Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

Cheesecake as essence

I became an avid aspirant of the Pinterest app in the early 2010s. My favourite self-proclaimed category was lovingly dubbed food, cakes and yummy things. When my kids were four and five, I pinned a lot of rainbow and unicorn cakes. I also had a power section on cheesecakes. You see, Shavuot, the holiday of all things dairy, has always been my grand opportunity to go all out on a really ‘do or die’, ‘all or nothing’ cheesecake. I never went for the plain cheesecake variety. There was the time I went for a Brown Sugar Pecan Praline Cheesecake. Just working on the caramel sauce for the praline was an act of divine service that took hours of devoted time. The result was heavenly. Another year it was a chocolate cheesecake with a chocolate cream topping.

Now, I am in Sydney but I am determined to bake a cheesecake this year. The one thing that keeps me up at night is finding the right biscuits for the base. In South Africa, everyone knows that Bakers Tennis biscuits make the best cheesecake crust, because of their coconut, caramelly flavour. So, I need to get to Bianca’s for the Tennis Biscuits. But unlike previous years, I have decided to go for a simple cream-cheese filling with a sour cream topping. I’m done with complicated and I’m done with ‘pyatska’ (Yiddish for overly-pedantic effort). Perhaps, that is because I don’t have the ‘help’ I used to have to assist me with complex recipes. But I choose to think that I am going simple for a more spiritual reason; in one word – essence!

On the holiday of Shavuot, we remember the receiving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The Torah suggests that the people assembled at the base of the mountain and amidst thunder, lightning, blasts of shofars and fire and mist (essentially a grand sound and light show), God recited the Ten Commandments. Straight after we read the Ten Commandments, the text tells us that the people panicked, “fell back and stood at a distance,” and begged Moshe to tell God to stop speaking. “You speak to us instead,” the Israelites begged Moses. The question is, hadn’t God already recited the Ten Commandments. Well, apparently not! The Midrash elaborates on what happened. In one version, the Jewish people heard only the first three words: Anochi Hashem Elokecha, I am the Lord your God, at which point they passed out and begged Moshe to continue the delivery. These stories convey something of the overwhelm, the awe that the people felt at experiencing the voice of God beyond the veils and curtains of everyday life. According to another source, God said even less: “God simply uttered the first letter of Anochi, the letter Aleph”. But how could God ‘say’ the letter Aleph, because actually Aleph is a silent letter. According to this reading, God had simply exhaled, offering the very tip of the letter Aleph, when the people said, “this is too much for us!”. On one level, we might say, we were cheated out of God’s voice reciting the ten Commandments. But on another level, we might say that the silent letter Aleph distils and clarifies the many words and the complicated ideas of the Ten Commandments and more widely, the Torah to a simple exhale, to breath. From the noise and bustle of intellectual ideas, Revelation comes to us as the sound of silence. On the one hand, Revelation is the Ten Commandments. More widely it includes the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible and beyond that even our oral tradition, books and teachings spanning thousands of year. But in essence, God’s big Reveal is offered in breath, the exhale of the Universe and the inhale of life, the coming into the present moment, the sound of the Aleph which precedes and includes all other sounds.

Each religion takes God’s ‘exhale’ and creates narratives, stories, laws, wisdom and teachings which circulate around particular times, places and cultures. But I like to believe that all religions circle back to this essence, to God’s exhale, God’s revealing Godself through quiet, awe-inspiring breath in the world.

In a world that sometimes feels super complex, complicated, tough and tricky, it feels good to think of Shavuot as a return to that simple and profound exhale, the very tip, the beginning of the formation of the letter Aleph from which everything else flows.

And this is why I am going for a simple cheesecake filling with a basic sour cream topping. But I won’t compromise on the Tennis biscuits.

Chag Shavuot Sameach!