My Work, This Shabbat

In the months preceding a move to the other side of the world, and with it the expiration of my all-encompassing, overly-expensive, perfect-example-of-America's-health-system-malfunction-disaster health insurance, I decided to take a trip early this week to the Allergist.

Since college I have struggled with my body's auto-immune response to problems non-existant. You're a fighter, David, I was always told. And so I am. In the absence of a real fight to pick, my body chooses to attack things like dust, and pollen, and pet dander.

Cue the histamine, the runny nose, the congestion.

In the fight against allergies, I buy pillow covers and mattress covers. I use air filters which suck all of the impurities from the air I breath at night. I flush salted water through my sinuses each morning with a bottle shaped to fit a genie. I vacuum and sweep and vacuum again.

It is a never-ending battle against a microscopic invader against which I am helpless. The evil fills every space into which I enter, floating harmlessly in the air, until I breath it in, and my body reacts, and, low and behold, my sinuses no longer function.

So I went to the allergist to pinpoint the exact nature of my allergies. Forty pricks on my back of forty common things on this planet later, my body was charted like a connect the dots picture yet to be used.

And within minutes, my back had exploded in redness. The itches could not be contained. Scratch me! Scratch me. I could not. Fifteen minutes of not scratching passed, as I awaited the doctor's eye.

Then came the moment of truth. The list of offending allergens was brought forth. Dust. No surprise. Cats and dogs and hamsters and cockroaches. There goes veterinary work. Olive tree pollen and some grasses and mold. Fair enough.

And then, there, at the end of the list, the one allergy I have to food. Screaming blatantly from the page, as if it were highlighted two times over and written in red-ink, circled around with arrows pointing to it: shellfish.

And not just a small allergy, at all. Rather, it's about as severe as any other allergy I have, a '4+' on a scale of zero to four.

Yet what exactly that means, I do not know. I will not know. I cannot know.

In the days of my youth, there were times aplenty when I dined on various parts of the swine. Bacon, pepperoni, sausage - all delicious delicacies which have found their ways into my mouth throughout the ages. To be clear, I never ate ham. No such goyisher item would be allowed near me. But derivations of the pig so delicious as these were never forbidden to me.

As much as I did eat pork, as I did not eat kosher, as I made little distinction between what is treif and what is not, I still never touched shellfish. Shrimp and crab and lobster and such, always seemed so not-Jewish, not to mention unappetizing.

I'll confess that I did eat clam chowder, but only because it was creamy and in a giant loaf of bread. Once I was old enough to realize that something called "Clam Chowder" has clams inside, I gave up that practice entirely.

And once I did eat shrimp. But only because it came deep fried and battered - there was more crispy goodness than pink living animal of the sea. And I was seven. Dinner called "Popcorn Shrimp" is much more appealing than grilled salmon.

That is all to say, that in the twenty six odd years of my life, shellfish has entered my lips maybe a handful of times, all of which the taste of the shellfish was so utterly covered and masked by some other delicious substance. And now it turns out that I am very allergic to shellfish. Very allergic.

Maybe so allergic that I would die if I ate it. Maybe not. Probably not. But I will never know.

I won't ever know what will happen to me if I eat it. I will never know the taste of these most-celebrated of dinner items.

I won't know. I cannot know.

I can't because my both my body and my God are in agreement that this is a forbidden fruit.

It seems that there is so much I can learn from that. There are so many good drashes to give.

What does it mean that my body seems to be screaming out in support of the halakha? What does it mean when the natural order and my religious system are in utmost agreement? And what if I were allergic to not wrapping tefilin, or allergic to putting a stumbling block before the blind.

I'll ponder that.

And what does it mean to be so removed and unable to know something as simple as shrimp, or crab, or lobster? All the more so, what if I cannot know God, or the meaning of the universe, or my place in this world?

I'll ponder that too.

Time to go start.

Comments

[Mason-Barkin]

Your God and your body may be in agreement, but my God -- or at least the book they say my God wrote -- is in disagreement with my taste buds.