A nondairy Shavuot, the traditional way

On this coming Erev Shavuot, Zizet and Shmuel Messalem will eat pkaila, a Tunisian stew of spinach, white beans and meat that’s cooked for hours until almost black. The stew is served ceremonially over couscous. It’s a delicacy that they’ve been serving on Shavuot and special occasions since before they moved from Tunisia to Israel in 1949. 

But they’ll be eating this festive dish all alone.

None of their loving seven children, twenty four grandchildren or twenty five great-grandchildren will be joining the family patriarchs for the traditional meal marking the beginning of Shavuot. Members of the younger generations, who all grew up in Israel, would rather celebrate the holiday the way the rest of the country does, with cheesecakes, dairy kugels and rich cheese platters.

“Tunisian Jews never had milk or dairy products,” said Chen Cohen, the Messalems’ granddaughter (Tunisian Jews say they do not eat “the white”.) According to Zizet, the only milk that was available in Tunisia, when she grew up there, was what was known as “chalav nochri” – milk that was not-supervised by kashrut authority and therefor forbidden for consumption by Jews. Other North African Jewish communities also refrained from dairy product, mainly because they only had one set of dishes that was used for meat meals. Dairy products were sometimes purchased from street vendors, but not cooked or consumed at home.

Instead, Shavuot meals in Jewish communities in the Middle East, were known for traditional meat and grain dishes, many carrying symbolic references to elements of the holiday, from meat stews to grains and baked goods.

Shavuot originated as an agricultural holiday, one of the three Pilgrimage Festivals, with Sukkot and Passover. During those festivals, Jews would gather at the Temple in Jerusalem, bringing their farm offerings. Shavuot, also known as the Festival of Reaping, marked the end of the fifty day period between the harvest of the barley in Passover and the harvest of wheat. As an offering, pilgrims would bring two loaves of bread from their wheat harvest to the Temple. Shavuot is also known as the “Holiday of the First Fruit,” in which Jews presented the priests with a gift of the first of the harvest of the seven Species the Land of Israel: Pomegranate, olive, fig, grape, date, wheat and barley.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, religious leaders sought to reassign a new meaning to Shavuot, and branded it as a commemoration of receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai.

This new meaning (and the fact that Shavuot coincides with the cows’ peak in milk production,) paved the way to the Ashkenazi tradition of serving dairy dishes during the holiday . Some tie this tradition to the phrase from Song of Songs, comparing the Torah to “honey and milk under your tongue.” There are many other explanations, most of them done ”backwards,” to justify a tradition that came about naturally. For American Jews, most of whom are Ashkenazi, the tradition of serving dairy dishes for Shavuot has always been seen as a given.

There were also some less-traditional reasons for turning Shavuot into the official dairy holiday of the Jewish people.

Fast forward a couple of millennia ahead, to the end of the 19th century in then-Palestine. Early Zionists “decided to bring the state to the biblical era, to a society with biblical style foods,” said Yahil Zaban, a literature professor and food culture scholar. “There was a strong emphasis on the produce, fruit and vegetables of the land, and grains. Dairy products were important too, as in the Land of Milk and Honey.” 

Most of the Zionists who settled Palestine at the time were Ashkenazi. “Those Zionists came from a very secular background. They reconnected to the Land of Israel in the spirit of A.D. Gordon’s New Jew, who has a healthy relationship with the land that surrounds him, that engages in productive labor,“ said professor Nimrod Luz, head of Research Authority at the Department of Land of Israel Studies in Kinneret College.

“The Israeli food industry discovered the commercial potential of the dairy products,” said Zaban, “and from then on, the grains and fresh produce are forgotten.”

Israel’s Milk Council even came up with a cartoon figure of a fearless boy named Yoav Ben-Chalav (Yoav son-of-Milk,) who just like Popeye’s spinach, got his powers from drinking two cups of milk, and successfully defeated hair-raising terrorists and spooky thieves. “Milk became an ideological drink,” Luz concluded.

The new white holiday was almost the complete opposite of the holiday celebrated by Zizet and Shmuel with their black pkayla, and very different from the way most of the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews used to celebrate it.

For Libyan Jews, it wouldn’t be Shavuot without a large farina dumpling called bazeen that represents Mount Sinai itself. It is served with meat in tomato sauce.

Many Sephardi Jews bake the traditional Seven Heavens challah (Siete cielos challah) referring to the seven heavens of the universe mentioned in Jewish scripture. This tradition dates back to 8th century Spain. The challah’s shape, a large dome surrounded by seven rings of dough, symbolizes Mount Sinai and the clouds or heavens surrounding it. It is then decorated with symbols such as a ladder, Torah scrolls, and birds.

Moroccan Jews crumble leftover matzah from Passover into a glass of milk and with honey and eat it before the meal, demonstrating the sweetness of the Torah as described in the Song of Songs.

Another baked tradition comes from the Libyan Jewish community: Parents would prepare a special necklace of cookies for each of their children. The cookies were shaped to resemble the tablets; a ladder for Moses to climb up the mountain; birds, as no bird chirped when Moses returned with the Torah; palm-shaped Hamsa and evil eye, for good luck; eye glasses to read the torah, and backpacks to carry it to school. The cookies were threaded on a string  and decorated with a painted eggshell and beads.

Chen Cohen told me of a Tunisian tradition called Kliya (to toast, in Hebrew,) where toasted flaxseed, chickpea, lentils and barley are placed in a large bowl for the family to nosh on during the holiday. The tradition may be connected to the harvest of wheat, or to a sentence from the book of Ruth that mentions her eating toasted food after a day of harvesting wheat at Boaz’s fields.

Non-dairy Shavuot culinary traditions may have been driven out of the mainstream, but they still exist, not only as a delightful reminders of the beautiful use of culinary symbolism, but also as a sign of the diverse array of traditions that make up the Jewish experience.

And as for Zizet and Shmuel?

Well, no need to worry about them. They do not stay alone for long. 

On the first day of Shavuot, all their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren come over for a big carnivore BBQ celebration. As the Talmud says, “there is no joy without meat and wine,” and that’s true even on dairy-dominated Shavuot..

( main photo credit: כרזה של קק”ל לשבועות, עיצוב: אביטל סמוני)

Article was published originally at Haaretz.com