Oneiron

  Most kosher rules are based on a prohibition on mixing, which is based on the belief that according to God, each individual thing (whether person, object, or dish of food) must have its own recognizable singularity, its very own created nature.

  Nowadays kosher requirements for food feel just as arbitrary as the prohibition of shatnez: any mixture of wool and linen in the same garment. This rule probably originated from the fact that linen was imported from estuarine areas such as the Nile Valley in Egypt, while the production of wool is connected with the pastoral economy that the Jewish tribes wandering in the desert practiced. At a symbolic level, combining wool and linen therefore means mixing Egypt and Judaism.

  Naturally kosher foods, fruits and vegetables, are low-calorie and thus they also often form the basis for the anorexic’s diet. You can eat them without any complicated arrangements. Almost everything else is difficult. Ruminants are allowed, but only if their hooves are entirely cloven. Cows and sheep are kosher, while horses with their cornified hoof capsules belong to the odd-toed ungulates (perissodactyla), and also aren’t ruminants. Rabbits chew cud but have paws. Pigs have cloven hooves but don’t ruminate.

  In order for a water animal to be kosher, it has to have fins and visible scales. For example, clams, crabs, lobsters, eels, sturgeon, and lampreys are prohibited (trefa). Insects are also not allowed. Blood is super-extra trefa.

  I know of one tragic anorexia case that has a clear connection to kosher law. A girl, let’s call her Rivka, began having panic attacks after her bat mitzvah over animal blood somehow invading her body. The fear didn’t subside even though her mother and father assured her that her terror was irrational. And why would it subside since the Law is full of tenets that were just as irrational!

  Rivka cleaned and cleaned the house, cleaning after she finished cleaning. She couldn’t eat anything because everything she put in her mouth might have some drop of blood hiding in it. Even in an orange she peeled herself!

  Ultimately Rivka had to be admitted to a hospital. The last I heard of her, a fistula had been created in her stomach so she could directly inject a substance into her stomach that it would be a sin to call food. It was a soft, light brown ooze broken down with artificial enzymes into basic nutrients: glucose (energy for the cells), amino acids (building material for the organs), and glycerol (building material for the cells).

  Each and every bag of this stuff was packaged as if Rivka were on her way to outer space, and each and every bag was blessed by a rabbi who pledged, in the name of God, that there was not a drop of blood mixed in with the sludge.

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  Animals must be slaughtered properly (shechita) and the meat must be prepared carefully. Soaking and salting ensure that the blood has been removed from the meat. Because a calf cannot be boiled in its own mother’s milk—what a macabre idea!—meat and milk products cannot be combined or consumed during the same meal.

  For some, a quick swish of water in their mouth is enough if they want to have some meat after a piece of cheese. Others wait an hour. If you want to eat aged cheese, the waiting time increases significantly. If you want to have a piece of hard cheese after enjoying your beef, the wait is from four to six hours. Of course the cheese can’t contain rennet, which means it has to be purchased from a store that specializes in kosher products.

  A doctrinaire kosher kitchen will have two sets of dishes, two sinks, and two refrigerators to separate meat and milk products. Cleaning dishes is an art in itself. Fire or boiling water destroy any foodstuffs that have soaked into the pores of a metal dish. But ceramics are so porous that they have to sit empty for a year if you want to serve a cheese soufflé on a ceramic plate after a meat pie. Glass is the only material immune to this sort of absorption.

  Unleavened matso bread is dear to the Jewish heart. At the Pesach or Passover seder, leavened breads are absolutely forbidden. In Jewish culture, leaven (chametz) represents egotism and a proud heart.

  Because sudden, undesirable departures have been a recurring part of Jewish life, unleavened dough has become a reminder for members of the community that they must always be ready to flee again. In passing let it be noted that preparation for departure and leaving the past behind made the creation of the Book possible. When the Temple was destroyed and the Jewish diaspora began, religious knowledge had to be portable. Interruptions in knowledge are unacceptable, so the recorded and copied Word is significantly more reliable than a religious scholar, who can always be killed or silenced.

