I have long felt that life offers very few more enjoyable experiences than a good meal eaten in the company of friends. There are even times when I feel that there are very few better ways to spend an evening than trying, and failing, to decide which is more delicious, which more nourishing: the food or the company. A good meal stimulates and satisfies; good conversation does the same.

Whenever I start going on like this, I wonder whether I’m being trivial. I surely can’t be suggesting that dinner with friends is up there with experiencing a performance of King Lear or The Marriage of Figaro? However great the chef, a meal is, in essence, an ephemeral thing, and the few traces it leaves behind are singularly unattractive. I love our friends dearly, but none of them would claim that they were wits and intellects in the class of Robert Benchley or Isaiah Berlin.

And yet….and yet. There is something about dinner with friends: the interplay between the semi-formal structure and the ease of being in a group all of whom feel completely comfortable in each other’s company; the balance of predictability (the set table gives a good idea of what to expect) and a sense of the unknown (down which particular byways will our conversation take us this evening?); the knowledge that no one in the group has anywhere better to be, and that the next couple of hours will provide an oasis on the journey through life’s desert.

It has, therefore, been a wonderful experience, over the last few weeks, to read a book one of my favourite dining companions lent me, a book with the daunting title: The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature, by Leon R Kass. Let me first say that I’m not sure whether the erudition and breadth of scope of the book or the author is more intimidating. Kass summarizes his background thus:

This strange book was written by a strange author. Trained first as a physician and then as a biochemist, he now practices neither. Untrained in philosophy and literature, he teaches both without a license, studying some of their greatest works with serious students at one of the world’s best universities [University of Chicago, which has just been ranked 10^th in the ARWU (Academic Ranking of World’s Universities) list – so that’s not a baseless claim].

As for the book, it has been described, fairly, I feel, as follows:

Who would have thought that a book on ‘eating’ could turn out to be a profound and brilliant exploration of the human condition, its limits and its potential?

As another critic wrote, Kass:

…recognize[s] that everyday activities are charged with unsuspected meanings….The way we eat together has everything to do with the way we live together.

So, in choosing to write this week about dining tables I have slid my feet under, I feel that I am not necessarily throwing out a few light-hearted observations, but rather touching on something that speaks profoundly to the human condition.

In one chapter, Kass points out the prominent part played by hospitality in Homer’s Odyssey. In modern Western civilization, of course, much of that private hospitality has been replaced by hotels, restaurants, inns and so on. However, as I repeatedly discovered when I travelled abroad on business regularly over a period of about 13 years, sometimes some of us need (or at least crave) more than the hotel and the restaurant can offer. A typical trip for me would be to attend, as part of a team of 5 or 6 people, business meetings, for two weeks in a single city.

Since I was very often the only religious member of the group, I expected to be alone on the middle Saturday, when my colleagues were either working round the clock or seeing the sights. Then after meetings ended on the last Friday, my colleagues would fly home, and I would be ‘trapped’ until the Sunday, unable to fly over shabbat.

It is fair to say that I was sometimes feeling rather sorry for myself at this stage. I would typically have survived all week on kosher cup-a-soups, tuna, crackers, salad and fruit, nuts and raisins and chocolate, all eaten in the sterile environment of an anonymous hotel bedroom. I would have worked 15–18-hour days, two thirds of the time in a comfortable but characterless conference room, and the other third in that same hotel bedroom.

But then, on Friday, more often than not, something amazing happened. Having completed my work, I would shower, change, and make my way to the home of someone I had never met, who was hosting me for shabbat. Sometimes this was the friend (or, on one occasion, the parents) of one or another of our friends in Ma’ale Adumim. Sometimes, it was someone I had called without an introduction (never a comfortable experience) earlier in the week.

On one occasion, it was pure good fortune. After two weeks in St Louis, I was unexpectedly asked to fly to Dallas for a third week. After meetings ended on the Thursday evening, I was completely exhausted, and also feeling that I had used up all of my charm and affability. So, I decided to spend shabbat alone in my hotel room.

Accordingly, I drove to a supermarket that had a kosher aisle, planning to stock up with goodies. Unable to find the challot, I spotted someone who was obviously Jewish and asked whether he could tell me where the challot were. He pointed me in the right direction, and then asked: ‘Are you in town for shabbat?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Have you got anywhere to stay?’ ‘I’m just going to stay in my hotel.’ Looking around, he called out to a tall young man in the next aisle: ‘Michael, you’ll host this gentleman for Shabbat, won’t you!’ I was simply unable to refuse without appearing rude. I jotted down the address, and comforted myself with the fact that I would at least get to stay in a J R Ewing-style Dallas mansion!

