I’m not fasting.  It’s not because I have to take a ridiculous amount of medications.  It’s because fasting makes me concentrate on fasting and not on repentance, religion, prayer, or anything but food.  

But I’d like to give you a little gift – a poem by Rony Sommek:

 

Shofars

 

The sound of the shofar from the Ashkenazi synagogue

mingles with its brother from the Yemenite synagogue

which is already suffused with the shofar’s blow

from the Iraqi synagogue that was built above it.

 

Show me another restaurant in the world

whose menu includes in one mouthful

zhug,

amba

and ptcha.

 

 

(zhug is a Yemenite spicy sauce, amba is a pickled mango sauce from Iraq, and ptcha is an aspic popular in Eastern European cooking)