Kosher Brain

I am at a global TED conference in Edinburgh. It is the summer of 2019 and the pandemic is still far off beyond the horizon.  I hear Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk about our different brains and how each of them affects us. I take notes furiously. Afterwards I am lucky enough to sit with her over a cup of coffee.

Jill’s talk explains everything! Our mind is made up of four different brains that take turns running our thoughts and daily lives. Among my four brains I have one (just that one, I hope) that is quite irrational. The brain that still believes. The one that lives in fear of divine retribution and shares that fear with the other brains. I call it Kosher Brain.

“Kosher? You keep kosher?” People are often incredulous. After all I am a secular Jew in so many ways. I believe that people wrote the Bible (geniuses, mind you). I don’t observe the Sabbath (except for abstaining from flying but that’s a different story), I spend less than an hour in the synagogue – a year. I am, generally speaking, a nonbeliever.

Except for Kosher Brain. My primitive believe-everything-you-are-taught-in-school-and-synagogue brain. The brain that is still stuck in first grade of Hebrew school. Listening to Hebrew teacher Werner Bauer tell us that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ordered directly from heaven, much the same way that we now order pizza. Roast chicken for lunch? No problem, says Mr. Bauer. The heavens open up and two courses of chicken breast and your favorite garnish suddenly and miraculously appear.

After school Kosher Brain morphs into Kosher Patrol. I am ruthless in our kitchen at home. “Our ice cream is not kosher,” I tell my Mom. Our favorite licorice snack, AllSorts, is packed with porcine gelatin. Out out, vile lardish Graham crackers and pigfat-laced French fries. On Passover we can go to the movies but cannot eat the popcorn. Kosher Patrol is relentless.

In the meantime I grow up, learn about evolution and decide not to go to religious (Yeshiva) high school in New York with my friend Yechiel Eckstein (a good decision in retrospect, especially after reading Yechiel’s autobiography). I put my tefillin (phylacteries) away one year after my Bar Mitzvah and never look back (well, almost never).

Kosher Brain continues to haunt me. Wherever I go it is there. It is futile to fight it.

Of course, there are times when the unexpected lapse occurs. For example that delicious smoked turkey at a brunch that I am sure is kosher but turns out to be smoked something else.

Or that time I am with Dr. Mira Barki on a business trip in Germany. We sit down to lunch with the heads of the company. In my honor, they have ferried a special salmon steak all the way from Hanover. The waiter proudly places the warm dish in front of me. It’s a salmon steak, to be sure, but adorned with three large juicy shrimp. Mira takes her knife and slides the slippery crustaceans onto her plate, whispering in my left ear, “Shut up and eat.”

If Kosher Brain would only settle for patrolling my diet, it wouldn’t be so bad. But Kosher Brain has other pernicious roles. It is also Divine Believer and Trepidation brain, Agoraphobia brain, Fear-of-flying brain and Superstition brain. And perhaps some other functions it hasn’t shared. Yet.

Worst of all, all my the other brains are perpetually gripped in mortal fear. Of retribution. Not divine retribution, mind you. Something worse.

The retribution of Kosher Brain.