In what has become an annual ritual all its very own, advertisements for kosher wine now spring up much like tulip bulbs in the weeks preceding the holiday of Passover. While it’s been years since Manischewitz was the only potable commonly found on the seder table, the variety of kosher wines continues to grow at an unusually fast clip.
Ethnographers, historians and sociologists are having a field day trying to account for the ways in which religion and consumption are now allies rather than rivals. They puzzle, and rightly so, over the implications of this union and what it portends.
Once upon a time, it was widely thought that modernity and its many blandishments diminished opportunities for religious expression. But if these advertisements for kosher wine and for luxurious Passover holidays by the sea are any indication, things have become far more complex, blurring the line between the worldly and the other-worldly.
I suspect that David Brooks would agree. Writing on “The Orthodox Surge” in last week’s Times, he could barely contain his enthusiasm for the “impressive” snack section, the variety of cheeses and the specially designed, squeeze-free Sabbath sponges available at the Brooklyn kosher food emporium, Pomegranate.
The latter, he writes, “looks like any island of upscale consumerism, but deep down it is based on a countercultural understanding of how life should work.” Warming to his topic, the Times columnist goes on to note that what fuels the lives of prototypical Pomegranate shoppers is not consumerism so much as a “collective covenant with God,” whose laws “infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance.”
Pending a field trip to Pomegranate, we’ll have to take Mr. Brooks’ word for it and trust to his reading of the situation. In the meantime, I’m going to stock up on a few bottles of Kosher Malvazija, the latest offering from Zagreb.
