I have a sefer called Bedikat Mazon Kehilchata which is all about checking your food to make sure that there are no bugs. Bugs are bad. If you eat a bug, you have just transgressed 4-6 biblical commandments. Definitely Bad News for the Jews (BNFTJ). For most of my life I did not really know about the concept of checking food for bugs. Once I found out about this, I got very paranoid about checking for bugs. After reading my sefer, I got even more paranoid – this book has lots of magnified pictures of bugs that the author found in his vegetables, details about the prevalence of bugs in vegetables (ie: most vegetables have lots of bugs and should not be eaten unless painstakenly inspected, or unless bought from Gush Katif).As it turns out, there is a much bigger bug problem in Eretz Yisrael than in Chutz La’aretz. Some of the explanations I have heard for this are: fewer pesticides; Israel is at a juncture of Africa, Asia and Europe, thus bugs shipped in from everywhere; the high spiritual level of Eretz Yisrael allows for the possibility of spiritually detrimental things (like bugs) that are much worse than in other places (along the lines of: the more yetzer harah a person has, the more potential they have for learning Torah and creativity, or vice versa).
All in all, there are more bugs in Israel than in America. This doesn’t mean that we don’t check out vegetables very carefully – just not as carefully as we would do in Israel (ie: we dont put out flour through sifters). And we rarely find bugs.
What does this have to do with aliyah? Well, last night we were bug-central. My wife was washing lettuce for a salad and on the first piece there was a little bug with wings (5 transgressions). Two minutes later she was washing a piece and there was this little white/translucent thing on it. My wife said to me: “That could be a worm. Do you think it is a worm”? And before I could do any scientific analysis on the thing, it started to move. Definitely BNFTJ (only 4 transgressions this time).
So I would like to think that we are seeing more bugs because our mutual spiritual levels are soaring as we prepare to immmigrate to the Holy Land. Or something like that.
April 1st, 2005 at 23:40
Oy, who knew? Actually I’m not sure I wanted to know, lol. According to my mother lettuce should be washed 5 times in slightly warm, salted water (by the individual leaf if you please) in order to rid it of not only bugs but also of viruses that are carried in the soil and that can make you die –and she tells the story of some little girl in Texas who went into a coma for 5 days from a virus she got off only once-washed romaine lettuce. (Meryl Streep’s character in Lemony Snicket has to be based on my mother!). All veggies should be seriously scrubbed, especially scallions (some people died from unwashed scallions at a Chi Chis restaurant, I’m told) and celery.