BON APPETIT

On a Friday night as Yeshua, head of the family, was preparing to bless the bread -- baruch atta Adonai Eluhenu --, he looked at the pile of inviting, freshly-made blond loaves and thought: Yes, that too has its place in the prayer I'm building. We harvest the wheat, we thresh it, we mill the grain, we bake the flour; but without the wheat, and the millet, and the rest, what should we do? It was you, Father, who brought forth lechem min ha'aretz, bread from the earth. Nothing is so basic: it is 'bread', but sometimes we use it to mean simply 'food'. It is your gift, not our right.  And sometimes You withhold it, or seem to; sometimes rains or drought spoil the  harvest, and we go hungry. You have not given, but You have allowed, great famines. It would be proper to ask for it: "Give us today today's bread, today's food." Only today's, he thought; it would be wrong to demand tomorrow's, too like hoarding, control, security. Abba, you have taught us to care and not to care, to live lightly, loving only you so that we may the better love all else. Give us, just for today, the lechem we need.

And, he reflected, as every thing here below is itself but also an image, how true this is of the lechem! It is the warm bread we eat and enjoy this Shabbat, but at the same time it is the unleavened bread that reminds us of our flight from Egypt; it is the food that God provided for Israel in the desert -- and remember, they were told to gather only each day for that day (except for Shabbat). And the food God gives is not only that of ha'aretz, is it? 

As he meditated, walking in the fields that day, the subject opened out and out in his mind. What feeds us? What feeds our bodies? What feeds our souls? `What has fed my mind, that now I can access so many treasures of thought? And the Word of God swam into his mind: all those riches of Torah, Tanakh, all the words of the prophets, all the overflowing beauty of the Psalms -- what a banquet!

The Psalms brought him to the Meshiach, that supreme gift from God that we are promised. Meshiach, who will repair the great Ill and heal Israel of its wounds. Will not Meshiach be like bread also, not today's but eternity's?