Food for Thought, Spirit and Body
An Interview with Rabbi Nilton Bonder
By Rachel Fine

Rachel Fine: There has been a surge of interest in the Kabbalistic teachings, not only in Jewish communities, but also in non-Jewish communities. How do you account for the recent popularity of Kabbalah?

Nilton Bonder: I think the term "Kabbalah" has come to represent "secret". It was meant that way in the tradition and there is an enormous interest in going beyond the shallow meanings of what daily, routine life seems to produce. However, it has been traditionally understood as a "dessert" of life and wisdom. It is not "it". To have Kabbalah you need a good and well balanced meal. Its sweetness can go very well in good dosage with the rest of the meal. One of the problems of the newly risen interest is that it seems to be composed in certain measure by people that want to live on "dessert". That is not very healthy. My books tries to look at concrete issues and present the meal with its ethical, intellectual and emotional courses before going into the secret and spiritual.

You have recently published two other books regarding Kabbalah, The Kabbalah of Envy and The Kabbalah of Money. What prompted you to complete your trilogy with The Kabbalah of Food?

  The trilogy is built on a passage from the Talmud which states that " a person can be known by their glass, their pocket and their anger". If you understand the way your pocket impacts the world (money); the way that your glass exchanges with the world (food); and they way that you deal with your aggressiveness you can learn a great deal about who you are. In the book about envy I deal with the reasons why I believe this saying has singled out specifically those three elements. They are very down to earth manifestations that can help us see, beyond discourse and disguise, our real self. Food is particularly interesting because it deals with real necessities. And because of that we can detect when we cross the boundaries of need in the physical sense and begin a process of eating to satiate other kind of hungers.

In your book, The Kabbalah of Food, you often incorporate the use of numerology to gain further insight into the Kabbalistic teachings regarding food and diet. Likewise, you frequently observe the double meanings of words, and treat words as acronyms to locate a secondary meaning. Why do Kabbalists adopt these practices?

When you reach the stage of dealing with secret meanings you are no longer looking for logical connections or even symbolic connections. It means speculating in interfaces that are not manifest. One of our major difficulties is to legitimize that which is not manifest but is hidden. By hidden we mean something that requires some sort of instrument to come to light. Otherwise it would be either visible, audible or even conceivable. The kind of instrument can vary obviously. Kabbalah has singled out some idiosyncrasies of the Hebrew language. Since it is a three (sometimes two) letter root language it creates interesting possibilities when you begin to play around with the order of the letters and their numerical value (each letter has a number associated to it). Also the idea in Jewish Mysticism that the world was created with letters and words brings up the magic contained in the code of writing that is very much at the core of these techniques. But, in any case, they rely on human imagination and intuition to create paths of connections that are hidden and in no way manifest.

The United States continues to battle the unremitting problem of obesity. How would you explain this "disease" as a cultural phenomenon?

The United States eats more than it needs in energy, in paper consumption, in water, air, fuel and so on. There is a real problem of obesity in the US that you will find in middle and upper classes strata at any society. But in no other place you have such a concentration of people behaving that way. So it becomes more visible and at the same time easier to act against. Excess is bad. But we don't believe it until we experience it. It is part of our nature. But regimens as the bookstores have in profusion won't do it. The American society needs good diets. Diets that mean not only discipline but values. That is much of why I believe the Jewish dietary laws can serve as a model.

You refer to obesity, a physical problem, as a symptom of a greater spritual and emotional problem or "imbalance." Is it possible that the propensity for obesity is partially genetic?

Sure it is possible. There are also diseases. There are also side effects of certain medical treatments that can cause it. I am not saying that every fat person you see is necessarily "imbalanced". But we all know that defining the limits of what is need and what is compensating for needs other than the nutritional ones, is very complex. The question as I present it at the book is not as much about being thinner but lighter. To get rid of certain heaviness in other areas of our lives may very well have an impact in our figure. That is true even for people that are obese because of other dysfunctions that have nothing to do with food intake.

In the first chapter of your book, you mention "the danger of studying the subtleties of the Kabbalah before achieving a certain degree of maturity." For a person (unfamiliar with the Kabbalistic teachings), who is interested in developing a new and healthier relationship to food and eating, what is the best approach to reading, understanding and practicing the principles set forth in your book?

