Kosher Style, Treif Style, Jewish Style

Last weekend I was once again obliged to attend the bar-mitzvah of some child I had never met. Happily it was the great nephew of my dear friend Moshe, so at least I had someone to whom I could complain about the catering.

Complaining is no fun if the person on the receiving end is trained to be polite and leave you feeling even more furious that when you started out, like they are in call-centres. Satisfaction is only arrived at when the other person loses his cool. Moshe takes every criticism personally, even when the criticism is aimed at someone else, in this case, his niece. That Moshe is so easy to infuriate is the main reason I like him.

On the spectrum of religiosity, Moshe’s niece is, well, not religious. I therefore requested a special meal because this was not a kosher catered function, it was a kosher-style catered function.

For readers who are not aware of the concept of “kosher-style”, it follows the same restrictions in terms of what foods may be eaten, but does not go so far as to adhere to the rituals in terms of slaughter and separation.

For the not-so-religious Jew kosher-style catering comes in at a fraction of the price of the supervised version, and guests can enjoy meat that looks and taste just like the real halachic thing.

The other advantage of kosher-style food is that it includes proper heimishe chicken soup with butter laden matzah balls using a recipe made famous by the gentile-style Nigella Lawson. Nigella believes that made this way in Kensington, the matzah balls taste much more sophisticated than the ones usually found in north-west London.

As someone who keeps proper kosher, kosher-style holds little appeal. I can see why it suits some, but it means that at a Jewish function I’m labelled the religious nut as the glare of 200 pairs of eyes burn into my flesh while I unwrap the several yards of cling film from my plate of real kosher food that has been carefully created to match the kosher-style menu other guests are enjoying. My authentic kosher meal is a fake of a fake kosher meal.

Which is why I much prefer treif-style to kosher-style. Treif-style is genuine kosher food that looks and tastes just like the forbidden foods you have always craved.

Of course treif-style is nothing new. Dairy-free dairy foods concocted to be consumed at the same sitting as meat have courted controversy for many years. I have often heard people argue that following meat with non-dairy ice cream, for example, flies in the face of the spirit of the law which serves to remind us of our responsibilities towards animal welfare. My response to this is straightforward: “you have clearly never tasted dairy-free ice cream. If you had you would know that eating it can only serve to remind us that we should never ingest dangerous and vile tasting chemicals”.

My favourite treif-style food is foie gras. Jews make the best foie gras in the world. You can be sure that if anyone knows how to feed a goose to death, it’s us Jews. Every time I went to my grandmother’s house as a child I was subjected to gavage.

When it comes to foie gras the whole question of animal welfare is quietly put to one side. To be kosher the bird must be killed humanely, but no mention is made of the suffering the creature endures during its lifetime, so it’s definitely good for a sprauncy simcha especially when served in typical Jewish portions, just so guests can experience what life was like for the bird when it lived.

If foie gras doesn’t do it for you, There’s a wide range of kosher sea-food including faux crab-meat, prawns, shrimps and the somewhat less popular mock turtle.

Back at the barmitzvah, the meal came to a conclusion and I was all ready to get going with the specially printed benschers that had been provided, but no bensching took place. It turned out that the books were no more than souvenirs of a Jewish-style simcha.

Jewish I-Spy

In a vain attempt to maintain his normally even temper, my father would begin a long drive in our Rover 75, or indeed any tedious activity likely to last more than two hours, by presenting each of his children with an I-Spy book. Readers who grew up in 1960s Britain will recall I-Spy books. For the rest of you, the I-Spy series was a range of paperback spotters’ guides, each on a particular subject — trees, cars, insects, and the like — that educated while encouraging the reader to identify examples of the subject matter, awarding points for a successful spot.

These marvellous little volumes were conceived specifically to minimise the number of times a child asked questions such as “Are we there yet?” and “I’m bored. Can I have an ice-cream?” by making them so consumed with the detective work that whole summers would fly by as he (and let’s be clear, no girl was ever OCD enough to fall for such manipulation) sought to note a striped antelope bouncing along the Essex coastline near Walton-on-the-Naze.

Not being of a competitive disposition my enquiries as to arrival time would begin some five minutes after being handed the guide. Nevertheless, I remember the books with affection, and that recollection has formed the basis of an idea for passing the time in synagogue — I-Spy Shulgoers. While sitting in shul, award yourself points if you manage to spot any of the following:

Screaming babies (20 points): I’m sorry if you belong to one of those synagogues that discourages parents from bringing infants. Not because I think it’s a good thing to allow the noisy little blighters into shul, but because it will make those 20 points difficult to bag. Indeed, if yours is one of those synagogues that would rather children were left at home than learning to feel at home in shul, write to me care of this newspaper with its name and I’ll join immediately.

