Don’t Put Your Soul On a Bagel!

The most vivid expression of his love of giving was how he offered his guests a cold drink. Most people simply offer their guest a drink or put out a few bottles on the kitchen counter or dining room table. Pop had a formal bar built in the corner of their “den”. Even when it was just his grandchildren visiting, he would joyfully stand behind the bar to serve up whatever anyone fancied.

Once, when I was about ten or eleven years old, he asked me to do something quite unusual—to go on an errand for him on my bike.

He had a hankering for kippered salmon and I guess my grandmother wasn’t around that day, because he wanted me to buy him a bag of it. The place to get this Pacific Northwest specialty was a smelly fish store on the waterfront that I had rarely been to, but that had apparently been there since he was a kid.

Also, notably, until that day I had never seen my grandfather eat kippered salmon and I wasn’t even sure what it was. But I dutifully went down there with the twenty dollar bill that he gave me in order to honor my grandfather.

Kippering is a process of first salting then hot-smoking the fish for seven to ten days. This gives the fish a copper color, which is the Germanic etymology of kipper. But while we use the European term, the Tlingit, Haida, Salish, and others Indian groups have been hot-smoking salmon over alder wood for thousands of years. It was their primary method of preserving the massive seasonal salmon run.

Modern “kippered salmon” is moist and bare distinguishable from smoked salmon, but what my grandfather sent me for was the real deal, super dark, dry, and chewy like what most people call salmon jerky.

Now, what does this highly specialized food topic have to do with Yom Kippur?

1. Tradition—Pop told me that day that his father used to get him kippered salmon as a treat and every once in awhile he liked to relive that childhood memory. That’s part of Yom Kippur—connecting us to our parents and grandparents. Tradition matters.

2. Purity—Like kippered salmon, the great joy of Yom Kippur comes from stripping something down to its essence and appreciating it for what it is. You don’t put kippered salmon on a bagel, and you surely don’t put Yom Kippur on a bagel. It has to be savored all by itself, without any accompaniment. And when we fast on Yom Kippur along with the right kind o liturgy or literature, we can strip our soul down to its essence as well. Your soul is like a fine wine—you don’t want to pour it into the stew, it should be savored by and for itself. The rest of the year we can drink it with food, but once a year we have a wine tasting—a soul tasting—to re-educate ourselves on what it means to be human.

​Shabbat Shalom and

Happy Yom Kippur

PS: Here is a link to my 11-minute class on this week’s parshah.
Here is a link to my new 7-minute Yom Kippur class.