Tail of Two Kippers

The purpose of this blog is to add change the colors of your Shabbat table... Please print and share.
Happy birthday to Keith in Seattle!

Congratulations... you made it into another year.

Hopefully you didn't rush.

When I was a teenager, I loved the speed you could get on a bike whizzing down steep hills.

At some point my grandfather realized I was old enough to ride my bike safely around town and would occasionally send me to the fish store to buy him a bag of kippered salmon.

Now, if you're Jewish, it's probably a good bet that you eat salmon (in one form or another).
Question for your table: What color is sockeye salmon?

I'm going to guess that everyone said red?

Look at the above photo: a sockeye salmon lives most of its life as blue as the ocean it swims in. It turns red (among other changes) when it returns to the river to spawn, in what the NYT's best science writer calls "one of the most miraculous costume changes of the animal kingdom."

Some say it looks copper colored.

Now "copper" in Old English is "cypera". This word became "kipper".

Therefore, when you split open a fish of any sort - let's say herring - and salt it and smoke it, giving it a reddish color, you are kippering it.

So you can imagine my confusion when my grandfather asked me to pick him up some kippered salmon. That's like asking for salmoned salmon. But he assured me that if I asked the fishmonger for kippered salmon, he'd know what I meant.

He was right.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I'm no longer confused. That's what etymologies can do for you.

But we never ate the fish head. This made a great deal of sense to me at the time, but today it confuses me.

Because one of the traditional foods for the Rosh Hashana table (along with apples and honey) is a fish head.

Dip the apple in the honey and say, "May we have a sweet and healthy year!"

Take a bite of the fish head and say, "May we be heads and not tails!"

Cute.

But what of all those discarded fish tails? (Not to mention the discarded fish tales?)

Just like tashlich and the scapegoat, we toss them away (or feed them to the cat?), a symbol of the old self we're trying to shed, like ol' Dr. Konigswasser stepping out of his skin.

Now, here's the clincher question for your table: the salmon somehow knows exactly what it wants to transform itself into. But we - how are we supposed to know?

Wishing you and yours a happy and holy Yom Kippur (when is it again?).

Shabbat Shalom

May you be sealed in the Book of Life.

PS - If you didn't get my Questions to Think About From Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, reply to this email to request.
PPS - Yes, the above image is clickable.
PPPS - There is an ancient tradition of increasing one's tzeddaka during these Days of Awe. To support this blog and other JSLI projects, click here.

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