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There is a new advert for a machine that makes home-made, soft-serve ice cream. I hate it. I hate it so much that when we passed by it yesterday in the car, I wanted Daniel to pull over so I could scream into David Beckham’s face while his massive hand holds a cone of soft serve vanilla ice cream with a chocolate flake bar stuck in it. 

The first thing to say is that when David Beckham sells things like underwear and cologne I can see the correlation. I can see why advertisers would think that is a good match. But David Beckham, who probably hasn’t had sugar or carbs in the last 30 years? No, I just don’t buy him eating, let alone walking into his kitchen to make himself a soft serve ice cream. But the real reason I have pulled out my soap box and decided that this is the platform where I start convincing people not to buy the soft serve ice cream machine and its ilk, is because I’m railing against some – not all (I am not a heathen) – convenience culture. 

What machines am I referring to? It may be the professional grade coffee maker, the kind only seen in exclusive Italian coffee bars, the high-end treadmill, the personal sauna, the biggest TV on the market, and the home theatre, and for goodness’ sake do not buy the machine that makes you soft serve ice cream. If you have any of these at home, more power to you, but I will tell you where I am having an issue. 

These items, and so many more, keep you at home. 

If you really wanted to, in this day and age in the West, at the very least, but probably in other places, the average person, with average means, can too easily become agoraphobic. You can choose, if you wish, never to leave your home. You can, and may well, work from home, having every meeting virtually. You can have a full-time job and never even once meet a colleague face to face through an entire career. And if even that is too much, you can be self-employed in a virtual business selling a virtual product to virtually anyone. You can have your groceries delivered to your door, and if you are in decent health you can see your doctor remotely and get medication sent to you. You can build a gym in your home, relax in your home sauna, and watch the latest releases thanks to Netflix and other streaming services; in your home cinema, on a screen that once was reserved for movie theatres alone. You can make barista-grade coffee, and now the final bastion has fallen: you can have soft-serve ice cream, once the exclusive purview of ice cream trucks, in the comfort of your own home any time of day or night and any season. This is the essence of convenience culture.

My love of the ice cream truck has always been there. Outside elementary school in the summer months we would line up next to the ice cream truck before getting on the school bus and pick up Marino’s Italian ices (incidentally, cherry is my favourite, followed closely by lemon and then the cola flavour – I don’t trust people who like the blue flavour). If you were in the park and the ice cream truck was there it was all about the ice cream sandwich, the chocolate eclair or the strawberry shortcake. In the UK the ice cream truck is all about the soft serve with a chocolate flake stuck in it, once sold for 99 pence.

As a family, we spent a magical few weeks in Caesarea during the summer of 2008. My siblings and I, along with my parents, our spouses, and all our children. The kids spent all day in the pool or at the beach, it was magical. And a couple of times a week, the ice cream truck would turn up. We would wait and see which kid was the first to hear the distinctive music, and then en masse they would run out of the pool to the truck, dripping chlorinated water on the asphalt to keep their feet from burning, while they jumped up and down to get a better look at what ice creams were available that day. These are the small but profound human moments that will stay with my children forever.

Six years ago, friends of ours married off their son. We were privileged to make sheva brachot for them. Like many British people, my husband amongst them, this family loves the British seaside and had spent many happy summers visiting it. We served fish and chips, the chips doused in salt and malt vinegar and mushy peas. And as the pièce de résistance we told them that dessert was being served in our front driveway. In fact, the kosher ice cream truck, Uncle Doovy’s, was parked out front and everyone lined up for an ice cream cone with a flake bar in it. The young couple were beyond excited and every adult was thrilled with the surprise. These are the moments that embody the irreplaceable magic of shared experiences.

If each of us had one of David Beckham’s soft serve machines on our countertop, we would be robbed of that experience and take the magic away from our children.

More than that, the market economy, with each and every purchase, separates us from other people. When was the last time you needed to borrow anything from someone else that wasn’t easier to order on Amazon Prime? When was the last time you called someone for a recipe? It’s usually easier to look it up online. I, more often than not, order my groceries online. At one point it had been six months since I had stepped into a supermarket. Each one of these things that is there to make our lives easier, separates us more and more from other people, confines us to our homes and the people in our homes. And if, like so many people in the modern world, one lives alone, that is a recipe for loneliness on a scale previously unknown. Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, warns that “For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, each generation was more engaged in community life than its parents. During the last third of the century, that trend reversed.” We have created a world where we have almost entirely cut out our dependence on, and need for other people. Putnam also notes “The single most common finding from half a century’s research on life satisfaction is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one’s social connections.”

