Attires of the holiday (2)

What did we do on Shavuot? I want to mention three things and this goes to show, more so, what I wrote yesterday -- how this festival of the reception of the Torah, for all practical purposes is one of the early harvest.
We had a campfire with friends, we made a basket of offerings with stuff we made in our kitchen and took it to friends and then we visited a kibbutz to see the celebrations there.
The Kibbutz celebrations are very traditional in Israel and make no statements on the Torah at all and all the more work out as a display of all the harvest elements these agricultural communities can offer. A couple of years ago we witnessed one in the Galilee with an impressive procession of tractors and other farming auxiliaries, decorated with whatever representation of what this kibbutz was farming. This was followed by performances of singing dancing and such.
This time round, in a much more urbanized settlement. The result was unbelievably poor. If one ever needed a reminder that we urbanized folk hardly have any rural roots left, we got one here.


The question this observation together with yesterday's raise is: are we finally ready to leave behind the ancient acting out of Shavuot and move to the more cerebral, abstract meaning of Shavuot: reception of Torah. The Jewish tradition launched.
On a side note. The Christians mapped onto this and the festival became Pentecost, which is the reception of the Holy Spirit and the launching of the Church. I wonder what pagan festivals were hijacked in order to Christianize the Europeans and get them to celebrate Pentecost.

Attires of the holiday (1)

Shavuot is the Holiday that commemorates the reception of the Torah. It is also a harvest Holiday as you can understand from the other names of the Festival: Chag haKatzir (Festival of the Reaping) and Yom haBikkurim (Day of the firsts (fruits etc.)). It is customary to dress up in white, eat dairy products, exchange baskets of fruit, vegetables and dairy (Tenne) and have children wear flower wreaths. I have asked why there is this strong connection with white and dairy and obtained various answers over the years. One is that the Israelites were white as children (innocent, naive, ignorant), when they got the Torah. Another is that the laws for kashrut were not yet known and so they ate dairy. And yet another is that in order to be ready to obtain the Law, the Jews must wash up and become white.
Well, I am no scholar and here is not the place I want to criticize these explanations. All I want to say is that, more than with any other Jewish Holiday, the liturgic meaning of the chag (Reception of the Law), is overshadowed by the additional meaning, by the look of things. This additional meaning, totally dominates the holiday and makes it for the secular newbie that I am, an exclusive harvest festival. It is all about the first fruits and grains and milk that have been reaped. It makes it more likely than with other religious festivals, that this festival was mapped onto an older, rural, maybe even pagan festival.
The amazing thing is, that these Jews that are more urban than ever, still live the earliest roots of the chag in a stronger sense than the newer ones.

Sour soup with fennel and garlic

Five pieces of fennel,
half a garlic (7-10 cloves),
tea spoon turmeric,
tea spoon ground cumin,
pepper,
two lemons,
a table spoon and a half of olive oil,
salt.

Clean the fennels (keep the green leafage aside) and cut to fine pieces. Put one table spoon of olive oil in the pan on low heat and add the turmeric and the cumin. Stir fry for two minutes and add the fennel. Stir fry for ten minutes, while gradually increasing heat (make sure neither the spices nor the fennel gets burned). Add ample salt and boiling water (3 to 4 liters). Then add the garlic. Cook for 15 minutes and then add the juice of two lemons. Cook on low heat for another two minutes, add the leafage of the fennel and allow standing time. Add salt and pepper for taste.

Aubergine, eggplant, חציל

If you do not know how to deal with aubergine, it is a really terrible vegetable. It can be a tasteless sponge that makes your dish heavy and even make some people ill, whether it is because of allergy or otherwise. It can be a nightmare while preparing dinner. The green of the plant is like a nasty thistle that hurts your fingers and leaves the sensation of having touched a cactus. Throw in the aubergine too late and the whole dish is ready to serve except for the aubergine that is bitter and rubbery. Cast it in too early and the sponge takes in all the fluids messing up the stew for other ingredients. Over the years, I have begun to learn to get the eggplant under control, and I am still learning.
If you peel the aubergine, cut it in strips and cook it with lemon and tahin, you can get a soup that competes with a creamy soup of asparagus -- I am still trying to get that recipe right. I am also perfecting a dish with minced meat and a red sauce. My wife has some good results with softening the cubed eggplant in the microwave. So there is lots to come.

The easiest way to begin getting the aubergine right is by using the oven or the grill. Without additions, aubergine at high temperatures, turns soft, liquid even, if given enough time. The flavor is sharp and pleasantly scorched. The softened eggplant makes for an excellent basis of pastes, sauces and stews. I'll give two of them here.

Take an aubergine and cut it lengthwise in half. Cover the halves with tinfoil and burn them at 200 degrees for about an hour. (This depends on the power of the oven and the size and toughness of the plants. Large and tough needs more time and power.) After this treatment, you can scoop the liquid out of the peel. Mix it with garlic, a little tahin, lemon and pepper for a traditional middle-eastern side dish. Last night though I made two other side dishes.

1. Mix with oil, lemon, salt and pepper. (Burnt Aubergine, חציל על האש)
2. Mix with half a spoon of mayonnaise and ground black pepper. (Baba 'Anush)

Gravitational waves

Me and Physics; don't make me laugh. I dropped out of Physics class in high school (3 atheneum). I can't even get Newton's equations right. Forget about General Relativity. What could I possibly make of gravitational waves? I am a man for History, languages, Law, in case you hadn't noticed. It just so happens that Law brought me to Sociology and Sociology to Logic of Science and once there, you roll from Popper to Einstein and back to Physics with renewed interest. Interest is one thing, but how in the world am I going to grasp all that if I couldn't keep up, right from the start?

In our time, comes to the rescue. Melvyn Bragg met with Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey, with Carolin Crawford, Royal Society Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge and with Sheila Rowan, Professor in Experimental Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow and they sorted it all out for me. I am not going to try to reproduce anything of their discussion here, no need to get audacious, but believe me, I didn't miss a second. This podcast is one of the very, very best there is.

Schug (סחוג) [s.ch.oo.g]

Schug is a spicey additive that has its roots in Yemen. You can mix it with sauces, salads and soups. My father-in-law used to make it at home after learning the recipe from a Yemenite Jew colleague of his. I asked him on occasion how he made it, but it was only several years after he passed away that I set out to reconstruct the recipe. Today I make a schug that is different from what I recall was his, but has developed in the direction my wife and I like it best.

green peppers
fresh cilantro leaves (Koriander, כוסברה)
lots of garlic
cumin
cardamom
black pepper
salt
olive oil
lemon

Every time I take the ingredients in different proportions. It really depends on the season and what I know of the quality, strength of taste, in the ingredients. Right now, because the warm season has started, I use more salt and oil to prevent early molding.
Clean four green peppers: cut off the top and bottom, throw away the seeds and cut them in easy to chop pieces and throw in a blender. Add one tea spoon of salt, one tea spoon ground cardamom, one tea spoon ground cumin and half a tea spoon fine ground black pepper and a spoon oil. Blend. Add a handful of cilantro leaves (100-200 gram) and seven cloves of garlic. Blend until the whole becomes a green paste. Add more oil and the juice of one lemon. Blend for five minutes.