Eating the produce of Eretz Yisrael is a way of connecting, through the pleasure of eating, to a big story and to a big God who kept His promise to the Jewish people. God’s prophets said that we’d be back planting trees and enjoying their fruits, and here we are, after 2,500 years of turmoil and upheaval, fulfilling their prophecy.
One of the primary desires of a mother is to nurture her child. There’s a motherly pleasure in making food for her children and seeing them enjoy it. For 2,000 years, this land has been waiting for the children of Israel to return so she could feed them again. When a child of Israel eats food grown in the soil of Israel, he or she is tasting a mother’s love and her joy.
There is an even deeper joy in eating the wild foods that grow by themselves from Israel’s soil, unsown by human hands.
The story of wild foods in Israel begins with our prayers for rain on the holiday of Sukkot in the fall. Israel has a semi-arid climate. By early fall, it has been six or seven months since the last soaking rain. The land is brown, and the trees and the plants are dry and thirsty. The clouds in the sky have been scarce; it’s been one sunny hot day after another. In the month after Sukkot, following our prayers, the clouds return to the sky, and within a month or two, the first good rain comes.
After the first rains, the hills turn green again, bringing forth many kinds of wild green plants. One of the most immediate to appear and among the most abundant is an edible wild green called mallow in English (in Hebrew, chalamit, and in Arabic, chubeiza). The names in Hebrew and English relate to bread; mallow has often been a subsistence food, a staff of life, for human beings in times of food scarcity.
The leaves of the mallow are a wonderful salad green; its stems can be used to make a soothing and refreshing drink; and its roots can be used to thicken soups. Children love to pick out and eat the cheese-wheel-shaped seeds.
When a farmer plants seeds, the seeds grow into food, and we eat the food. We’re eating the product of the farmer’s will expressed through the fertility of the soil.
By contrast, the foods that grow wild are an expression of the “will” of the soil. In Hebrew, the word for “man” (adam), comes from adamah, meaning “soil.” This linguistic connection of man and soil embodies the deep truth that humanity is an expression of the soil’s “will.” For 99.9% of humanity’s history, that basic and deep connection between man and soil was a given. That is not the case today. We live at a time of unprecedented alienation from our agricultural roots in the soil.
Eating wild foods powerfully connects us to our forgotten roots, reminding us of where we come from and where we will end up. Everyone would do well to educate themselves on the super-nutritious wild plants growing in their backyard and to start eating them.
However, for a Jew living in Israel, eating wild foods has four additional spiritual dimensions.
First of all, they are a response to our prayers. According to our sages, Adam’s first prayer was for rain, and his first and primary role in creation was to bring rain. On Sukkot, we shake our lulavs and pray for the return of the rains and a year of blessings. We move outside for a week into our simple huts under the sky, covered by a roof of tree trimmings that our sages tell us are the “Clouds of Glory” that protected us in the desert.
Now, the clouds have returned and the rains have come. The green plants have returned, and the flowers and trees are blooming. When we eat wild foods in Israel, we taste the sweetness of God’s love and His responsiveness to our prayers.
Secondly, the bones of our ancestors are in these hills. Our forefathers and foremothers, our prophets, our sages, our kings, our warriors, our healers, and our priests are all buried here, as are millions of simple Jews who led lives of dedication to our Torah and our land. Something of their spiritual energy pervades it and when we eat it, we take it in, and they become part of us as we continue their journey.
Thirdly, for a Jew accustomed to making the after-blessings on food, there is an additional opportunity to connect to something bigger. After eating a mallow leaf and any food other than bread and grain products, we say a short blessing that ends: “Blessed is the life of the worlds.” For Jews, eating is an invitation to connect to the infinite creative energy that made us, sustains us, and brought us back to live in our land and eat of its goodness.
Fourthly, there is a set of agricultural mitzvot (“commandments”), particularly the mitzvah of shmita, observing a Sabbath of the land. In the shmita year, we don’t plow or plant the land, and all of its produce, like wild food, is available to all of the land’s inhabitants to eat. For one year out of seven in the Land of Israel, we stop relating to the land as an instrument of own will and eat from the expression of the land’s will. Eating wild foods as Jews in Israel helps connect us to the spirit of shmita, the spirit of a relationship to our land that is like the relationship of a husband and wife, a relationship of love and dedication.
See the other articles in this series:
How I became a West Bank settler meme
Connecting to our mothers and fathers