Now, to collect the full 20 points it’s important that the mother allows the screaming to persist for at least five minutes before they accept that their silent pleadings are in vain, grab the little cherub and saunter out of the prayer hall cracking an embarrassed smile. Those that remove the child immediately are only worth five points.

The next category is “friends of the barmitzvah boy” and again specific circumstances dictate differences in points awarded. If the barmitzvah attends a Jewish school then expect terrible decorum from his friends and collect 15 points. If the child attends a state school then you can be sure that his friends will be quiet and well-behaved — 20 points.

Award yourself extra points if you see any of the guests playing games on their mobile phone. This is no less likely among Jewish kids than gentile ones so both occurrences are worth five points.

There’s an old saying: “Former synagogue presidents don’t resign, they just sit in the back row and kibitz”. Award yourself 50 points if you find yourself sitting next to the previous incumbent and are forced to endure hours of prattling on about how he transformed the place and how it has declined in the three weeks since he stepped down.

Thirty points are up for grabs if you are unable to daven because your neighbour doesn’t let up about how bad business is while insisting how smart a businessman he is, and 40 are available if he doesn’t stop going on about Theo Walcott’s goal in the game against Sweden.

Finally, we approach the upper end of our generational journey. Less an I-Spy than an I-Hear, award yourself 15 points for a whistling hearing aid and a further 20 if an elderly congregant asks: “What’s ’e saying?” in an uncomfortably loud voice during the sermon.

When you’ve completed the list you can start on the second in my series. This one is for those outings to Brent Cross Shopping Centre. It’s called I-Schmy.

I’m out of Tune with Modern Ways

There are limited opportunities for lovers of choral music to attend recitals on a Saturday morning.  The Wigmore Hall is famous for its lunchtime concerts but for those whose tastes are, to put it as delicately as possible, a little less sophisticated, I can heartily recommend your nearest Reform or Liberal synagogue where a group of mixed voices (and I mean that in terms of quality rather than equality) add all-important terpsichorean accents to the proceedings. 

And by “accents” what I mean is: sit back, enjoy the show and keep schtum.  This is not an opportunity to step aside from the mundane, corporeal week and into the spiritual realm.  You are not invited to find solace and peace, or search for a sense of perspective and place in the universe.  You are not there to consider how you have behaved in the week just gone or what you can do for others in the week to come.   You’re at a serious concert performance and you are there to appreciate how hard the choir has worked on singing vaguely in tune and time with each other. 

I attended a bar mitzvah at a Liberal synagogue this Shabbat past.  Regular readers will be fully aware that visits to shuls other than my own are not made in order to deepen my understanding of Anglo-Jewry, they are made in order to placate Mrs J, for whom any opportunity to see behind the doors of someone else’s ark is not to be missed.  Personally I’d be much happier going to my own place of worship and sending the kid a £10 book token.

Apparently I should be flattered.  Mrs J tells me that she enjoys talking to me when we sit together in a Liberal or Reform synagogue.  She has completely failed to pick up on the fact that an orthodox service separates men from women for one very good reason.  That reason is not, as commonly perceived, to stop men from being distracted by women.  On the contrary, it is to enable men to be distracted by women, without being distracted by their own women.  Wives should understand that Shabbat is the day of rest for our ears as well as the rest of our overworked bodies.

Another aspect of the progressive service that I struggle with is the amount of English used.  Again, there’s a very good reason for the orthodox sticking to Hebrew.   It’s because nobody really wants to know what they’re actually saying.  It’s all a bit too religious and mentions God more than most people are comfortable with.  Couple all that embarrassing English with the rather melancholic droning and we end up with what might happen if an airport announcer was drafted in to present Songs of Praise.  This isn’t so surprising because I’m bound to say that I find Liberal and Reform synagogues to be indistinguishable from churches except that they have radiators. 

Something else I find somewhat disconcerting is the way men are excluded from participation in any religious aspect of the service.  I understand this is because progressive synagogues have fully embraced egalitarianism.  I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, but I do draw the line at forcing the men to give over their tallises and yarmulkes (or ritual prayer shawls and skullcaps as the more assimilated prefer to call them) to the ladies.  Sorry, women.

Whenever I write about progressive synagogues my inbox overflows with a letter from someone complaining about my lack of tolerance towards Liberal and Reform Jews.  So, just to show that I’m not completely against them I want to end on a positive note about their services: they’re thankfully very short.  If only they’d start at nine o’clock instead of eleven I’d have time to nip down to the Wigmore Hall to enjoy a lunchtime recital.