It had been sitting on the kitchen table for two days now — red with a

patch of green. It couldn’t be put in the fridge and it couldn’t be put in the trash and no one really wanted to eat a broken red pepper. The other broken one had grown some mold on its crushed sides — so that decision had been clear. Someone Mrs. Graston assumed must have stepped on the bag in the car on the way home from the grocery because she would certainly not have chosen a broken unfortunate-looking pepper like that one. So it sat on the table not here and not yet there. Until Friday afternoon when a decision had to be made. “Enough!” says Mrs. Graston. “How long can I stare at this pepper?” She moves it to this side and that side then to the counter. She decides. She’ll throw it out. She picks up the pepper and throws it into the trash bin the kind that you step on and it pops open. Then she goes back to the sink. But at the sink she can’t relax as she normally does. A Jew in the ghetto wouldn’t even have considered throwing out that pepper. But it’s so easy to discard the imperfect when there’s so much to choose from. Waste. That red pepper was planted to grow. How can you just toss it away like that? It’s not bad it’s broken. She takes the red pepper out of the bin as if rescuing a fallen soldier. Who knows what this means or how this affects the world? Thoughts such as these aren’t new. In the total silence of the empty kitchen she can think a lot of things. She ponders the last plastic bag in the holder that holds 200 bags. As she had used them she would always wonder if she would get to the last one. That never stopped her from using them carelessly.

And the day would come when there were no bags left and someone would need one for their sandwich to take to school. She’d smile although she’d be frustrated because here was the proof of the famous teachings about not wasting — that each person is given his portion of water the number of words he can speak and that one day that last drop or that last word would come. Or maybe it was that the pepper is a symbol of her life of the broken pieces she knew and prayed would somehow come together. Mrs. Graston opens a cookbook. She could make roasted red pepper soup. Or stuff the red pepper. Better yet she remembers a recipe an old friend had given her. She slices the pepper mixes it with crushed fresh garlic and olive oil and bakes it in the oven. The smell fills the house with

something unbelievably irresistibly delicious. She recalls the famous haiku (a Japanese form of poetry that captures the deepest meanings in the fewest words) that Professor Handler had taught her in high school English class. She remembers the seriousness of purpose with which the great professor whose true sole aspiration was to be a poet taught this poem. Actually it was taught more like a universal motto to live by: that life was random careless and free. A spiritual guide to a G-dless world. That haiku had followed her all through the years never finding its place — like the broken red pepper continuously moving from here to there all around her mind and soul. The haiku went like this: On the side of the wood bowl a green pepper falls So what? Today she knows what to do with the red pepper — just like she knows now what to do with the haiku. Life isn’t “throw away.” It isn’t “so what” at all.

There’s a G-d and it’s His world and His red pepper and G-d says it matters what we do with the fallen broken maybe old not-perfect pieces. He tells us to use them. Fix them. Not to throw them out. And in the end — they can become the greatest unbelievably delicious part of the serving.

So even if a red pepper falls off the side of the bowl “pick it up”