You shall eat it in a holy place…
-Leviticus 10:13
I’m not going to waste your time telling you the joke
about the summary of all Jewish holidays.
(Okay, maybe just parenthetically, in the unlikely event
you don’t know it: They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.)
Every sentence of this section
of this Torah portion is about eating.
We are instructed to eat.
We are instructed what to eat.
We are instructed how to eat.
We are instructed where to eat.
Nothing is left to question.
If one of the great mysteries of your life
has been where and how to eat
the Breast of Waving, then this is your moment.
(Also if you didn’t know there was a
breast of waving, and for that matter
a thigh of raising, I’m only too happy
to share this information.)
Everything Jewish begins with, ends with
or is composed of eating.
Even the times we are not supposed to eat
culminate with eating.
We can’t get away from it. (Nor do we want to!)
I may take a break from writing this to have a snack.
Okay, I’m back. I hope you’re not hungry.
You should really eat something.
You’re starting to look a little thin.
Are you wearing enough sweaters
And for heaven’s sake, write down
all the details of the recipe.
You don’t want your descendants screwing it up
with interpretation.
You should eat.
You should eat right now.
Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 25 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express” (Poems written in Japan – Ain’t Got No Press, August 2020) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.