This is why I love Judaism. Judaism in its wisdom, thousands of years before we turned into an economy of “I”, believed in the “we.” Judaism provides a built-in antidote to isolation. Judaism does not work as an individual religion. You cannot go into isolation and be a Jew. Even the nazir (nazirite), the word meaning separation or crown, does not separate themselves from other people, only from drinking wine, cutting hair, and contact with the dead. So yes, he is separated during times of communal grief, not ideal in the view of the sages, but he is by no means in isolation. While other religions venerate isolation and asceticism as the highest degree of worship, Judaism encourages community at every step. Pirkei Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers) teaches: “Do not separate yourself from the community” [2:4]. During Covid, rabbis were at their wits’ end on how Judaism would work, and in fact it was a real challenge: from how do you pray to how do you bury someone, how do you go to the mikvah, how do you celebrate someone’s wedding? Judaism has never been a religion that functions without community. Community is essential to Jewish practice. 

Yet, it wasn’t until I saw David Beckham holding an ice cream cone (that frankly looked ridiculous in his hand) that I realised the incredible intelligent design of Judaism and its practices. While the modern market economy drives us away from each other, Judaism consistently pushes us together, and never more so than at our Shabbat tables. Shabbat is an island of time and space in our highly connected (electronic) yet at the same time highly disconnected (from other humans) world. This is what happens when convenience replaces encounter. 

Shabbat meals are to be shared, phones and devices away, people present. Slow, meandering conversations, and getting to hear about people’s weeks, their successes and challenges, what they hope for in the week to come, we connect with people around us. And we need that. We need to go out into the world. We need to talk to the people we see in the street, and not (as I do but really should stop) plug in as soon as I walk out the door. We should speak to the person behind the till as we check out and not keep talking into our headphones. We should order coffee and thank the person who serves it and ask how they are doing. We should put down our phones at concerts and ask the person next to us when they started liking the artist on stage. At sports events we should cheer and jeer with the person next to us. At the supermarket we should choose our own produce and lament the end of tomato season with the lady in front of us in line. Modern life is making it too comfortable and too easy to close in on ourselves. 

Traditional Jewish practice does not allow for that.

My last bit of advice: do not buy the soft serve ice cream maker. Listen out for the ice cream truck, line up with others and buy a cone. Make it a treat. Not only is modern life conspiring to isolate us, it is ensuring that the small treats, the tiny thrills of life, become everyday and common, taking away our sense of wonder. We must protect the irreplaceable magic of shared experiences. It is our responsibility to hold on to the magic of the small shared moment and create it for ourselves and others.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explained: “Judaism has foundational beliefs, to be sure, but it is fundamentally about something else altogether. For us, faith is the redemption of solitude. It is about relationships – between us and God, us and our family, us and our neighbours, us and our people, us and humankind. Judaism is not about the lonely soul. It is about the bonds that bind us to one another and to the Author of all. It is, in the highest sense, about friendship.”

— Judaism’s Life‑Changing Ideas, page 201

DO try THIS at Home:

With all of this in mind I’m sharing two new recipes this week that are projects, just fun things to do in the kitchen together with others. Making marshmallows may seem like a ridiculous thing to do in the kitchen, but they are fun to make and just as fun to eat. For me, the sense of accomplishment in making confectionery at home is of a higher calibre than any other cooking feat, because it is the kind of thing you can generally only buy packaged. That said, it is a project best done with others. I’m pretty sure that my kids, growing up, enjoyed making marshmallows with me far more than eating them.

The second project-based recipe is empanadas, steeped in Sephardi tradition. These baked food parcels are the predecessors of burekas and sambusak. They are not only a brilliant project to make as we near the end of summer and wait for regular life to kick in, but I am yet to meet a young person who doesn’t love eating them.

The last new recipe this week is super easy, if a bit unusual. This salad, a mix of tomatoes, nectarines, and avocado, is a celebration of summer produce at its best, brought together with a simple dressing. It is summer on a plate, just as the weather in London threatens to turn autumnal.

Daniel and I will be packing up our kitchen this coming week, so for the moment I’m not really cooking for Shabbat. Next week, however, I will endeavour to share a few suggestions on how to shop well for Shabbat from one of the many pre-made Shabbat food stores you can find in the heart of traditional communities around the world.