A Taste of the Leviathan

Huge props to Talia Coutin, Editor in Chief of our quarterly student Jewish newspaper, the Leviathan. This whole quarter, but especially the last few weeks, and especially the last few days, she has been rallying the troops to get the paper ready for print. The theme is "altered states and spirituality," and I'm very much looking forward to what students have to say about it.

For my part, I conducted an interview with Benyamin Cantz, the man behind locally produced Four Gates organic kosher wines. As a little preview of what the coming issue of the Leviathan has in store, I include here an excerpt from that interview, which took place on the 14th of Shvat (and relates to Purim because it's about wine). Here, Benyamin was responding to the question, "Why do we use wine davka to sanctify our holiest times in Judaism?":

"You use the Kiddush wine to commemorate the Creation on Shabbos. So what you're doing is you're making a connection between the physical world that we're familiar with and that we work at, and the larger-than-physical world, the spiritual world that the physical world is embedded in, or however you want to describe the relation between the physical and the spiritual world. So, in my mind, that became early-on and still remains the model of the spiritual world, and here we are, physical beings in a physical world and we have to do things and make things that acknowledge our consciousness; that it's larger than just what we see, that this physical world that we're living in from day to day is embedded in a much larger, fantastical, unimaginable, spiritual world that we maybe only get tiny hints or glimpses of, or maybe not even that. Maybe it's just faith. But we all experience the largeness."

I hope that whetted your Leviathan appetite. It'll be all around campus soon, so keep an eye out!