  Preparing for Pesach includes removing all flour products from the home to ensure that no traces of leaven are left behind. All food must be absolutely kosher during Pesach. Even the wine is grown in vineyards that specialize exclusively in the production of Pesach wine. No one is allowed to eat anything in the areas devoted to producing the wine in order to prevent any cross-contamination.

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  Identification with the skeletal bodies of holocaust victims is also another partial explanation for the prevalence of anorexia in Jewish society. We all know the myth of Simone Weil, who empathized so deeply with the concentration camp prisoners that she died of a heart attack brought on by severe malnutrition at the age of thirty-four.

  Simone Weil’s example, whether true or not, has spurred many young Jewish women on the road to anorexia. This has served as a more noble and spiritual excuse for refusing food than the narcissistic ideologies of the Internet, like thinspiration and pro ana.

  The concentration camp connection is not as fanciful as it might seem, since the Shoah still haunts us particularly in the Jewish kitchen. Parents often force their small children to eat by saying, “Take this bite for your uncle who passed in Treblinka, take this bite for your grandmother who never left Sobibór.”15

  So food is fundamentally a struggle for survival, the opposite of slavery, and we actively try to nurture this memory. The Pesach meal I mentioned a moment ago begins with the words, “Let all who are hungry come to eat, let every slave taste of freedom during this meal!”

  At the same time, Jewish culture is full of contradictory messages. A grandmother might say to her rail-thin granddaughter, “You look good, child. You’re so thin! Now come, the food is on the table!” Mothers who cook send the same sorts of contradictory signals to their daughters, “Eat! Eat!” and then, “Diet! Diet!”16

  *

  I’d like to end my lecture with my personal experience at the kibbutz, but before that a few words about the foundations of the kibbutz movement.

  The kibbutz ideology was born as a counterpoint to traditional Jewish culture. The Hebrew word “kibbutz” means a group. The first kibbutz was founded in 1909 in Degania, and the movement enjoyed its golden age after the Second World War. Jews moving to Israel wanted their own land where they could have peace from their persecutors. They also wanted to make a break from ghetto culture, whose conventionality, family focus, and Jewish religious rituals they experienced as oppressive.

  Jewish religion encouraged men to thank God each day that He didn’t create them as women. Women had to cover their heads and their hair, and cut their hair when they got married. So it’s no surprise that the kibbutz movement supported gender equality at least in theory.

  At a symbolic level, chauvinism still insinuated itself insidiously into the foundations of the movement. One of the basic images of kibbutz culture was a new, proud, masculine Jew who had not been made effeminate by exile.

  The experiment exceeded all expectations: the kibbutz created a completely new personality type in the course of a single generation. A personality with the theatrical pathos of ghetto life, those deep currents of emotion that previously overflowed so extravagantly and loudly before the whole community, rooted out from it. A “masculine”, calculating sensibility took the place of “feminine” emotionality.

  This was the departure of the Wandervögel of Central Europe from their ghettos at the turn of the century. They took off into the air from their shtetlekh, their tiny Jewish towns, whose atmospher
e nauseated them. The eating ceremonies of the ghetto particularly disgusted them. The father’s place, second only to God, was at the head of the table. The mother’s place was bustling about with the pots and pans. First the mother boiled, roasted, and stewed. Then everyone ate, and finally came the questions: “How was it?” “Did you like it?” “Did you really get enough?” All said by the ghetto mother in a voice that aroused guilt in the heart of even the most stubborn offspring.

  In the kibbutz, food only had instrumental value. We ate nutrients, stomach filler, not “food”, and especially not “delicacies”. We always ate in the communal dining hall, without ceremony. We scarfed down the meals we prepared as quickly as possible, without needless chatter.

  The previous symbolic value of food was completely nullified. In one’s own quarters it was improper to prepare or eat food, because eating alone could involve unbridled private pleasures that represented a crime against the spirit of the kibbutz. Eating alone, just like fasting alone, were impossible concepts.

