You Can’t Cook from
the Other Room
My friend Annie in the Bronx uses an expression that translates roughly from Yiddish as, “You can’t cook from the other room.”
She offers these words to me when I make an offhand comment about something that I wish could be different, or that I would like to do but haven’t gotten around to doing yet. If I venture into “coulda-woulda-shoulda” territory, she responds with the words, “Jody, you can’t cook from the other room.”
What she means is that to make something happen — or to be a part of something — you have to be present and participate. You can’t sit in a chair in the living room and dream, however pleasantly, and make anything happen in the kitchen. You have to stand up, walk in, and get to work. Knead the bread, peel the potatoes, make the soup, slice the apples. You have to be in the room where the stove resides, and you must pick up the utensils required for a particular outcome if a meal is to be prepared. In other words, you can’t cook from the other room.
When Annie offers me this bit of philosophy, she isn’t trying to get me to start dinner. She is reminding me that I have to be an active participant in whatever it is that I think needs to be done. And she reminds me that cooking and merely “stirring the pot” are two different things entirely.
Committees are sometimes formed with good intentions and lofty language, and then after coffee and cookies – or after the Zoom meeting adjourns — the committee members disperse to the diverse demands of their separate lives. It often all ends where it began – with solid ideas, but no solid course of action. Changes don’t come about. Problems aren’t solved. Relationships aren’t deepened. Communities aren’t strengthened or transformed. Nobody lights the fire in the oven. You can’t cook from the other room.
The New Year 2024 is already shaping up to be a conflict-filled, contentious, and deeply divisive election year. Opinions and narratives have been established, and it seems that there is little room for respectful discourse, the sharing of ideas, or polite intelligent debate. As a society, and especially as a broad community of Christians, we speak long and loud about peace, love, and compassion.
However, in the uncomfortable arena of politics, we often forget who we claim to be, and we stay in the corners we have designated for ourselves and those who share our particular point of view. We fail to engage with “all those others” in order to understand, perhaps even be enlightened. Little is accomplished, except the curdling of the milk of human kindness.
If a shared meal is a central shared experience of our faith, we have to mingle with the entire community to break down barriers. It is not possible to be transformed by love if we remain aloof, apart, and convinced that our view of life is the only right one to consider.
If we are to eat together, somebody has to go to the kitchen and prepare the meal. Breaking bread as a community requires that we perform the simple tasks. We shape the loaves, bake the bread, lay down the plates, and then sit together so that our eyes meet those of our neighbors across the table.
You have to be there. You have to leave your comfortable chair and go to where the food of life is being prepared.
You can’t cook from the other room.