Not By Bread Alone

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, August 19, 2011

Most of us, unless we are gluten intolerant, or are allergic to eggs or milk, take bread for granted.

But bread was a major advancement in human culture. Bread is not like berries which you can pick off bushes, or carrots that you pull out of the ground, or even like fish or meat that you can hunt and prepare. To eat bread you must first do a lot of work and often need some other people to work along side you. The wheat or barley needs to be grown and harvested, roasted and ground, and then finally baked. To prepare bread we are told, in one ancient text, we must “plant, plow, sow, reap, stack, thresh, winnow, grind, sift, knead and bake”. At first the bread eaten in pre-historic times was a flat cake like a tortilla. This might be the kind of cake that Abraham asked Sarah to prepare for the three angels. The earliest archeological evidence of leaved bread comes from Egypt. It was considered worthy to be offered to the gods.

In Jewish culture, bread was so important that it became the definition of a meal. If you ate but didn’t have bread, then you did not have to recite the bircat hamazon, the grace after meals, because what you ate could not properly be considered a meal. Twelve loaves of bread were offered on the altar in the ancient Temple and bread became synonymous with food. It is not coincidental that it is the challah loaf that is the symbol of the Sabbath, and that the consumption of this finer bread was part of the oneg, the joy of the Shabbat.

Our Torah portion this week includes the famous phrase, “Man cannot live by bread alone”. Often this phrase is quoted to express the idea that there is more to life than material goods, that we have spiritual needs as well.

I am not one to argue with that proposition, but I think that in its original context, this Biblical verse may really have been talking more concretely about food.

That is certainly the position taken by scholar Jeffrey Tigay, who prepared the Jewish Publication Society’s commentary on Deuteronomy. Responding to the common interpretation of this verse, he writes: “this is homiletically attractive, but far from the plain sense of the verse, since manna did not show that man has spiritual needs.”

Let’s look at the original context of this famous verse:

“ Remember the long way that Adonai Your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past 40 years, that God might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep God’s commandments or not. God subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live by bread along, but that man may live on anything that the Lord decrees.” Deuteronomy 8:2-3

“Man’s does not live by bread alone” is the conclusion of a discussion of the Israelite’s dependence upon God in the wilderness, and their ability to survive on the manna that God provided.

The Bible describes the manna as a test. Now that doesn’t jive with the image of manna that most of us have, an image shaped by the midrash which insisted that the manna was the most desirable of foods. According to the rabbis, the manna tasted like whatever you wanted it to taste like, and in whatever quantity you ate it, it filled you up.

However modern scholars wonder if the Bible understood manna differently. The word manna is still used in Arabic today to refer to the sweet edible honeydew found in the Sinai desert in the summer months. Scientists tell us that it is a substance that comes from the secretions that scale insects and plant lice deposit on tamarisk trees. In the cool of the desert night, these crystallize and fall to the ground as sticky solids. They can be found by those who go out early in the morning, before they are completely melted by the sun.

Very simply put, this verse is meant to remind the ancient Israelites that they had to overcome the normal human tendency to be conservative in our eating habits in order to adjust to the manna, a new food. As Nachmanides, a medieval scholar, writes: “Neither they nor their fathers had known it. It was an unpopular, strange food which was not given them in abundance and could not be stored.”

This manna was not to be the end of their challenges.

The portion goes on to describe the products of the land of Israel: wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olive oil, and date honey. These would be the new foods around which their diet would revolve once they entered the land of Canaan. No more the “fish, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and the garlic” that had been the delicacies of their master’s diet in Egypt. Though we today relish the products of the land of Israel, if we can put ourselves in the Israelites shoes, we can imagine that it was an adjustment to move from the agriculture of Egypt based on the regular overflowing of the Nile, to the agriculture of Canaan, which is dependent on rain. How concerned they were with the rain can be judged by the large number of Hebrew words that exist for rain, depending on whether it is early or late, hard or light, and so forth. (HEBREW has 6 different words for rain- geshem, matar, yoreh, malkosh, revivim, se’rim )

This part of the portion concludes with the instruction upon which the bircat hamazon is based, “and you shall eat, and be satisfied, and bless Adonai your God”.

In American right now, a great deal of attention is given to food. One commentator noted that “restaurants have become our contemporary shrines and chefs our high priests”. There are numerous tv shows about food, and I have noticed that the younger generation is much more interested in cooking, than my friends were at their age. Perhaps this is because in a world that seems more and more beyond our control, making choices about the foods we eat is something that seems within our reach.

Perhaps this new interest in food is also influenced by its becoming more and more clear over time that the diet of the average American is not healthy, neither for the person who consumes it, nor for our planet. A segment of our society is making extensive choices about what they choose to eat, pesticide free, local, free range, etc. while many people lack access even to the minimal fruits and vegetables that would enable them to make the changes in their eating habits that would be life sustaining.

Tomorrow morning a delegation from our congregation is heading up to UC Davis to attend part of the Hazon conference. The word Hazon means vision and the organization Hazon is committed to a vision of environmental sustainability created by healthy communities in the Jewish world and beyond. Unlike many other Jewish organizations, Hazon is dominated by under 40’s and includes Jews who are not otherwise involved in the organized Jewish community as well as those who consider themselves religious or observant.

A major focus of the organization is food, and the conference we will be attending is an expression of that interest. The Hazon Food Conference describes itself as “ the only place in the world where farmers and rabbis, nutritionists and chefs, vegans and omnivores, and foodies of every stripe come together to explore the dynamic interplay of food, Jewish tradition and contemporary life”. At the conference we will be discussing every aspect of food including food justice, Jewish cultural experiences around food, and halachic issues as they relate to food. One of our members will be attending a program on local and global food systems, another on food and the cycle of Jewish rituals around the seasons, and another on urban hunger and food access. We plan to bring this information back to the congregation through our upcoming spring retreat on the topic of Jewish food. Watch for information about the retreat which will be at Asilomar in May.

Food: it is inescapable, a necessary part of our lives, and its variety and the many related decisions we must make about it, remind us, that in truth, we do not, as the Bible reminds us, live by bread alone.