It’s a day off, and I’m out walking. An early morning stroll up and down Mount Tabor wasn’t enough when it was nice and cool. Instead, I convinced myself that the best way to get around on an 81 degree day would be to walk down Belmont and Hawthorne, stop for lunch somewhere, and then camp out in a comfortable (ideally air-conditioned) bar to write in while I wait for an appointment.

The Kara-age Don from the new Japanese place was very good- strips of lightly fried but heavily spiced chicken thigh atop a bowl of pillowy and acidic sushi rice was at once refreshing and cripplingly filling, even with an ice-cold Sapporo beer to wash it down. Stepping back out into the sun, my legs felt like sacks of lead. I didn’t want to walk anymore as much as a nap… but that wouldn’t do.

An ice-pop and a shady conversion with an old friend got me more-or-less to my destination- the taproom of a brewery near my appointment with good beer, giant fans (and giant windows. No air-conditioning a space THIS big), and a chilly marble-veneered bar to rest my arms on as I type.

Today is good. I’m walking in the sun, drinking beer, thinking about food, and seeing God. What more could you ask for?

A new cook at the winery likes talking to me a lot about God. That’s not always a thing one expects to go well in the workplace unless you happen to be a priest, a philosophy professor, or the two of you happen to be devotees of the same faith. In this case, my coworker is a convert to Judaism and I am the only Jew (let alone born Jew) on hand.

I don’t have a problem with this. I like talking about faith and religion, and I like being the guy that others feel like they can talk to. It’s a point of pride for me. My coworker, however, isn’t just looking for a friendly ear to explore her faith with- she’s looking for community. Belonging. Just “being Jewish” isn’t enough and being a cook sure isn’t. She feels isolated. Groundless without going to a synagogue regularly, which is a hell of a feat for someone in our line of work.

I want to commiserate. I want to scoop her up and tell her “come to shul with me! I know the rabbi, there’s always room at the service!” That’s a lie, though. I rarely go to synagogue. Getting to one on the High Holidays is more a matter of convenience than a priority for me, and I haven’t really felt like part of a Jewish community since college. My own synagogue in my hometown was stodgy and xenophobic, full of the exact kind of people that made me roll my eyes harder than Moses seeing the Golden Calf.

How do I tell my earnestly curious and earnestly Jewish coworker, then, that I don’t go to synagogue because I’m already there in the kitchen? I’m not standing there reciting the Kiddush over my cakes. Food, for me, is worship. Creating it is Ministry, and serving it is… well, Service.

A cook, when I dine, seems to me a divine being, who from the depths of his kitchen rules the human race. One considers him as a minister of heaven, because his kitchen is a temple, in which his ovens are the altar.

— Marc Antoine Désaugiers
Eating and Drinking in Europe: A Cultural History

There is a sort of privilege I feel I having been born Jewish while speaking with my coworker. She is very earnest in her newfound faith, and I’ve spent so much time in it already that I’ve had to lose faith in and reexamine my connection with the same traditions. There’s a feeling of “Oh yes, I’m glad you feel such a connection to the morning prayers. I remember reciting them in rote and getting disapproving stares from elderly faces as a child when I pronounced words wrong.”

I don’t know how to explain the meditative feeling of rolling crust or weighing recipes. How watching a cake batter come together feels like being a partner in creation, or how watching sugar caramelize and bread proof, and egg whites whip and cook into Italian merengue can feel like wielding science as a divine gift.

In “Tenzo Kyokun” (“Instructions to the Cook”) Zen Master Dogen admonishes cooks to “take a leaf of lettuce and transform it into the body of the Buddha. Taking the body of the Buddha, transform it into a leaf of lettuce.” It’s a metaphor for valueing and treasuring all food equally regardless of quality, but I will tell you that I feel more sacred taking fresh fruit and greens, preparing them, and sharing the knowledge and proceeds with my congregation of cooks than I did at my own bar mitzvah.

We all need belonging, and we all need to believe in something beyond us that connects us- whether we call that thing God, Chance, Fate, Luck, Karma, or whatever. I’m proud to be a Jew, but I know I’m also proud to an acolyte of Food and a cleric of the God of Storytellers.

Stay Classy,