  At first I thought this was the best thing about the whole kibbutz: I could eat without anyone watching, mechanically, at specific scheduled times of day. My weight climbed to a normal level within my first year at Methuselah. Eighteen months later I became pregnant with my first child.

  I have two children, my firstborn son Moti, who is now thirty-seven years old, and my daughter Malka, who is one year younger. I haven’t seen them once since I left. That has been a difficult experience. I understood that they really didn’t need me. That the community was their mother, and they accepted that without complaint.

  After Moti’s birth I was so confused about all the big changes happening in my life so quickly that I didn’t know how to question the kibbutz methodology. I let things happen, even though inside I knew that something was seriously wrong. But with Malka, my maternal instincts came into their own.

  I was only allowed to nurse her for six months. The central committee of our kibbutz had stipulated so. After that she had to learn to eat from the cups owned by the community, which the metapelet used to feed her purees. My breast was too personal. It didn’t belong to the kibbutz, so they wanted to wean her from it as quickly as possible.

  According to the declaration of the central committee, breastfeeding past six months no longer served any nutritional purpose. It was only for pleasure, in other words pointless and possibly harmful.

  Whose pleasure was in question, the suckling child’s or the nursing mother’s, they didn’t say. I would argue that the two cannot be separated. Mother and child are one, joined by the sweet milk, the most perfect nutrition possible. I’ve never experienced any feeling of completion quite like it!

  Once again, this is an example of how pleasure, especially women’s pleasure, is seen as a threat in Jewish culture. The fact that this negative view of pleasure was hiding in the tenets of the kibbutz ideology, which are in complete opposition to so many religious diktats, is irrelevant. The dogmas are still there, and they can be used to shrink and curtail a person when necessary, no matter how noble the principles.

  So oral, maternal pleasures were off limits at Methuselah. Children weren’t even allowed to suck their thumbs. I asked about this at one of the general meetings. My husband, Dovid, elbowed me angrily in the side. “We’re still in our trial period,” he whispered and asked me to keep my mouth shut. But I didn’t. I raised my hand, and when my turn came I asked, “Why aren’t children even allowed to suck their thumbs?”

  Patiently they replied that thumb sucking emotionally separates the child from the community she has to belong to. That the thumb becomes an insidious hiding place where the child can escape. That the child gets more pleasure and safety from the thumb than from the collective. And that this is not acceptable.

  The kibbutz has also been studied from the perspective of eating disorders. According to some studies, the ideology built around collectivity, especially the socialistic tendencies in the movement, protects against eating disorders.17 Contradictory results also exist which suggest that kibbutz life creates a predisposition to pathological eating behavior since those brought up there live in a cross-fire of conflicting messages: on the one hand you have kibbutz life and on the other the western lifestyle, and these two are not easily combined.18

  My own time at the kibbutz definitely strengthened my identity as an anorexic. After having my children I was in a very vulnerable condition even though I looked mostly fine on the outside. When I wasn’t able to be a mother to Malka and Moti after that first six months of nursing, I became completely estranged from my own body. I had given birth to them, but suddenly I had to pretend that they hadn’t actually come from me. That I could just be replaced by a “professional educator”, whose only task seemed to be to snuff the light of curiosity from my children’s eyes. And she did a marvelous job!

  I returned to the kibbutz once, in February 1974, before I left Israel for good. My naive intention was to kidnap my children. Even though less than half a year had passed since my departure, neither of my children knew me any more. They were happy like children immersed in structured play with others often are. They were friendly to me, because at the kibbutz everyone is friendly. Every single individual trait had been successfully rooted out of them. They could have been anyone’s children.

  My ex-husband didn’t want to see me. The other members of the community were terribly nice to me, though. They knew that I’d end up leaving with my tail between my legs. They knew that the three-year-old mechanical Malka and her older brother, mechanical Moti, were operating exactly according to the rules programmed into them. Everyone felt so comfortable they didn’t hesitate to invite me to stay a few days longer.

