“Hamotzi Lechem min Ha’aretz, we give thanks to God for bread…”
Each week we celebrate Shabbat with our youngest in our Early Learning Center, on our Bima on Friday evening, and with our b’nai mitzvah on Shabbat day with those words and their familiar melody. The Motzi, our prayer before eating a meal, offers our gratitude to the Holy One, Maker of All, who brings forth bread from the earth.
There is no question that our tradition prompts us to be aware of our need to nourish ourselves, and gives us a variety of things to consider when doing so. There are blessings for all different kinds of
foods – fruits from trees, from the earth, from vines, grains and cereals, meats and cheese and all other foods, and of course bread. There is the much longer series of blessings in birkat hamazon to be offered after the meal. And there are the dietary restrictions that we first read about in Leviticus and then are reiterated in this week’s Torah portion, R’eih.
In this portion we are reminded of which animals are and are not fit for consumption. Land animals that have split hooves and chew their cud, sea animals with fins and scales, and specific flying animals – birds and insects – who in general do not eat the flesh of other animals. The portion also teaches us not to boil a kid – a young goat, in its mother’s milk; the basis of the prohibition of mixing all meat and dairy.
When I find myself in conversations about our dietary laws, they often focus on trying to divine the reason or the justification for those restrictions, and they usually are trying to be pragmatic. Pork carries more food-borne illness, and God didn’t want ancestors to get sick! Shellfish are bottom feeders, and God doesn’t want us to put what they eat into our bodies! While those explanations seem reasonable, they have never been satisfying for me. God must have had a purpose beyond being the ancient health department, right?
I had a teacher in rabbinical school, Rabbi Ruth Sohn, who wrote about this in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, published by our movement in 2008. She noted that while these restrictions are applicable to the Israelites, God made very clear that if we do have food that is unfit for us, we should give it to our neighbors that they should eat and enjoy it. The Torah makes clear that they are perfectly acceptable for human consumption, so there must be some other reason that God wanted us to avoid certain foods.
The purpose, Rabbi Sohn taught, was to give us an opportunity to engage in spiritual discipline while doing the most mundane of acts, eating. It is so tempting to mindlessly graze our way through life, taking whatever is in front of us and putting into our mouths, and giving little thought to what we eat. But, by choosing not to eat certain foods, we have to make ourselves keenly aware of what we are putting into our bodies. One of my daughters is allergic to certain nuts, and we have learned to check labels, ask waitstaff, and do whatever else we need to do to make sure she can eat safely. She cannot just toss whatever she sees looks appetizing into her mouth. It has to be deliberate, with a degree of mindfulness. And that is how the Holy One wants us to think about all foods (and most other acts for that matter), with mindfulness, intentionality, and spiritual discipline
Eating is something most of us do multiple times a day, so we have multiple opportunities to raise our spiritual awareness. By saying blessings, we sharpen our awareness of God. By thinking about what foods we are eating, and about how they arrive on our plate, we connect ourselves to those around us.
Take a moment and think about a Shabbat dinner: chicken, a vegetable side, perhaps a grain, challah, and a cookie at oneg after services tonight. Each of those dishes are made up of ingredients that you or someone you know may have cooked. Take one of those dishes, and think about all of the people who played a role in you having that food to eat.
Challah starts with the wheat, grown by a farmer and probably harvested by day workers. That wheat is loaded on to a truck or a train and brought to a miller, who grinds it into flour. That flour is mixed with yeast that was made by other folks, eggs that came from chickens raised by another farmer, salt that was mined and refined, all by a bakery’s team. The cooked loaves are then transported by another driver to a retailer, who might have someone receiving deliveries, someone else stocking the shelves, and someone else working the checkout counter. We may only interact with the last person on that chain, but all of those people helped us have challah for Shabbat.
The same is true for all of the other items in our meal, each one the result of a series of people who grow, process, transport, and sell our food products. As we go through a day, or a week, of our lives, the number of people who we interact with, or the number of people who contribute to our satiation, becomes hundreds and thousands.
That awareness, our connection to our fellow human beings, our awareness of the animals who live and die so that we might enjoy ourselves, our intentional focus on our relationship with the Holy One, all require us to take a moment and focus. Having a dietary ethic, either the one laid out in our portion or one that meets a different set of values, requires us to have a heightened sense of the foods we eat, and teaches us to think not only of the ingredients, but the entire process and all the people who turn them into our delicious meals.
So when we say, “we give thanks to God for bread,” that is certainly true, but doesn’t and shouldn’t capture the entire picture. The acts of saying blessings, of having a dietary ethic, of thinking deeply about when, what and how we eat, can raise ourselves closer in spirit to the Holy One, and connect us with humanity around the world.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Greg Weisman
