1 Kabbalah, Food and Sustainability Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus ∗ Classic Jewish Kabbalah tends to view the interactions and exchanges between the divine and human worlds as a sort of “cosmic re-cycling,” particularly in its transformation of the traditional language of the Biblical sacrificial system. Kabbalistic meal rituals evoke these metaphors to heighten the intensity of the experience of the physical activity of eating. They cast the eater as a crucial player in the mythic drama of cosmic re-cycling. The spiritual experience of the fusion of body and soul advocated by Jewish religious mystics in speech-cued, mindful acts of eating is not so far from the experience of the sustainable banquet Michael Pollan prepared for his friends, the celebratory “thanksgiving” or “secular seder” which he describes at the end of his book the Omnivore’s Dilemma. 1 Both channel the “psychosomatic” experience of mindful eating (to use Joel Hecker’s term) 2 into a predisposition for environmentally conscious moral action, by way of mythic stories and metaphors of connectedness between people, and between people and nature. But while Michael Pollan makes a compelling case for telling stories to motivate us to eat, shop, farm, forage, hunt, cook, and work with our fellow species more mindfully in ways that are environmentally sustainable, the most frequently quoted “rabbi” at this conference on Jewish environmentalism 3 overlooks some valuable resources from his own Jewish tradition. Pollan beautifully evokes how “storied food” fed him and his guests physically and spiritually at the final sustainable banquet he describes at the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: ∗ I wish to acknowledge my Wheaton College undergraduate research assistant Lindsay van Clief for her help in assembling the references for this paper. 1 Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 406-8. 2 Joel Hecker, Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 59-60. 3 As Nigel Savage, the Executive Director of Hazon, quipped at the conclusion of the Klutznick- Harris Symposium on Jews and the Environment, 10/29/07.