“Better a Meal of Vegetables with Love”: The Symbolic Meaning of Vegetables in Rabbinic and Post-Rabbinic Midrash on Proverbs 15.17

Abstract

THOUGH CLASSICAL JEWISH tradition and cuisine look meat-centered at first sight, there is a strong vegetarian undercurrent that stretches to the garden, the Garden of Eden. Then, according to the Torah, human beings and animals coexisted harmoniously, and man had seedbearing plant. . . upon the earth . . . and eveiy tree that has seed-bearing fruit ... all the green plants for (Gen 1.29-30). Only after the Flood did God grant to humans the right to consume meat: creature that lives shall be yours to eat, as with the green grasses (Gen 9.3).1 There has been a revival of interest in early dietaiy myth especially among contemporaiy Jewish activists concerned about the environment, food resources, social justice, and personal health (among them Richard Schwartz, Robert Kalechofsky, Arthur Green, and many of the contributors to the web blog The Jew and the Carrot).2 They advocate a modern Jewish vegetarianism, or an eco-kashrut that more or less subscribes to Michael Pollan's ecotarian mantra Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.3 Modem Jewish vegetarianism has its roots in the meatless utopian visions of a messianic future and Edenic past in the Bible, early and medieval rabbinic literature, and the first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Kook.4 This longing to go back to the garden is also hinted at in several of the postbiblical interpretations of the of in Prov 15.17: Better a meal of vegetables where there is love, than a bull where there is hate. Thus, the medieval Spanish Jewish biblical exegete Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher infers from this verse that id human nature to want small and light portions of food, such as 'a meal of vegetables' or something similar in the company of friends, rather than bulls in the company of enemies.5 Granted R. Bahya's main emphasis here is the contrast between in the company of friends versus those in the company of enemies, experiences of concord rather than discord. But, in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, when there was concord between man and woman, between human beings and God, and between human beings and animals, the diet of all God's creatures was meals of vegetables. After the Fall, relations broke down between human beings and God, and even between human beings and animals. Permission to indulge in a new meat diet now characterized this discord-friends became food. If it is our human nature to be satisfied with it is nature from which we have now fallen.What is the nature of the relationship between Proverbs' of vegetables (yerakot) and the company of one's friends? Taken in apposition to the syntactically parallel verse immediately preceding it: Better a little with fear of the Lord, than great wealth with confusion (Prov 15.16), it seems the small quantity of the of is contrasted to the substantial meal of fattened bull. On the other hand, the term yerakot, literally, calls attention to their appearance-what they look like, and perhaps by implication, their taste, smell, and feel. According to Yehuda Feliks, a leading authority on plants in the Bible and rabbinic literature, the in Prov 15.17 probably refer to edible wild herbs gathered in the field, what the Mishnah later calls field vegetables, as opposed to those cultivated in gardens (garden vegetables).6 They might be mallow leaves (Heb., halamut), orach (Heb., maluoh, for its salty taste), rocket (Heb., orot), or maror (an edible weed that in Feliks's addendum to a modem commentaiy on the mishnaic order of Seeds \Zera'un looks like dandelion greens, as well as the generic term for any bitter herb suitable for the Passover rite).7 This reinforces the connotation of the of greens as a low-status food of poor people, since anyone can gather field freely in the wild, even in times of famine.8 That being said, the term yerakot could possibly evoke the taste and mythic historical associations of the yerakot required for dipping, discussing, and eating as bitter herbs for rabbinic and postrabbinic Jews familiar with the rabbinic Passover seder. …