We choose life each and every day; we believe that there is great work to be done in this world at this moment. That the Torah is not in heaven but on earth, and we educate our children as such. A famous rabbi whose children were all murdered in the Holocaust was asked, ‘Did you have no questions for God?’ ‘I had questions,’ he replied, ‘my questions were so good that God would have called me to his side to answer them, but I would rather live my life here on earth with questions, than in heaven with answers.’
From the first prayer we teach our children to the life-sustaining and comfort-giving chicken soup we feed them. From the moment we teach them to thank God upon rising and believe in his protection before sleeping, we teach our children to believe in life, to choose it every single day. Not just their lives but the life of others; we teach them that to save a single person is to save a world entire. But we also teach them that they have a right and an obligation to live, and at this moment that means defending themselves and the country that right now feels like both the safest and the most unsafe place on earth.
I’m a Holocaust educator; multiple times a year, I take groups of non-Jewish students to Auschwitz for the day. I always make it a point to speak to them in block 27. In it, there is an installation by Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust Museum) taking over almost three quarters of the length of the room is what is known as the Book of Names; it is massive with over 4.8 million names of those murdered in the Holocaust.* At the other end of the room is a wall of screens; in each screen is an ever-changing photo album of Holocaust survivors with their families post-war, those fortunate to have walked away from the nightmare of the Shoah and built homes and lives for themselves, many in Israel, but equally from around the world. I tell students that the Jewish response to death is not revenge; it is life.
When the Nazis were defeated, when they put down their poison, when they holstered their guns, yes, we demanded justice, the criminals who could be found were tried and punishment for their crimes was met. But there was no mass destruction of Germany or any German the world over. Shocking to many were the Jews who settled in Germany after the war.
Yet, why am I surprised? I live in England, a country famed for the first blood libel and for expelling its Jews in 1290 and only allowing them back 366 years later. There are Jews living in France, Spain, Switzerland, and Germany, all countries that had expelled their Jewish population – in some cases, multiple times. I think this is our strength; we choose life. Every. Single. Time. And that means our children live, our nation goes on.
There are a number of commentators on the famed verse from the Book of Deuteronomy, ‘Choose life – so your children may live’. My explanation is simplistic, and I choose to read it at this time in its purest explanation: choose life, so that you may have children who will see you choose. Every time we choose life, we teach them to do the same, and they live, and we have more children. Simple biology and yet it escapes so many.
We will choose life every single time, and that may sometimes look like putting down our weapons and walking away and, at other times, it will look like us raising up our weapons to defend ourselves and our only safe haven. Both ways, we choose life.”
* Since its establishment, Yad Vashem has endeavored to gather the names of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust – one of its central missions. Yad Vashem’s Book of Names is the unique result of meticulous and painstaking work that commemorates 4,800,000 men, women and children whose details have been gathered and uncovered over the years – through Pages of Testimony, the location of various Holocaust-era documents, cooperation with memorial sites and more – which are memorialized in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.
Kubeh Disasters:
Last week, I sat down to dinner with old friends, and like any Jew alive at the moment, we started discussing the situation. They said something that upset me, and in fact, I knew it to be false information. However, I didn’t want to offend my friends or for the meal to end awkwardly, so I said nothing. At that point, the friend said, “I guess you agree with me as you are sitting quietly.” I spoke up and said I didn’t agree at all. In their turn, they told me I was misinformed, and being the coward that I am, I changed the subject. I then did some digging just to confirm that what I knew to be true was indeed true. Why did I need to double-check something I knew to be true? Why didn’t I trust myself? Why didn’t I speak up and tell my friend that they were unilaterally wrong?
Now, have a look at the picture of kubeh—the gorgeous professional pictures by the super-talented Blake Ezra of not-very-good-looking anemic kubeh. Let me explain what happened, and this was a life lesson for me. The pictures are not lying. On the morning of the photoshoot, I was suffering from a massive case of imposter syndrome; I was overwhelmed. We live in a world where expertise seems to be granted by how many people ‘follow’ you and how much they ‘like’ what you do. Because I don’t have many followers and fewer likes, I started doubting myself. The fact that this recipe is one I know probably better than I know my own name, that this is a recipe I not only grew up eating but also helped my grandmother make countless times, and yet I doubted myself so much that I made a last minute change.
On the morning of the photoshoot, I felt so insecure about my cooking and recipe-writing abilities that I experimented using a ‘published’ author’s method instead of my own. It not only failed, but it failed disastrously. It was falling apart in the pan, with bits of shell and minced meat floating in the oil rather than staying together in their compact and secure parcel. The one or two that held their shape needed to be fished out of the oil before they too exploded, so we were able to photograph just the one you see in my hand, being artistically held together between thumb and forefinger and dotted with tahini. My friends, this is a lifelong process for me. I have spent years writing recipes and even more years than that cooking and, before that, learning how to cook from my grandmother, the best cook that ever lived.
I allowed insecurities to tell me I was not good enough and that because someone else’s recipes had been published on paper by a publisher, surely their recipe was better. How often in life do we sell ourselves short? How often do we compromise what we believe and know because someone else seems like they have all the press attention? How often do we doubt what we know to be true? Each time I doubt myself from now on, be it about cooking or speaking truth, I will think about kubeh.
Amsalem:
Two weeks ago, I put together a cookbook called Amsalem – Recipes for Hope PDF cookbook, together with the uber-talented Blake Ezra, Emily Theodore, and Zahava Kahen. It is a collection of 28 Israeli recipes (28 in Hebrew is the numerical value of the word ‘koach,’ meaning strength), mainly inspired by my Savta (grandmother) Zahava. All the proceeds from the sale of this PDF cookbook go to Leket Israel, an organization that Daniel and I have been connected to since its inception. Leket has consistently been feeding Israel’s hungry, and with the onset of the war and the dislocation of families from the South of Israel, Leket finds itself having to feed hundreds of thousands more people every day. The funds we raise will go towards supporting this effort.