Smells and Bells

Just before Spring Break, we read several articles about taste in Christianity and Judaism. The article that was most frequently discussed was “‘Taste and See that the Lord is sweet’ (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West” by Rachel Fulton. The article discussed various approaches to studying taste in religion, from analyzing recipes, exploring alternative translations to scriptures, and the psychology of flavor. Why is God sweet? One explanation that our class came up with is that a sweet flavor is the result of glucose being present in the food, the simplest form of energy. The rush of energy and pleasure that comes from eating something sweet is to create a positive association with gaining nourishment and staying alive. How can that be a bad thing? Fulton believes it isn’t a bad thing to be transformed by food, but that our Western notions of health and dieting make us fear getting fat. A controversial sentiment she shares towards the end of the article is that A

What a google search revealed a nard to be Starting on Valentine’s Day, we started reading The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, explores the imagery of fragrance in rabbinic literature. Two months later, we had Dr. Rachel Herz from Brown give a lecture on her work unraveling the neural processes of olfaction and gustation. The readings and lecture gave the class a well-rounded understanding at how scent is employed in ritual for invoking emotion. As mentioned earlier, our sense of smell is the most memorable due to its proximity to the pre-frontal cortex. Although research behind this phenomenon is relatively recent, practitioners of religion understand the influence of associating scents with divine concepts. In her introduction, Green mentions how we lack a vocabulary to describe our sense of smell, and refer to such using simile, metaphor or simply naming the scent. The explanation for such is that the olfactory bulb is located so “far down” that the circuitry co

Religious beliefs and public health today often find themselves at odds. Because of a tendency to associate religious people with everything from abstinence-only education to opposing vaccinations, it is easy to see faith as an obstacle to public health. However, the translation we read of the First Gate paints a very different picture. I enjoyed this reading because I immediately saw a clear connection with my major. Most people today credit John Snow as the founder of the modern field of public health. He mapped out the spread of cholera and found that it was concentrated in specific groups of people that got their water from the same wells. Today we know that bacteria live in that water, and when people drank it they became infected. This was a landmark discovery and he was a very smart man, but I am not sure he actually founded modern public health. One of the key tenants to the field is disease prevention and overall population health. These were achieved all the way back in the m

NYTimes: All Grown Up and In Charge of the Seder http://nyti.ms/1NoJz6c

Thought this was a fascinating article about why many people find the taste of Indian food so good.  Are the Jewish flavor combinations we learned about more like or unlike the flavors of Indian food? "The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients. Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground . More specifically, many Indian recipes  contain cayenne, the basis of curry powder that is in just about any Indian curry. And when a dish contains cayenne, the researchers found, it's unlikely to have other ingredients that share similar flavors. The same can be said of green bell pepper, coriander and garam masala, which are nearly as ubiquitous in Indian cuisine. 'Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor sharing pattern with rest of the ingredients,' the researchers noted. Milk, butter, bread, a

So Today, March 4th marks the day of the Jewish holiday, of Purim, or as some refer to it as Jewish Mardi Gras. The celebration involves the reading of The Book of Esther while covering up the villain, Haman's, name. What follows after this tends to be a Purim Spiel, which is a dramatization or comedic play of The Book of Esther, this involves usually the singing and acting of adults and children in costume. Jews  are also commanded by the Talmud to eat, drink, and be in a merry mood. It even commands a Jew to drink until they cannot tell the difference between "cursed be Haman" and "blessed be Mordecai," which can open to interpretation. Hamentaschen are also pastries that are triangles that are typically fruit filled, represent Haman's three cornered hat, and are the treat of the holiday to eat.  This brings us to the topic of what even is the story that is told in The Book of Esther that this great holiday is based on? Well, it starts with a Jewis

In class we discussed different definitions of the universal purpose of religion. One idea presented was that religion teaches us how to behave with human and non human beings. While others claimed that religion is not about teaching people ethics that this is more a realm of cultural context and part of human nature. Therefore the definition that seemed the most reasonable to me is that religion is about cultivating cosmic sensitivity. The text  Shulhan Shel Arba  by Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher a medieval Jewish mystic and translated by Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus presents its readers with a guide to cultivating cosmic sensitivity with the alter of the table. He presents four gates of knowledge. These gates work to explain 1) the blessings over the table and other obligations, 2) an explanation of the nature of eating and how this prepares one for their life purpose 3) ethics and table etiquette and 4) an explantation of the meal to come. Throughout the text Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher goes int

In  The Aroma of Righteousness,  Deborah A. Green works to interpret and understand the role smell plays in jewish religious literature. One goal of this reading was to make the reader think about the religious use of scent, aroma, and smell in Judaism. But woven amidst all of this sensual analysis is a deeper question. What, or who is God? I have my own definition, but it is not something that I am very confident about and I struggle to clearly put it into words. The best I can do is say that God is an entity or energy. i don't want to presume to know what or how God manifests but my most recent guess is that God  G enerates,  O perates and  D estroys. This is a new definition for me and it is always changing. I have tried to define God from the perspective of the mind, of thought, of ideas but maybe there might be benefit in trying to answer this question by using my senses. In this reading Green attempts to show how rituals such as lighting incense help us define our relation

The ritual I did with different kinds of fruits on the first day of class comes a "seder" for Tu B'Shvat ("The 15th of Sh'vat" - the Jewish New Year for the Trees).  I wrote a short description of this text in the Jewish food blog The Jew and the Carrot here: The Original Tu B’Shvat Seder: 'Pri Etz Hadar' According to what we've read in Diane Ackerman's Natural History of The Senses , everything we know about the world we live in is mediated to us through our senses.  But what in particular do are senses "tell" us that is so important to know? Our senses alert us to what is food, who would be a good mate, and predators that might be out to get us. Our senses give us pleasurable rewards presumably for what is good for us to smell, touch, taste, hear, and see. And we experience disgust or pain for things that are presumably bad for us. However, it's also possible that not everything that feels pleasurable to us is alwa