II think the best approach is to let go with the "flow" of logic of the book. The entire trilogy is more about the technique of Kabbalah than Kabbalah itself. To learn to see beyond is part of the process of healing, dieting and overcoming. We know this from psychology but it is true for treating any dysfunction. Happy is the one that knows what kind of physical (or emotional, or intellectual) weakness he or she has. Much of my book is about deep diagnosis. It is about learning how to catch ourselves at certain habit situations, developing an immune system based not in chemistry but in consciousness.

Your book, The Kabbalah of Food, is clearly not a how-to-diet-and-lose-weight book. Your book supports the development of an entirely new relationship with food on many different levels, physical, emotional and spiritual. In addition, the development of this "new" relationship, for a person that has acquired and cultivated unhealthy and detrimental eating habits, requires a significant amount of patience, time, and the willingness to "shatter" bad habits and adopt new attitudes. The demands of such a commitment might discourage people, especially people who desire a quick remedy or diet, from considering this holistic approach. What are your thoughts regarding this issue?

There is what we call the Long Short Path and the Short Long Path. Most people will always go for the shorter path, which is longer. They undergo regimens but dont quite get where they expected. Or they do it for very little time also at very painstaking demands. No doubt my book is about the Long Short Path. Its main promise is not to make you thin in a few weeks but to bring you to enjoy taking care of your food habits not because of others but because it brings you a feeling of well-being. This well-being is not only health, but the pleasure contained in the act of caring for oneself.

In your book, you mention the importance of fasting, "an active feeding on nothing," as a critical part of any holistic diet. What does it mean to actively "feed on nothing." Why is it crucial in any diet?

What I mean is that in the spectrum of "eatings" there is also not-eating. Fasting in that sense is an important element of self-awareness. I can eat food because of emotional problems. For example, let's say I am anxious and I go to the refrigerator because of that. In that case I eat not because of physical hunger, but emotional hunger. The void is not in the stomach but in the soul. Well, when I do the opposite, namely, instead of having to fill in the soul with food, I fill the stomach with spiritual energy, I begin to develop accesses to the right kind of nourishment for each and different kind of hunger. So fasting is not for a better average of weekly calories but again a technique for awareness that promotes changes in one's perceptions and habits.

In the final chapters of your book, you include "The Rules of Physical Well-Being" written by Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried (1804-1886). Much of Rabbi Ganzfried's advice for following a holistic diet seems remarkably relavent in the late 20th century. For example, he states that "a person should eat only when he has a natural desire for food, and not an indulgent desire," a recommendation that encourages people to respond to a physical need to eat, rather than an emotional or spiritual void. On the other hand, he refers to garlic, a food that many people use as a natural remedy, as "unwholesome" and discourages the consumption of it. How should we interpret these rules? Should we accept them at face value?

No! In no way. We should never accept diets at face value. Diets have to do with awareness and that is what Rabbi Ganzfried is doing when compiling rules that were part of the Jewish wisdom tradition. The only person that can fully create a diet is the individual himself. There are facts, medical or experiential ones, but we are the ones who have to keep up with understanding which is the best way for us to eat. Is this crazy? Not at all. It is like that throughout our lives in any aspect of it. We have the best hints that can reveal the best ways to go about fixing or curing something. Have you ever noticed that the best doctors spend a good deal of time asking you questions about your health? They know that we are the most important source for finding out what is wrong and, in many times, how to fix it. The more specific our problems are the less chance we have of finding specialists for it. They would have to be ultra-specialists or specialists in me or you. At the same time, I am a specialist in me and so are you in you. Make use of that fact: there will never be a better dietitian for you than yourself. We usually don't like that. A rabbi once came to his congregation and said: I have three pieces of news to convey to you. One is bad, one is good and one so-so. The bad one is that our building is at the point of collapse and it will require one million dollars to repair it. The good news is that we already have the money. The so-so news is that the money is in your pockets. We don't like that third element of information. Nonetheless, the resources are very much at our disposal. Please, do make use of them.

Rabbi Nilton Bonder lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he is known as the "Green Rabbi" for his commitment to social and environmental issues. The first rabbi in Brazil to become a bestselling author, his other books include The Kabbalah of Money and The Kabbalah of Envy.

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