Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus

Professor of Religion and Henrietta Jennings, Faculty Chair for Outstanding Teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

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Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus wrote Gastronomic Judaism as Culinary Midrash (Lexington Press, Dec., 2018) and has published numerous articles on food rituals and Jewish food in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, Studies in Jewish Civilization, and other journals, He has regularly taught “The Rituals of Dinner” First Year Seminar at Wheaton for over twenty years, and courses such as Gender and Violence in the Bible, Intro. to the Comparison of Religions, Smells and Bells: The Sensual Dimension of Religions, and Mental, Physical, and Spiritual Well-Being from a Comparative Religious Perspective. He regularly stages meal rituals at home and at Wheaton and other places, even virtually. He’s currently working on a book on the myths and meal rituals of American Thanksgiving. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies (New Testament) from Vanderbilt, and is ordained as a Reconstructionist Rabbi. He lives, cooks, eats, and gardens with his wife Maia, an elementary school teacher in Providence, RI.

Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus will discuss eating and meals on Shabbat in kabbalah, building off his on-line translation and notes to Rabbenu Bahya b. Asher’s 14th century text Shulhan Shel Arba (“Table of Four”) on Sefaria. R. Bahya had thought- and imagination-provoking things to say about meal rituals as mindfulness practices (not using that language, of course). They become, in Jonathan Z. Smith’s words, “modes of paying attention,” by slowing us down before immediately gratifying our body and soul needs, by playfully using “words of Torah” in table talk to enhance the meaning and emotional impact of embodied practices, and by situating in general our acts of eating in a palpable and mythic drama of “cosmic recycling.”