Shabbat Eykev: Bread is not enough
It is a strange sentence. “I provided you with the Manah so that you should know that a person does not live on bread alone.” And then, the Torah goes on to extoll the physical richness of the land the Israelites are coming to and how it will provide all the food they could want.
Bread usually refers to any kind of food that comes from the earth, and of course, humans cannot survive without food. Bread, unlike meat, is something made by human beings. It is used first used in the Bible when Adam is told, “By the sweat of your brow, you will eat bread.” Our lives depend on food, but the process of making bread marks a stage beyond the early hunters and gatherers of humanoids. And it requires a great deal of effort at every stage, from sowing to reaping to grinding and baking before one gets to eat it. In a sense, it is a metaphor for life. The basic raw materials are there but they need working on.
The Bible is a book of transitions and stages. It describes a process of humans grappling with the realities of and the demands of the physical world. It tells us about suffering and rewards. But equally important is the way it describes humans coming to terms with the moral and spiritual aspects of life. Simply eating, necessary as it is, like breathing, is just not enough to distinguish us from other forms of life or to fulfil our human potential.
It is in this context that Moses refers to the mythical Manah that sustains the Israelites in the Wilderness. What was it? Wasn’t it food too? But what if Manah was not sustenance but simply a metaphor for anything that comes from God, words, and ideas too? And why did it suddenly stop as they reached Canaan? Because now they were indeed on their own, they had, in a sense, to grow up and take responsibility, both for their material lives and their spiritual lives too.
One of the legends about the Manah is that it could taste whatever you wanted it to. Your mental state could affect how the food tastes. The mind can modify the experience. As we know, our food can taste differently depending on our physical and mental states. One can eat to satisfy our needs or to gratify our greed. But eating food, according to the Torah, should be more than just a physical act of ingestion, digestion, and defecation. It should be a celebration.
And this explains why the very same section goes on to say, “ You should eat and be satisfied and thank God”, which is the origin of the Birchat HaMazon, the blessings we recite before and after eating and drinking. They are ways of expressing gratitude and encouraging us to be aware.
In the purely physical world, we can treat food as an art form, an expression of our creativity, a delight for our palates that drive us on to taste new and different foods and ways of preparing them. Food, too, can be a way of showing off. These are all aesthetic or gustatory experiences. But we should not forget to appreciate how lucky we are to have food, to be able to enjoy it.
This is why the text of the blessings we say reminds us that one should try not to separate our pleasure from our moral senses. Many are not as fortunate as we are. Without our spiritual sense, something is lacking in ourselves and in the ways that we experience life. Bread, the physical, the material, essential as it is, is not enough.
Deuteronomy 7:12 – 11:25
thank you, rabbi, for this lesson in why we should thank God for what we eat.