St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Aug 2024)
A Jewish Theology of Food
Abstract
This article addresses how Jewish food practices are an expression of Jewish theology. It addresses the question: how is Jewish food ‘God talk?’ and what forms does it take? Jewish dietary practices, the kosher laws, etc., are a kind of Jewish body-language. Attention is paid first to biblical and Rabbinic laws of kashrut (dietary laws), and then how they are ‘theological’. The biblical and post-biblical terms for clean and unclean animals are discussed, and the main principles of the kosher preparation of foods, namely the blood prohibition, the non-mixing of milk and meat, and kosher versus non-kosher wine. Also discussed are ‘kosher for Passover’, the kashrut of animal byproducts like milk and eggs, and of plant-based foods. All these expressions of kashrut suggest that making conscious distinctions (havdalot) is an implicit or explicit act of the imitation of God. In addition to the kosher laws, Jewish holiday foods and the typically Jewish ritual practices of eating, reading, and talking about food at the table, as in the Passover Seder, also embody and accentuate Jewish religious values. Particular attention is paid to sensory non-verbal communication through ‘Jewish flavour principles’ in the tastes and textures of symbolic and characteristic Jewish foods, and the ‘evaluative conditioning’ that occurs when ‘words of Torah’ are recited while eating them. Such practices evoke multisensory experiences, which are expressed in synesthetic metaphors of experiences of the Divine. The entry concludes that a Jewish theology of food is an embodied metaphorical theology, doing things with words and food as a kind of ‘culinary midrash’, a Jewish way of talking about and talking to God.
