Nobody Admires a Railing
I lost count somewhere around the beet salad. We’d been cooking for my husband’s father’s birthday — eight hours on Monday, then another two or three on Tuesday before anyone sat down. The birthday itself had gone by while we were still in Kiryat Shmona, a long way from Orange County, so this was the late version. By the time the table was set there were something like twenty dishes on it. That amount wasn’t particularly planned — we bought too much and were attacked by all the options.
Hummus. Lemon-tchina sauce. Matbucha, gazer marokai, fried eggplant, baba ganoush. Red cabbage slaw, sweet corn salad, a creamy cauliflower thing, tabbouleh, cucumber and onion, Israeli salad, gazer charif, the beet salad I lost count at, hamutzim, mock-liver eggplant spread, salata turkit, schug. Two kinds of skewer off the grill. My husband made flatbreads.
Every single item on that table was, in addition to being kosher, garlic-free and gluten-free, because of dietary requirements.
If you’ve never cooked around celiac, it isn’t a matter of skipping the bread. It’s the flour in the spice blend, the soy sauce, the shared colander, the crumb on the board from something else you made an hour ago. Anyone who keeps kosher will recognize the shape of it immediately — separate surfaces, reading labels like a lawyer, a running map in your head of what has touched what. The tabbouleh got riced cauliflower instead of bulgur. The flatbread had to be worked out from scratch, because a gluten-free flatbread that’s actually good is not something you can just buy in a store, unfortunately.
There’s a line in this week’s parsha that gets filed under home improvement.
כִּ֤י תִבְנֶה֙ בַּ֣יִת חָדָ֔שׁ וְעָשִׂ֥יתָ מַעֲקֶ֖ה לְגַגֶּ֑ךָ וְלֹֽא־תָשִׂ֤ים דָּמִים֙ בְּבֵיתֶ֔ךָ כִּֽי־יִפֹּ֥ל הַנֹּפֵ֖ל מִמֶּֽנּוּ׃
When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.
Ki Teitzei is stuffed with this kind of law. Small, physical, unglamorous. Pay the worker before sundown. Keep honest weights in your pocket. Don’t muzzle the ox while it’s working. And build a railing, because people fall off roofs.
Rambam reads the railing past roofs, and he isn’t being clever about it. A well or a cistern in your courtyard gets a wall around it or a cover on it. Anything in your house that could hurt someone who walks in has to be dealt with, and leaving it there breaks the commandment twice over — the positive one you skipped, and the negative one, don’t put blood in your house. The roof was merely an example. The rule is that your house is a place other people come into, and you are responsible for what happens to them there.
So a kitchen that can put a guest in the hospital is a hazard in the house, and building it so that it can’t is a ma’akeh. Not simply a metaphor for one.
Nobody at that table was eating around anything. There was no separate little plate off to the side, nobody being managed. My husband’s mother sat down and ate everything, same as the rest of us, and the conversation was about his father’s week and the drive and somebody’s knee, and at no point was it about her celiac. Twenty-some dishes, and not one of them was a workaround.
A railing works that way too. Nobody admires it. You lean on it without looking, and it holds, and you go on with your evening. You only ever notice the missing one, once, at the worst possible moment.
When I sat down afterward to write out what we’d made, I couldn’t get all of it. A few had already gone. Which is, as it happens, also in this parsha.
כִּ֣י תִקְצֹר֩ קְצִֽירְךָ֨ בְשָׂדֶ֜ךָ וְשָֽׁכַחְתָּ֧ עֹ֣מֶר בַּשָּׂדֶ֗ה לֹ֤א תָשׁוּב֙ לְקַחְתּ֔וֹ לַגֵּ֛ר לַיָּת֥וֹם וְלָאַלְמָנָ֖ה יִהְיֶ֑ה לְמַ֤עַן יְבָרֶכְךָ֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ בְּכֹ֖ל מַעֲשֵׂ֥ה יָדֶֽיךָ׃
When you reap the harvest in your field and overlook a sheaf in the field, do not turn back to get it; it shall go to the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow—in order that the ETERNAL your God may bless you in all your undertakings.
Rashi, working from the Sifrei, stops on the strange part. The blessing shows up for the sheaf you forgot. You weren’t being generous. You were tired, your arms were full, you walked past it and went home. And if that gets a blessing, he says, then consider a coin that falls out of your pocket and keeps a poor man fed for a day — you’ll certainly be blessed for that one, and you’ll never find out it happened.
Most of what a house actually does for the people inside it runs below the level anyone is tracking. The dish nobody remembers making. The board that got scrubbed twice. The hour of label-reading that never comes up at the table, because the whole point is that it shouldn’t have to come up at the table — that everyone is fully welcome and able to participate, even if they’re not a huge fan of the red cabbage slaw (like me, though my husband loves it).
It was mostly a work week otherwise. I was a guest on a podcast. The episode was about Judea and Samaria, which is an argument (though it shouldn’t be) that it seems I spend quite a lot of my life having. I worked on polishing and editing my next book. I spent way too much time writing and replying to emails. And I spent time with the CEO in the sky (Davening). Then I spent the better part of two days chopping vegetables so one person could eat without doing arithmetic. The parsha legislates all of it, and it spends far more verses on the chopping.
This weekend we’ve got a friend’s dog, so the house gets rearranged again for somebody who didn’t ask and can’t say thank you. It’s Elul, the month for taking an accounting before the Days of Awe. Most of what I’d want counted this year happened at counter height, with a knife, in the ten or eleven hours before anyone sat down.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham