Misunderstood and then decapitated,
Marie Antoinette
was very inappropriately hated
for having declared: “Let
them all eat cake (she meant the sort with cheese) …..
who cares if they will sue us?”
French folk would to the Fräulein have said “Please!”
if she’d said it on Shavuos,
but to the story we should pay no homage,
because she never said it.
The story’s fraudulent, free from French fromage,
fake news we need to edit.
Instead let us all concentrate on truth,
called in the Torah emet,
and after on Shavuot reading Ruth,
eat cheesecake free of rennet.
Cheese is of course the very best of fillers
for cake that isn’t parveh,
most parva (brief) of the five megillahs,
the one that I most love, a
dessert for something I would never barter:
the Torah all Jews this day re-receive,
its six thirteen commandments’ magna carta,
God-given, Jews believe.
I think the reason that Jews have a minhag to eat cheesecake on Shavuot is because of the description of Mount Sinai, the site of the theophany that we celebrate on the festival, as הַר גַּבְנֻנִּים, Har Gabnunim, in Ps. 68:16:טז הַר-אֱלֹהִים הַר-בָּשָׁן: הַר גַּבְנֻנִּים, הַר-בָּשָׁן. 16 A mountain of God is the mountain of Bashan; har gabnunim, a mountain with humps is the mountain of Bashan.
The word גַּבְנֻנִּים, gabnunim, is related to a Hebrew root גבן, gbn, which not only denotes “hump-backed,” but also means “coagulate,” the root of the Hebrew word for cheese, גבינה, gebinah,; as in Job 10:10 (translated by Edward Greenstein in Job: A New Translation (Yale; 2019):
י הֲלֹא כֶחָלָב, תַּתִּיכֵנִי; וְכַגְּבִנָּה, תַּקְפִּיאֵנִי. 10 Have you not poured me out like milk, and jelled me like gebinah, cheese?
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
