Parshas Vayeira
By Rabbi Dovid Zauderer
Guess what? Everyone’s favorite high-powered Jewish food Cholent was mentioned on prime time television this past week. That’s right, folks … it was on the ever-popular trivia game show Jeopardy! – hosted by the popular Jewish actress (and neuroscientist!) Mayim Bialik.
Contestants on a recent episode of “Jeopardy!” were stumped when presented with a photo of cholent, a meat stew generally placed on the stove from before Shabbos, left there to cook all night, and typically eaten around midday on Saturday.
The clue, for $400 in the “Sabbath” category: “Exodus 35:3 bans doing this on the Sabbath, hence the Jewish dish ‘cholent,’ which can go on the stove Friday and cook until Saturday lunch.”
The contestants got close with guesses of “What is cooking?” and “What is work?” but failed to name the exact Shabbos prohibition that Mayim Bialik, the show’s temporary host and herself an Orthodox Jew, was looking for.
In the end, Bialik explained the answer: “What is ‘lighting a fire?’ And the word ‘cholent’ is from the French ‘chaud lent,’ [meaning] ‘cooks a long time.’”
Now you might not know this but cholent is more than just a clue on your favorite game show – it actually contains within it (although not literally) a simple yet extremely important lesson for all of us regarding the very future of Judaism.
Allow me to explain… but first a little background about cholent.
The Ra”ma writes in Shulchan Aruch (O.C. 257:8) that there is a mitzvah to eat a hot dish at Shabbos lunch. The reason for this mitzvah is because there is a Rabbinic commandment to have Oneg (“enjoyment”) on Shabbos, and most people enjoy hot meals over cold ones.
Over the centuries and millennia, Jews all across the world have created different traditions for themselves as to which hot food they would eat at Shabbos lunch.
So, for example, most Ashkenazi Jews eat ‘cholent’ on Shabbos. This thick and "powerful" stew, is made up of a unique combination of beans, barley, potatoes, and bones or meat (and whatever else you want to throw in when nobody's watching!), Many Sefardic Jews call their hot dish hamin, which literally means “hot (food)”. It really makes no difference – as long as it’s hot!
However, the problem started around 2000 years ago, when a certain troublemaking, break-off Jewish sect called the Sadducees (pronounced sad-to-see) began to preach a literal interpretation of the Torah. This yielded some strange results. For example, the Torah states that one should not have a fire burning in one's home throughout the entire Shabbos day (see Exodus 35:3). Taken literally by the Sadducees, they would actually sit in the dark all Friday evening and would have nothing hot to eat on Shabbos morning.
This no doubt served to undermine the observance of Shabbos in the Sadducee community and caused a laxity of observance of Torah and mitzvos, in general.
We, who (thankfully) believe in the Oral Tradition, interpret the aforementioned verse to mean that one should not start a fire on the Shabbos, but we are allowed to maintain a preexisting flame. Big difference, eh?
So in order to show our faith in the Oral Tradition, and to protest the Sadducees' misguided teachings, observant Jews across the world maintain a long-standing, time-honored minhag (“tradition”) to leave a hot stew on the fire (or in a crock pot) all Friday night long, and we serve it piping-hot at the Shabbos morning meal.
[Ed. note: If, for whatever reason, one can’t eat a hot dish like cholent, then he should at the very least drink a hot drink like tea or coffee.- dz]
The Ra”ma writes further (ibid.) that anyone who doesn’t believe in the Oral Tradition and wants to forbid maintaining a fire in one’s house on Shabbos - - we have to suspect the possibility that he is a heretic…yikes!
It should be clear to all by now that the fight that was waged against the Sadducees over 2000 years ago was not only about hot or cold stew on Shabbos morning. Rather, the very observance of Shabbos – and Judaism - was at stake.
And herein lies the simple, yet important, lesson for all of us regarding the future of Shabbos and observant Judaism today. If we “sit in the dark” on Shabbos night, and have only cold food for Shabbos lunch – and give our kids the sense that Shabbos and other mitzvos are painful or boring - that’s not going to be too appealing to them. And who knows if we will be able to successfully transmit the Torah and mitzvos to the next generation this way – in the dark??
After all, have you ever seen any little Sadducee kids roaming around the neighborhood?
I haven’t …
http://www.torchweb.org/torah_detail.php?id=685