After the flurry of fall holidays, it may seem that the months between Sukkot and Passover lack opportunities for Jews to get together to eat, but this is not so. Of course there’s Chanukah, but our tradition actually commands us to have festive meals throughout the year. Almost every time we fulfill a mitzvah, we are encouraged to mark it by gathering around a communal table.
In Hebrew, it’s called seudat mitzvah (commanded meal). We mark Shabbat at the table and celebrate with bride and groom over food. We share a meal of consolation with a mourner after a funeral. A brit is not ritually complete unless there is a meal. The bar and bat mitzvah conclude with food, as does pidyon haben, or redeeming the first born. And if you should finish a tractate of Talmud, for heaven’s sake, eat!
This obligation to share a meal is a delightful thing. Eating naturally brings people together and the festive meal creates community — a core Jewish value — and memories. (Smell, an essential part of eating, is a powerful stimulator of memory.) But how delightful you find all this may depend on how responsible you are for creating the meal, your expectations and how much else you are also obligated to do in your day.
During my mother’s girlhood in the Great Depression, her family sometimes had nothing on the table but government cheese and bread. Food was a source of anxiety. As an adult, faced with the postwar ideal of the happy homemaker, she found making holiday meals a challenge. In spite of her good intentions, the atmosphere around the table was often more stress-filled than festive.
In spite of this, as soon as I left home, I began having big dinner parties — casual gatherings around an outdoor picnic table with bowls of pasta and bottles of cheap red wine. When I converted and joined the Jewish community, the seudat mitzvah should have been a natural for me, but the rules and expectations made me anxious. My post-college friends had been amazed to be invited over to eat anything, whereas my born-Jewish friends had all kinds of complex relationships to meals — history, memories, opinions about ways to make kugel, commitments to cuts of brisket.
Apparently, I’m not alone. Sally Weber, a social worker who spent many of her 22 years at Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles (JFSLA) helping people move from the edges of the community into Jewish life, explained to me that for some people, especially single parents, festive meals feel more like work than reward.
So Weber introduced them to Pizza Shabbat, a ritual dinner that began with picking up take-out on the way home from work. For some families, pizza turned into pizza and challah, grew into pizza, challah and candles, and eventually became a five-course dinner; for others, just having everyone in the family sit down together was pleasure enough.
For people looking to fully enjoy a 21st-century seudat, Weber counsels a willingness to let go of some 20th-century expectations. Men can light candles. Women can lead Kiddush. She said we should figure out what in a ritual is really important — be it a particular family tradition or something as simple as having children and parents eating together — and concentrate on that.
I’ve found there’s something magical about sitting at a table lit by candles, whether it’s our whole chavurah on the eighth night of Chanukah or just my husband and me on Shabbat. I’ve also come to love the way blessings bring our voices together. (And I confess here, to you all, that I have never made kugel, although I enjoy eating it in all its permutations.)
Weber retired from JFSLA in 2012 but says she failed retirement after only a few months, and went back to working full time for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. She still regularly invites family and friends to her home in Encino for Shabbat dinner because she loves to plan and cook the meals, but she allows that sometimes she and her husband observe a different tradition, one I plan to adopt: Pajama Shabbat. (With candles, of course.)
What is it about eating together that fits so perfectly into Jewish practice? Talmud says ritual meals civilized the Israelites in the wilderness.
The title of the great 16th-century Jewish code of law, the Shulchan Aruch (set table), implies a real connection between how we eat together — the doing, the making, the sharing — and our spiritual lives. For me, what makes Pizza Shabbat, with or without candles, different from a regular take-out dinner is being aware of the context. Around a table, celebrating or mourning, I connect to tradition and to the people I share it with.
