earlier today. Apparently, Pawlenty dismissed critics of the tea-party movement, including the Anti-Defamation League, I guess, as a “brie-eating” elite from “Ivy League schools” who sneer at “Sam‘s Club Republicans” who “actually like shopping at places like Wal-Mart.” Stuttaford concludes that the “guy’s a phony.”What else can you expect from the governor of a state that produces cheese like this or this? I didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school, but if eating brie makes me an élitist, then élitist I am. The worst thing about being an Orthodox Jew, in fact, is the dismaying paucity of choice in cheese. Kosher cheeses are tasteless processed lumps of hardened milk. Oh, for a good wedge of gorgonzola or even, God save me, stilton.
Cheese may be man’s greatest invention ever—easily the best thing in life, with books running a very distant second—and it is a testament to just how much God demands of an Orthodox Jew that he must give it up. A commentator accuses of claiming that “there is only one way—yours [that is, mine]—to lead a legitimately Jewish life.” But the truth is exactly the reverse. My advice is to pursue a different kind of life altogether, and enjoy to the full humanity’s astonishing riches of cheese.
Update: Cheese, of course, is what is used to catch rats.
Update, II: Kosher cheese is so God awful because most Orthodox Jews have never tasted real cheese, entertain no sinful thoughts about it, and consequently there is no market for it. One day at the supermarket, shortly after my wife and I had joined the Orthodox shul, I ran into a friend who is FFB (“frum [pious, observant] from birth”). She asked how the adjustment to Orthodoxy was going. I complained about the sudden disappearance of cheese from our lives. I said something similar to the above: “Oh, for a good wedge of gorgonzola.” I pronounced the word to rhyme with rock-’n’-roller. My friend slapped her forehead. “That’s how you say it,” she cried: “I always thought it was gorgonzola”—as if the cheese were a prehistoric Japanese monster. Living in Orthodox circles, she had never heard it pronounced. There had never been any occasion to hear it pronounced.
Update, III: In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov says that “food is our chief link with the common chaos of matter rolling about us.” It is instructive to compare this remark to something similar said by Roth. Sex, he writes in The Human Stain, is “the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.” Could there be a clearer expression of the difference between these two great American novelists?
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