Michael and I met up last week at a little corner restaurant down in the Financial District for happy hour. He ordered wine and a cheeseburger, while I grabbed a beer. We were talking so long that our food was getting cold. Michael picked up his cheeseburger and said, “A cookie. My first non-kosher food was a chocolate chip cookie.” He was 26 when he ate his first bite of treif (Yiddish for nonkosher) food. He had been having a hard week after a hard month after some hard years and that cookie seemed like it would taste good. Luckily it did.
A cookie. My first non-kosher food was a chocolate chip cookie.
While a cookie may seem rather harmless to the unaffiliated – after all, how do you hide pig, shellfish or any of the other famously unkosher ingredients in a dessert? – to anyone who has been raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, a cookie without kosher certification is treif beyond a doubt. Of the 613 commandments in the Jewish bible, there are two principal identifiers indicating membership of the orthodox fold: keeping the laws of kosher and observing the laws of the Sabbath. Consciously breaking either one is not only a sin, but also an identifying personal sign of departure: a trip past an internal landmark, “Leaving Brooklyn, Oy Vey!”
Years later, I still remember the first time that I ate treif. I was sixteen years old at the time and feeling rather rebellious. A few of my classmates and I had bought a jar of marinated artichokes without any kind of certification. We locked ourselves in one of our bedrooms and solemnly shared the pieces around on plastic forks so as not to “treif up” our parents’ kosher utensils. Many of my friends share similar first tastes of the forbidden: genuine Italian pizza smuggled into Flatbush; a vegetable soup from a little nondescript café; gum from an anonymous Duane Reade in the city where no one from the community could see it being bought.
As we talk over our food he savors the memories of all his first times: bacon, rabbit, chicken parmesan.
Ironically, these first tastes all share the fact that they all have kosher counterparts. Michael and I discuss this as he finishes his burger. “You spend your whole life waiting. You wait to find a good shidduch [spouse], and then you wait to have good kids. Then you wait for them to grow up and find their shidduch, and then you wait for grandchildren.” One day he just grew tired of waiting. He hadn’t met anyone that he had wanted to marry, and he had grown tired of following the rules. The cookie was excitingly different, spontaneous – it wasn’t preplanned or preapproved in any of the ways that an orthodox life always is. After such a rigorous upbringing, he was cautious to fully embrace treif food, each new introduction symbolizing another step away from the community with all of its rules and certainties. “You’re conscious of every new thing. It’s weirdly hard at first. You realize that you’ve walked through this door that you can never return through. Once you know what you no longer believe in – you can’t go back on that knowledge.” Over time though, he added more foods to his diet, discovering that he really enjoyed pork and artisan cheese on his burgers. As we talk over our food he savors the memories of all his first times: bacon, rabbit, chicken parmesan. “I’m still finding out where my favorite places to eat are. I love most that I can eat anywhere I want. I don’t think that I’ll ever grow tired of that.”
An excerpt from the #treif feed on instagram
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