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Menachem's Writings
Lust and the Use of the F Word
We authors are strange birds. Especially if we publish via the Internet. We can never be certain who is our readership, nor who will be reading our output in the future . . . this is especially true when potentially most of our audience arrives to our literature via search engines and Net listings, typically Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, Lycos, and whatever the future brings in terms of helping your work being located.
And everything you circulate via the Web becomes a permanent fixture in our post-modern world, forever accessible by a wide public. So we tread a thin line regarding a) "political correctness" which I prefer to disregard, and b) the use of widely acceptable language -- G rated.
So while I encourage my readers to communicate with me, especially to express disagreement with my points of view, and I like to put up exactly what they write, unedited, I was a bit worried when Ezra wrote regarding his view of meat consumption . . .
Because . . . yes he did -- he used the F word! This may get me into hot water.
Here's what he wrote [with my comments suitably displayed]:
I do understand you, I mean my sister-in-law is a vegan (wasn't that an alien race in Star Trek? [Could be -- I never was a Trekkie, but I believe Vargas was a monthly feature in Playboy, and Vogon poetry will kill you if you haphazard to listen to it while hitchhiking the galaxy -- it has been described as "the third worst poetry in the Universe"]). And we do her fairly reasonably whenever she graces our shores (she lives in LA-LA Land these days).
But I am going to sorely disappoint you because I'll take lustful consumption any day!
If God lets us go the whole hog [you didn't really mean to say hog -- that's Old English for piggies], so to speak, then drink beer as well! [I'm a red wine man myself. And if you want to eat the best, most delicious thing in the world, take a gulp of red wine, drop a small piece of 85% chocolate on your tongue and let it melt, slowly. And it you want a real bang for your buck -- use 85% chocolate with chili pepper. Interesting footnote, the chocolate/chili combination goes back to the Central and South American Indians from whom the Spanish Conquistadors learnt of the existence and the use of cocoa.]
Now you might say, well I should look at where I am spiritually, but I'm a Cohen and I got thinner (and that was your fault) so my meat and other additives that I've imbibed over the years are my tikun olam. For example, I was very keen to elevate some of the kosher animals found in South Africa on our recent holiday, and was very disappointed that the Cape Town Jewish community didn't see fit to provide kosher kudu, springbok and the like. Bit discriminatory. [in a country well-known for its discrimination and, shall I use the dreaded R word, racism.
I did say I was omitting cohanim from my vegan formula . . . and I continue to avoid going there now. It does present me an ideological difficulty, but remember, most cohanim only got to eat the Holy Meat two days a year, plus the Chagim -- so I could advise abstinence for the other fifty weeks in the year!]
Anyway, besides being contrary to the priestly requirements, being vegan, let alone vegetarian, would put me out of the pale for my cultural heritage. How many Sepharadi vegans have you seen? [Actually many Indians (from the subcontinent this time) exist entirely on vegetable matter, in some ways on a more restrictive diet than western vegans (they avoid root vegetables including potato and batata which they claim "exhibits motion" when examined under a microscope). I don't know whether the [Sephardi] Jews of India took that direction -- I in fact doubt it, but they certainly would have been exposed to the concept.]
I know, I know . . . . I'm a sinner and at the end of things, probably will keep not a few angels (hopefully angels) gainfully employed for a long time going through not a few volumes of ledger. [I probably could not have put it better myself.]
Anyway, I've taken lustful consumption to an art form. 85% dark chocolate . . . no worries, that can be lustfully consumed too . . . . But less than before so, you know, I don't want to go back to the F word (three letters).
Be Good. [I can only promise to try ;-)]
For those who didn't pick it, Ez's F word has three letters, so it is OK for general audiences after all.
The letters are F - A - T. Yes, this fortunate man is one of my readers, and my diatribes on rotund people sent him running to his physician who promptly put him on a medically supervised crash diet and his girth is now but a fraction of his height -- and not equal to it as previously.
Really -- I am a witness.
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and don't forget to stop by my site to look at my latest (and classic) photographs.
Enjoy!
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