  They made up a bed in the guest house—in the same room where they put up teenage summer workers from Europe. How much is it possible to demean a person?

  I left early in the morning without saying goodbye to anyone. On the table in the dining hall I left a letter addressed to the monster named Methuselah. It was the most angry, bitter letter I’ve ever written. It was my J’accuse letter to the collective of tyrants who pretended to live in true equality. They took away my children. They brainwashed my husband. In the letter I vowed revenge. I will now read a translation of the letter:

  Monster Methuselah!

  You all have names I could call you by: Ditsa, Zmira, Dovid, Moshe, Chaim, Gal, Dani, Eliahu, Ester, Josh, Yehudit, Libbi, Rachel, Tuvia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But why would I bother? You are part of a machine. Tiny workers in an anthill. There is nothing uncompelled in you. Monster Methuselah: hopefully you won’t be too offended by the name I’m cramming you all into. We did live together for seven years, after all.

  Dear Monster, you may be aware that sometimes you show symptoms of sickness beneath your placid surface. I’ll give an example. In the fall after the Six-Day War, one of the organs who operates under you, an organ named Lea, met some of her friends from the army in Tel Aviv. First she broke down in a clothing shop. Then she couldn’t decide what to choose from the menu at a restaurant. She came back from her trip in tears. She refused to rise from her bed for three days, so crushing was her experience of freedom.

  You abandoned the doctrines of Judaism, but you replaced them with new dogmas. In the beginning I believed that clear, detailed rules were necessary to accomplish the greater good, so you, Methuselah, could flourish and offer your members the best of everything. So none of your members would turn capricious or egotistical. For a long time I refused to believe that in reality you only wanted to subjugate and enslave. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever have a serious discussion in this country about whether a child can suck her thumb or not!

  No area of life went untouched by the rules you created and the ludicrous adaptations they required. I understand this, though. Without them, you wouldn’t exist. You would die, Monster Methuselah, if we acted according to our own will using our own brains.

  Do not kill. To my mind, this is a sensible rule. (Of cour
se it doesn’t apply to you. You are bloodthirsty and sent Noam, Yoel, Gidon, Yosken and Ben-Zion to the front to die.) Do not own anything—OK, so we share everything equally. But this is not enough for you, Methuselah. You also want us to divide our emotions equally. You forbid me from loving my children, because you think I love them “too much”. According to you, I love them wrong even though I’m their mother, so of course I know how much they need me!

  Methuselah, you are a sadist, a psychopath, a narcissist, a criminal, and a murderer. You smoked me out using the greatest possible emotional violence, because I didn’t obey you. You harnessed all your members to attack me: my husband, Dovid, who had helped me recover from my difficult disease. The nanny, Zmira, whose energetic personality I thought I liked at first. My friends Ditsa, Moshe, Chaim, Gal, Dani, et cetera, et cetera. I can’t comprehend how all of them, even Ditsa, turned their backs on me.

  Yesterday they were all smiles. I saw them dancing like marionette dolls: they look happy even though they’re full of anger and despair.

  I’m leaving now, and I won’t be back. You won, so keep my husband and make my children your own. But I will never forget. You destroyed me, Methuselah, but I will use the rest of my life to take revenge, to destroy everything that reminds me in the slightest of you. Goodbye.

  Sincerely,

  Shlomith-Shkhina

  And what have I done since my years at the kibbutz? I’ve rummaged through the soul of Judaism, identifying the side effects of Semitic culture and making them into art. I have subjected my body and personality to masochistic interventions, convincing myself that they have made me powerful.

  Now I’ve drained myself to the point of death in order to reach the heart of it all, a space from which only one way out exists: surrender, healing, and enlightenment. I’ve thought of this moment countless times. I imagined that right now, in the final seconds of my lecture, I would experience the ultimate catharsis of my life. An enlightenment I could communicate to you, my dear listeners, and which I could carry with me for the rest of my life the way some carry a rosary.