When I arrived at my host’s home the following day, I discovered it was a
small townhouse (terraced house) on a very busy main road. It transpired that
Michael was the principal (headmaster) of the Jewish primary school, a post
that came with a house. As he said to me, over dinner that evening: ‘You find
yourself in the only Jewish home in Dallas that votes Democrat.’ It was,
nevertheless (or possibly in part for that reason) a delightful shabbat.

I must have been hosted by twenty different families during those work years,
and every shabbat was a very special experience. In the same way as I feel at
home walking into a synagogue anywhere around the world, so I felt among
family, sharing shabbat with all of these diverse hosts. The sense in which we
both, host and guest, felt warmed by the experience was often palpable.

Incidentally, the synagogue I attended on that shabbat in Dallas was tremendously welcoming, with designated hosts for anyone looking for a dinner invitation on Friday night and separate designated hosts for Saturday lunch. After the Friday night service, three separate people asked me if I had a dinner arrangement. The only other place where Bernice and I have experienced that level of warmth was on our first shabbat in Ma’ale Adumim almost 24 years ago, when we first attended what has been, ever since, ‘our’ shul – Musar Avicha.

In only one city did I receive no welcome at all; that was Chicago (despite my dropping broad hints, to various congregants, that I was a visitor in town and staying in a hotel). This just bears out what has always been my experience: large, established communities are much less welcoming than small ones.

Which brings me to the most open house I have ever known, the house where Pauline and Louis Saville lived. They were the parents of Bernice’s closest friend since childhood – Denise. Louis had grown up between the wars in the then strong and close-knit Glasgow Jewish community, while Pauline had grown up in England’s second city, Birmingham. Louis qualified as a medical doctor, and, in 1940, Pauline and Louis married. During the Second World War, Louis was ordered by the Government to move to Ogmore Vale, a small mining village near the head of a South Wales valley, to serve as a family doctor there.

It is fair to say that, for Pauline, who loved the bright lights and social buzz of the big city, tiny, insular Ogmore was a huge disappointment, and, I imagine, for Louis as well. However, to Ogmore they were posted, and there they stayed for the rest of their lives. They very soon decided that if they were destined to live in a backwater, then no boat, however little, that ventured anywhere near their backwater would be allowed to float past without mooring for a shorter or longer time at their home.

I first experienced their extraordinary hospitality in April 1965. By that time, I was a veteran of one winter camp of Hanoar Hatzioni (the Zionist organization where Bernice and I met), and five or six of us from Ilford took the train to Swansea during the half-term holiday, to stay with various of our new friends. One afternoon, we decided to train and bus up to Ogmore Vale, to visit Denise. I can’t now remember how much notice we gave; I doubt if it was more than a few hours.

Regardless, we and our Swansea hosts (so, a party of about 10 or 12) turned up at the Savilles’. We spent a couple of hours listening to Beatles records on Pauline and Louis’ rather grand music centre, and were then ushered through to the dining room, where a long, long table, easily seating all of us, bowed under the weight of fried fish and salads.

That same hospitality was shown to anyone of interest who passed through, or even just nearby (both Cardiff and Swansea, the two cities of South Wales, were an hour’s drive away)….and probably the most important lesson I learnt from Pauline and Louis was that everyone is of interest, if you open your house to them, put them at their ease, ask the right question, and sit back and listen. They were both wonderful listeners. With them as your audience, you always felt as though you were a fascinating person, full of perceptive insights.

I always told them that it was a terrible shame that they did not keep a visitors book, because the number and range of guests they entertained over the decades was extraordinary.

Theirs was also a hospitality that could not be strained. One Saturday evening, Bernice and I had arranged to drive the eight miles up the valley from our home in Bridgend to Ogmore, for an evening of bridge. As we drove through Bridgend, a few snowflakes began to fall. We decided that it would be an exaggerated reaction to turn back, and so we continued to Pauline and Louis’ home. We arrived safely as the snow started to thicken. We were eventually ble to drive back home on the following Wednesday, after snow ploughs had cleared the drifts on the valley road. Meanwhile, the Army had helicoptered bread and milk in to the village. I bring up this story only to say that at no point in those four days did we feel for a moment that we had outstayed our welcome.

So, you will appreciate that it is with a broad smile that I tell you that my voice is now much stronger than it was, and I have been given the okay from the throat specialist to speak freely. Not the least welcome outcome of that is that we can now resume issuing, and accepting, dinner invitations…..at least until the next lockdown.

Tao, as you can see, has already learnt the art of engaging his audience non-verbally over dinner.