New York City has a lot to recommend it: shopping, people, sites. But one of the factors that I take for granted is the Jewish baking. Sally Minier was the food manager for Lehman Brothers before the financial collapse. Now, she runs the bakery Sweetsally’s. Using family recipes and cooking equipment inherited from her grandmother, Sally makes some locally-renowned Jewish desserts, categorized as “Jewish bits.” For most, bagels are the staple of Jewish cooking, but, according to one Massachusetts news article, New York City locals call Jewish desserts “Jewish bits.”
Whatever “Jewish bits” are in Massachusetts, they are delicious in New York. For some, though, these pieces of Jewish cooking are transplants from another world. I take it for granted that Jewish food has infiltrated my daily life to the extent that it now is normal, but it might not be so for others. For most of us, the most standard piece of Jewish food is the bagel. Surely, though, there have to be those who have never heard of it? What do people that do not know our circular wonder do with their mornings? To figure out what bagels mean to Jews as a whole, I took a look at the history of the bagel.
There is a common misconception that the bagel was created in the shape of a stirrup to commemorate a Polish king’s victory. Apparently, it was originally a food for the Christian holiday of Lent “invested with metaphorical meaning” over time as a symbol of religious significance for Jews. According to one scholar, “The hole in the bagel, Balinska points out, remained a symbol of yearning, emptiness, anger, and mortality.”
I never realized what the hole was for until now, but assumed it was a Jewish form of a doughnut. This interpretation makes more theological sense, though. Ever since the Jews were kicked out of Israel centuries ago, we’ve had a yearning to return home, to resume our place in our home country. That sense imbues itself into everything we do, from rituals to food. For many Ashkenazi Jews, this piece of bread may have represented both physical nourishment and the reminder of the promise of spiritual nourishment to come when the Messiah arrived. The “emptiness” of absence from Israel goes in the same vein.
Where would the “anger” latent in the hole of the bagel come from? Anger against those who exiled us or discriminated against us? Anger against the world? I have no idea, but perhaps it goes hand-in-hand with mortality. Ultimately, Jews want to see the return of the state of Israel as it once was. Yet each of us has been destined to fall short of that goal, if only because no one yet has lived to see it. The bagel seems to sum up the complex emotions of being a diaspora-era Jew.
So, the next time I have a bagel, there will be more on my mind than the flavor of cream cheese I chose. A bagel is more than just a Jewish doughnut: it’s a piece of heritage.
