A Las Cruces Rabbi Spins Weekly Lessons from Torah and Chiles
In the high desert of southern New Mexico, where the Organ Mountains turn copper at sunset and the smell of roasting green chile drifts from backyard kitchens, a rabbi composes a weekly column that has quietly gathered readers far beyond the Mesilla Valley. Each Friday, subscribers of the New Mexico Jewish Link receive a short reflection that weaves the week's Torah portion with a meditation on the humble pepper. The column treats capsicum as a doorway into text, ritual and the lived experience of Jews in the American Southwest.
For readers in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and beyond, the pairing might first feel unusual. Yet the column's premise is older than either ingredient's geography: a single food can carry theology, history and humour in the same breath. Australian Jews who grew up arguing over the best way to smoke a brisket or pickle herring may find unexpected kinship in a rabbi who argues, with equal passion, about whether a Big Jim or a jalapeño deserves the title of the week's spiritual emblem.
A Column Rooted in Two Traditions
The Las Cruces rabbi did not arrive at the marriage of Torah and chiles by accident. He grew up in a household where Shabbat dinner stretched across a table crowded with grandchildren, and where arguments about kashrut doubled as arguments about regional identity. When he took his pulpit in the Mesilla Valley, he discovered that southern New Mexico's culinary vocabulary was already a kind of Midrash. Every pot of red simmering on a stove held a comment on patience. Every roasted green carried a lesson on transformation under fire.
That recognition shaped the column's weekly rhythm. The rabbi pairs the opening words of each parashah with a specific pepper, then lets scripture and pod speak to one another. Bereshit, with its themes of beginnings and tilling, leans toward the smoky heat of a roasted pasilla. Beshalach, which tells of manna in the wilderness, finds a companion in the dried ancho whose wrinkled skin resembles the cracked earth of the trail kitchens of the Old West. The structure is simple; the readings are not.
Heat Levels and Holy Texts
The column treats capsaicin as a proxy for spiritual intensity. Readers who follow the New Mexico Jewish Link know to expect a quiet essay on a Tuesday morning and a punchy, almost fiery piece during the High Holidays. The relationship between fire and word is not merely poetic. In Jewish thought, language itself burns: the mouth that utters blessing also burns with the heat of argument, of song, of disagreement. A pepper becomes a small parable for the dangers and gifts of speaking in community.
For Australian readers, the metaphor lands closer to home than they might expect. Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market has long hosted kosher butchers and spice merchants side by side, and the queues outside Sydney's Paddy's Markets on a Saturday morning carry their own choreography of patience and negotiation. The same cities host Jewish festivals where chilli-based condiments have begun appearing beside the chopped liver, signalling that the table in Sydney or Brisbane is already wider than it was a generation ago. The Las Cruces rabbi simply makes that widening explicit.
| Torah Theme | Featured Pepper | Scoville Range | Column Tone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creation and order | Pasilla | 1,000–2,000 | Reflective |
| Wilderness and longing | Ancho | 1,000–1,500 | Contemplative |
| Law and discipline | Jalapeño | 2,500–8,000 | Direct |
| Prophecy and rebuke | Serrano | 10,000–23,000 | Urgent |
| Redemption and joy | Habanero | 100,000–350,000 | Exultant |
The layout functions less as a chart and more as a tasting flight, inviting readers to imagine what each Sabbath might taste like if the parsha were cooked into a salsa.
Diaspora Tables and Shared Spice
One of the column's quiet achievements is the way it dissolves the boundary between Old World and New. A diaspora that remembers gefilte fish from Warsaw or chicken soup from Budapest can equally remember a grandmother in Albuquerque who insisted that the only proper way to serve matzah ball stew was with a side of green. The rabbi writes of his own grandmother ladling chile sauce into a tureen alongside her kugel, and the image lands in Jewish kitchens across continents.
Australian readers will recognise the pattern. In Adelaide, where the Jewish community has long been small but tightly knit, family tables often blur Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions alongside Asian-influenced salads. In Brisbane, kosher cafés have begun serving harissa on the side of slow-cooked beef, and in Perth, community cookbooks now feature recipes from Israeli, South African and Latin American migrants living on the same street. The chiles of Las Cruces enter this conversation as cousins, not strangers.
Three observations shape the column's diaspora sensibility:
- Food is treated as a portable sanctuary, easier to carry than a Torah scroll and just as sacred in its handling.
- Identity is described as additive, with each new region adding a layer rather than replacing a foundation.
- Hospitality, the rabbinic ethic of hachnasat orchim, is honoured when a host opens both the pantry and the scriptural bookshelf.
A Local Palette for a Universal Story
The Las Cruces setting is not decorative. The rabbi draws directly on the agricultural calendar of the Hatch Valley, where harvest crews move through fields of Big Jim and Sandia peppers from late July into October. The column notes when the first frost is expected, when smokehouses fire up, and when congregations begin stockpiling roasted green for the year's freezer supply. These rhythms are useful far from New Mexico because they offer a model of how any community can attach sacred time to a local harvest.
Australian congregations have begun exploring similar attachments. In the Adelaide Hills, wineries now host Shabbat dinners where a kosher pour of riesling accompanies a menu built from local produce. In Melbourne's inner north, synagogues have partnered with community gardens that grow chillies alongside herbs for besamim. In Sydney's eastern suburbs, a growing number of families mark the High Holidays with a Seder plate that includes native ingredients such as quandong or finger lime. The impulse is the same as the Las Cruces rabbi's: to let the land in which Jews live shape the language of their prayer.
Common ingredients the column regularly references:
- Roasted green chile for the omer count, when patience ripens into celebration.
- Dried red pods for Tisha B'Av, when grief is measured in slow, deliberate heat.
- Smoked chipotle-style peppers for the autumn festivals, when endings carry the memory of fire.
- Fresh serrano for Sukkot, when the sukkah gathers the harvest and its sharp, bright flavours.
The thing to carry forward from this Las Cruces experiment is that Torah reading does not have to be confined to a sanctuary. A pepper can teach, a recipe can argue, a kitchen can host its own bet midrash. Whether one lives beside the Rio Grande, along the Yarra, around the Swan River or near the Brisbane River, the tools for a thoughtful Jewish life are largely the same: a weekly portion, a steady table, an honest conversation, and a willingness to let the heat of a local ingredient sharpen the reading of an ancient text.