DRBR 12a: In which a Menu is announced

[hatam_soferet]

Image copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger image.

Catalogue reference DR6-L6 is a menu from someone’s wedding. We’ll see the front today, and the inside next time.

בעהי”ת	By the grace of God
פרי עץ הדר—זו שרה (ויק”ר ל’)	“Beautiful Tree-Fruit”–this is Sarah (Vayikra Raba 30)
מנוי מזונות	Menu of Foods

(Compare the blessing for snacks, בורא מיני מזונות)

לשולחן ליל התקדש חג שמחת החתונה

For the table of the night entering a holiday, the celebration of the wedding

(Isaiah 30:29, הַשִּׁיר יִהְיֶה לָכֶם, כְּלֵיל הִתְקַדֶּשׁ-חָג; וְשִׂמְחַת לֵבָב, כַּהוֹלֵךְ בֶּחָלִיל, לָבוֹא בְהַר-יְהוָה, אֶל-צוּר יִשְׂרָאֵל. That song will be like the night entering a holiday, and heart’s-joy, when one walks serenaded, to go to the mountain of God, to the Rock of Israel. “Leyl hitkadesh hag” usually means Pesach, since that’s the only festival where we celebrate the night with serenading.)

של שרה בת יהושע זליג לבית פרסיץ	Of Sarah, daughter of Joshua Zelig, of the Peretz house
עב”ג	עם בן גילה: with her partner
אלכסנדר בהרב דוקטור שלמה כרלבך (א”ך)	Alexander, son of Rabbi Doctor Shlomo Carlebach (“AC”)

(No, not that Carlebach. His grandfather, actually.)

יום ג’ ח’ טבת שנת צדיק יאכל לשבע לפ”ק

Tuesday, 8 Tevet, year “A righteous man shall eat to satisfaction”

Compare Proverbs 13:25, צדיק אוכל לשבע נפשו, The righteous eateth to the satisfying of his soul. This is a chronogram; if you add up all the numeric values of the letters, you get 667. לפ”ק means “the little numbers,” i.e. “if you can’t figure out which millennium we mean, we aren’t going to tell you”, so the year’s 5667 Jewish, or 1907.

The Carlebachs are an old German-Jewish dynasty. Reading some of the Wikipedia pages about other members of the Carlebach family is interesting; here’s Joseph, one of Alexander’s younger brothers, and here’s Ephraim. He had seven brothers and four sisters, total, and four of his brothers, as well as his father, were rabbis. Our Alexander was a banker.

In the next post, we’ll see the elements of his wedding feast. I’ll tell you now that it contains a huge quantity of rabbinic allusion; I wonder if he came up with it himself, or whether it was a family effort, all those rabbinical brothers planning it in collaboration. And what they did for the other brothers’ weddings, whose menus didn’t make it into the JTS Rare Book Room. And whether they had fun planning it. And whether Sarah liked it.

Next time, we’ll see what they ate.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I love מִנּוּי as both transliteration and translation (from לְמַנּוֹת) of menu :)

[(Anonymous)]

I was just going to say that first comment.
I love this.
(emfish)