Reflection on Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

              I was watching one of Anthony’s Bourdain’s shows (I think the Travel Channel one) a few days back when I started looking him up and came across this book he wrote in 2000. It is an awesome memoir of his life working in kitchens across America and is a very interesting and entertaining book for any fan of Bourdain’s and anyone interested in professional cooking.

              Bourdain says that a good cook is marked by reliability, which means always showing up and having integrity. These lessons are very applicable to everyone’s life. However, in the culinary world it goes to extremes- kitchen staff are expected to show up sick and take tons of verbal, physical, and sexual harassment. It is sad to see that the people in this industry treat each other so badly. But that said, Bourdain’s book is full of life lessons and you’ll learn a lot about how things really work in the hearts of the nice restaurants you go to for birthdays and anniversaries.

Reflection on Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer

              I didn’t love this book, but it was a nice, easy read. While I didn’t learn much about curiosity besides the fact that it’s good to be curious, Grazer peppers the book full of interesting anecdotes about being a Hollywood producer.

Reflection on The Sabbath: Its Meaning for the Modern Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel

              I was looking for a book on spirituality in Judaism or theology and I really loved this short book that I found and finished today. The Sabbath is all about the seventh day of the week and what it means and how best to observe it. Heschel is an excellent writer and I plan to read more of his works. He can be confusing to read at times, but that’s really because his work can get really dense with meaning. I found the first third of the book especially interesting an the middle third not as interesting.

              In the prologue, Heschel is very concerned with the contrast between space and time. He claims that many people equate reality with “thinghood,” focusing on space and objects, but that Judaism is a religion of time. Consider native American religions that have sacred mountains and rivers and other sites against Judaism, which has sacred days like the Sabbath and the high holy days. Heschel sums it up by saying that “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” In fact, the first holy object was not an object in space but a day—the Sabbath— “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” This is why in Judaism there are fixed times but no fixed place of prayer that is holy by itself.

              Heschel moves on to discuss how to observe the Sabbath and one important thing is that it is not a means to an end. The Sabbath is a day of rest, but not in the sense of resting from exercise so that the body can heal and be stronger. Rather, it is a rest for rest’s sake. Heschel says that “Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art… The seventh day is a palace in time which we build.” The Sabbath is given by God to us and we are not given to the Sabbath, so Heschel implores us to take advantage of that day and enjoy it because it is an example of the reward given to the worshippers of God. You shouldn’t even get angry on the Sabbath. He goes on to say that the likeness of God is not found, therefore, in any image, and though we may think of God as all-present in space, that’s not really it either. Rather, God’s likeness is found in the Sabbath and “our keeping of the Sabbath day is a paraphrase of His sanctification of the seventh day.”

              Another really important concept in the book is the qualitative difference between different moments in time. It is unfortunate that for many people time is just a “measuring device rather than a realm in which we abide,” meaning that people just use time to say that something was before or after another thing. Yet, says Heschel, “everyone will admit that the Grand Canyon is more awe-inspiring than a trench. Everyone knows the difference between a worm and an eagle. But how many of us have a similar sense of discretion for the diversity of time?”

              This quick read is excellent reading for any Jewish person and really any student of philosophy. It was very thought-provoking for me and I would highly recommend to others.

Reflection on On Trails by Robert Moor

              This was a really cool book recommended to me by a friend. It is all about paths and offers interesting perspectives on ecology and geography. I didn’t take too many notes, but the most profound thing I got from this book is that trails are key to life. In a forest, the spiral instinct kicks in when people are lost, so that without landmarks, the average lost hiker will move no further than 100 yards from where they got lost. Instead of going far in one direction, people will move around spiraling in circles for hours. I think this applies well to knowledge versus information. Information is a forest, and knowledge is a trail. You move nowhere when lost in tons of information, but with knowledge you can go far.