A Celebration of Palestinian Food

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Luke 15: 1-2 NRSVue 

I just read a Christian Century review of a book that I will never purchase and won't show up in our local library, as good as it is, but it still intrigues me. Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food by Faid Kattan is a cookbook that is also about the importance of community in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and perhaps more broadly about how eating together gives us a sense of belonging. I appreciated these two paragraphs (and many more) from Stephanie Saldana's review: 

At the center of Kattan’s book is the Bethlehem market, only a five-minute walk from the nearby Basilica of the Nativity, where tradition holds that Jesus was born. For locals, the basilica and the market together form the beating heart of Bethlehem’s town center. For generations, butchers, farmers, and spice vendors have sold their meat and produce at the souk, and on Saturday mornings the market swells into the surrounding alleys and it feels as though the entire town shows up to shop for the freshest produce. It is a place of life, magic, and attention, where vendors call out and remember you by name. Often, what they say could almost be poetry: “They’re not tomatoes! They’re apples!” a vendor recently sang out when his tomatoes were especially sweet.

 The cookbook is also a quiet story of faith. Recipes include siyami (fasting) foods for Bethlehem’s Christians, who often refrain from meat, eggs, and dairy during Lent. An outsized portion is dedicated to Christmas. There’s Kattan’s recipe for burbara—the dessert of wheat berries soaked with spices and dried fruits, served to family, friends, and neighbors on the Feast of St. Barbara at the beginning of the Christmas season. One of his most touching vignettes is his nod to the Salesian Bakery, a local Christian bakery that quietly distributes bread to the needy regardless of their religion, demonstrating what Kattan calls the “essence of solidarity and communal responsibility.”

When we were in Israel two years ago it was apparent that our Christian family members who lived there at the time were focussed on the Jews of Israel but they told us that we should eat in Arab restaurants whenever possible because of the hospitality and the culinary experience. They were right, and we enjoyed several meals with them in Arab-owned restaurants. While efforts are made to differentiate Arabs from Palestinians they have many common cultural and culinary elements. And while the majority are Muslim there are also Christians. 

We also had the panicky/comic experience of ordering food in an Arab restaurant on the mountain in Haifa overlooking the Mediterranean when it was just the two of us on a day trip.  We decided to share an order for a modest midday meal but something was lost in translation. Dishes began to arrive at our table in such abundance we laughed out loud. It was delicious and still relatively inexpensive, happy to say.

According to the gospels, Jesus, born in Bethlehem,  loved a meal and a party, to the disapproval of some religious leaders. There are at least seven meals described in Luke, suggesting that breaking bread together was a spiritual experience. I wonder how many stars Jesus would give to  Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food? 

                                               Jesus Eats with Tax Collectors & Sinners -- Sieger Koder