Torah study on Saturday with Rabbi Lerner, in Berkeley: we read the parts of Leviticus about dismembering and burning of various animals. I kept flickering back and forth between historical mindsets: our modern sensibilities, revolted by all the gore of that slaughter and burning, and some glimpse of an earlier mind, immune to the gore, but mystified by the act of sacrifice, the idea of offering all this wealth up to an invisible patron—not to the usual stone statue or animal spirit with a taste for human flesh, but some cantankerous, unfathomable old Jew with fussy eating habits giving dictation from the top floor of a Mount Sinai condominium.
It’s hard to maintain Historical Mind for any sustained length of time.
After Leviticus we went for brown rice and vegetarian fare at Manzanita, a macrobiotic restaurant also in Berkeley: Carin, Nicole, Rob and I. The food has a fascinating story and philosophy behind it. Unfortunately, the end result can be described as “variations on a theme of gruel.”
Nicole and I used to be an item. Since then, she’s gone on to even greater renown as the founder of a community-run business here in San Francisco. She is very beautiful in that way that turns down the volume on the rest of the world while you speak to her. She is also hot. She is also wise. She tells me that she finally found a president to run the business side of things.
You mean a prime minister, I tell her. She gets the joke, namely that she is the Queen. She also gets that I may not get that she’s gotten it, and that I might spoil the whole thing by making some redundant variation on the joke, thereby embarrassing myself and her, so she laughs, and says:
I got it.
I tell her I’ve been rereading Rabbi Lerner’s books, the first one especially, Surplus Powerlessness, where he talks about his student radical days at Berkeley and how SDS and the movement in general tended to consume its own leaders. I want her to read this with regard to her own community, so I’ve photocopied the chapters.
You really do love me, don’t you! she says, glowing all radiant across the table from me.
Have you tried the cobbler ? I ask her, helping myself to some more cobbler.
You care about me!
It’s pretty good cobbler, actually.
Carin knows a great deal about food, being a caterer and a nutrition counselor. She even did a kind of apprenticeship here at Manzanita. She has been the one explaining the philosophy and story behind the food that makes it much more interesting.
There’s been something on my mind, and I ask her about it: Monkey Picked Tea.
Why do they call it that, I ask her.
Because it is. Picked by monkeys, she says.
How?
They train the monkeys to go to the tops of the tea trees, and pick only the freshest tips of tea
Wow, I thought, imagining the scene. Is this job open to anyone? I ask. Or do I need another masters’ degree?
That is when I resolved to become a monkey tea picker, picking only monkey-picked tea.
MonkeyTea 