The Boons of Cultural Blending: Gong Fu & Shabbat

For the past couple of months, my husband and I have been practicing the art of Shabbat Gong Fu. Gong Fu is a Chinese tea ritual dating from around 1000 CE, which we learned, of all places, in the mountains of Asheville on a recent trip to visit my grandmother. A first cousin of an old friend of mine, after training in China, opened a tea shop there right before the pandemic that somehow survived.

My husband and I were enchanted with the delicious, hand-harvested oolongs and pu-ehrs and the ritual’s tiny strainers and cups, the layers of mango and blooming green herb flavours in small, contemplative sips. Caught up in our enjoyment, I said to my husband, “This would be a wonderful Shabbat practice when we’re at home.” He nodded enthusiastically, but as with so many things with him, I thought the enthusiasm was passing, or perhaps mimicked to indulge mine.

Not so. When we arrived home, he began scouting the internet, without my knowledge. For my birthday the next month, he presented me with a wide box protecting a full, gleaming white tea set.

He also selected a tea pet. The practice of tea pets dates back centuries: as a way not to waste leftover tea, the drinker pours it over the mini ceramic statue to “feed” it. Tea pets are historically believed to bring good luck and peace to the tea ritual, reminding the drinkers of equanimity and mindfulness; today the shapes of the ceramic figurines run the gamut from capybaras to dragons. My husband settled on a perhaps-poisonous blowfish in full blow. We named him Hootie.

The ancient tea ritual, which we learned through such an unlikely and wonderful connection, helps us deepen our appreciation of Shabbat even thought it is not a Jewish tradition. The shared tea-time and Shabbat values of rest and connection complement each other. As my husband and I sit over steaming cups of Taiwanese milk tea, fruity and herbaceous at the same time, we can enrich our enjoyment of each other’s company and of the gift of time. I can feel us building Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “cathedral in time” as we sip, pause, converse, and live our joy. An hour spent in conversation and contemplation with my beloved over tea is well worth the trials and tribulations of the rest of the week. (We are in the midst of a move to our first owned home and changing cities in the process; we can use the break.)

There is currently a raging cultural debate about cultural appropriation, loosely defined as the borrowing of aspects of a culture not one’s own by birth and adopting them as one’s own. I am aware that my husband’s and my practice of Gong Fu on Shabbat might be understood as such appropriation. I am further aware that the practice might be taken as un-Jewish and therefore inappropriate in another sense. These two reactions are opposite ends of the spectrum of cultural isolationism and particularism, a longstanding issue in the Jewish tradition and a current hot-button political topic.

To deal first with the potential Jewish objection: Jews have always been a particular religious and ethnic group with our own practices and rules. (So many rules…) However, since the Babylonian exile of 597 BCE, we have also been a diasporic people. In fact, diaspora is the ancient Greek word used to describe us. (It literally means, “scattering.”) This diaspora has resulted in the mixing and blending of Jewish culture with other cultures, while we also retained our distinctness. Because we have, over the millennia, been pretty much everywhere (including China), we have absorbed elements of other cultural practices and made them part of our own. It is unlikely that my husband’s and my practice of Gong Fu as part of Shabbat will catch on broad scale, but we are fully in line with tradition and in good company with our adoption of non-Jewish ritual in celebration of Jewish heritage. Consider this an invitation, coming out of tradition, to experiment.

Secondly, the broader question of cultural appropriation. This is a “progressive” line of argument that has long frustrated me for many of the reasons discussed with reference to cultural blending and Judaism above. Humans borrow culture from one another and adapt if for their own use; in fact, the bearing and borrowing of culture is a distinguishing feature of what it means to be human. We see this in microcosm, in a family or group of friends where members adopt similar verbal expressions; we see it in macrocosm, as in ancient Greek culture’s massive influence on the subsequent Romans.

In the contemporary world, this human tendency has somehow been villainized into one of the greatest sins; borrowing from cultures that are seen as marginalized, rather than being viewed as a way cultures contribute to and develop interest in each other, is instead seen as racist oppression for which an individual or group might be socially blacklisted. As a Jewish but non-POC writer, I am constantly being told by my “progressive” writing community that I cannot write POC characters. Simultaneously, my work must include POC perspectives in order to be considered publishable and worth reading. This oxymoron of cultural appropriation is enough to twist any thinking person into cognitive knots.

Cultures face a need for balance: for borrowing from one another enough to avoid becoming staid, and for maintaining a sense of cohesion. Arguably, as the first example of diaspora, modern Jews have become particularly adept at this balance. Yet in the contemporary “progressive” world, we might find ourselves accused of oppression for one of the secrets of our survival and successful cultural continuance.

On Tu B’Av, we celebrate the often-marvellously cohesive force of love from the perspective of our own culture. Part of this culture is that we balance: we follow the great grief of Tisha B’Av with the great celebration of Tu B’Av. We also balance cultural adaptation with cultural continuation. We are a people that can withstand a little change.

May you find some time to be with your loved ones today, perhaps over a cup of tea.