The Serendipity of the Sabbath Queen

On how holiness doesn't discriminate.

I’m doing something strange this week. There is so much tumult. There are so many collective questions. Why? How? What? What can I do?

I’m writing about a film showing tomorrow at TSL in Hudson. And about what had happened years before I saw it, and what happened to me after I saw it, and the meal I’ll be cooking when the credits roll.

I stopped practicing Judaism the second semester of my junior year of college. It was a dramatic shift, and it happened quickly, almost cataclysmically.

I spent the whole academic year abroad—the first half at the University of Barcelona, where I attended services at a tiny, under-funded synagogue in an old neighborhood. I was so struck by the vividness of its congregation—its hospitality, the vibrancy of its prayer—that I wrote home to my rabbi at Bet Torah, in Mount Kisco, describing the beauty of the synagogue’s Kol Nidrei, the mismatched folding chairs and crumbling walls, the prayer books in such short supply that groups of us had to share.

I was told that Rabbi Fine read my letter at a Shabbat service. A 12-year old member of the congregation was so moved that she donated her bat-mitzvah money to the Barcelona synagogue so that the following year there would be enough prayer books to go around.

I tell you this story to point out how stark my departure from Judaism was. Within six months of writing home to Rabbi Fine, I had rejected the spiritual and ritual tradition that had defined my life until then. The shift, the change so extreme it was almost a shedding of a self, happened in Jerusalem.

I’m half Israeli. I spent the second half of my junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I wish I could say that, immediately upon landing in Jerusalem from Spain after not having been there in years, I saw and understood the country’s apartheid, and Israel’s cruelty to Palestinians, and that my understanding caused the crisis. In reality, it started with a cat.

I lived in a dorm, mostly with American Jews more observant than me. A number strictly observed Sabbath—refraining from turning lights on or off, answering the phone, and other activities that had been defined by Jewish law as un-Sabbath-like. As a less strict adherent, on Saturdays, I would turn their lights on and off for them and answer their phones. They wore long skirts so their knees didn’t show. They covered their shoulders. I understood all of this as an observance of the Holy. As a deference to Holiness in the world, made real and specific for them in this way—but a piece with a shared understanding of what we believed.

Then, on a rare rainy day in Jerusalem, I found a very wet and very hungry and very scared kitten outside our dorm. I brought it inside. I dried it and fed and warmed it and agonized over it for a couple of days—in the manner of a nineteen year old—trying to decide what to do. Then, I received a petition from the girls for whom I spent Saturdays turning on and off lights and answering phones to get the animal out of the building immediately or be reported to university authorities.

That was the beginning of the fissure, the crack in my understanding of Jewishness—what it was about and for—that deepened over the next few months in Jerusalem. I can’t explain why the cat opened my eyes to the barbed wire separating Palestinians from Jews, or to the cruel marginalization of women, or of the queer and trans communities, or the pettiness of so much of what called Jewish religious law. I can only say what happened: In October 1997, I was writing home to my rabbi about a synagogue in Spain. By May of 1998, I’d left it all behind me.

What does this have to do with food?

A few months ago, a friend took me to see Sabbath Queen at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. Filmed over twenty-one years, it tells the story of a thirty-ninth generation Jewish Israeli rabbi named Amichai Lau-Lavie through the lens of his own grappling with the questions I asked when the observant girls who refused to flip a light switch—in the name of the Holy—wanted me to turn a wet hungry kitten onto the street. And to live silently and contentedly in an oasis while neighbors behind fences lacked water. And to avidly study computer science while neighbors behind fences lacked electricity. And to teach teach our children to enforce a brutal occupation. In Sabbath Queen, Amichai grapples with these contradictions. As an Israeli, as a Jew, and as a rabbi.

I cried for most of the movie. When it ended, I turned to the people beside me and said: This is the first time in thirty years that I’ve felt like a Jew.

Sabbath Queen is showing tomorrow in Hudson. It’s one showing only. Afterwards, I’m cooking a Shabbat dinner—which due to logistical limitations is sold out, alas.

It’s the first Shabbat dinner I’ll be hosting in as clear-minded a way as I am in many years. It’s the first I’ll be hosting meaning the Jewish prayers I say, able to say them whole-heartedly, in the spirit of the Sabbath and in the spirit of all humanity and all spirit, and in an understanding of liberation as a web, pulling against oppression, straining towards love.

I’ll write the menu here:

Snacks: Lupini beans, plantain chips, Sunday salsa

Dinner: Challah by my mom, Mujadera (with yogurt and techina; my techina is: 1:1 tahini to warm water, pounded garlic, salt, lemon!) Samascott farm green beans with lemon, spring onions, parsley; Holmquest farm tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, and mint; Amy’s Brownies with whipped cream.

Come to the movie. Or light candles at home. Cook a meal of mostly vegetables and beans to honor all that we have, and all that is holy. Welcome the Sabbath with me, queen that she is.