"Kavannah for Living"
- Unit 7
Eating
(If you miss a study unit along the way,
you can access the materials in the Kavannah for Living Archive: archive.)
B’rucheem haba’im, chevrah. Welcome to the
conversation!
Prelude:
A popular
candy bar advertisement features attractive office workers playfully munching as an unseen
duet sing the claim that eating the product “satisfies you!”
While it is
hard to dismiss the fact the bar’s combination of chocolate, nougat, and nuts is
delicious - isn’t there something ironic in saying that a food which is clearly a
desert is satisfying? It certainly isn’t going to satisfy your health or nutritional
needs, nor would eating one of the bars actually satisfy your appetite (it would curb it
for a few minutes and probably result in some mild stomach pain). Is it satisfying
your quick fix need for a sugar high in a world running at a frantic pace? Yes. And that
is just the beginning of our current spiritual crisis regarding food.
While
we’ve taken food to new gourmet heights, we’ve also managed to reduce breakfast
and lunch to a ten-minute activity that generally happens while we are doing something
else. Clever food manufacturers have created products which require little or no
preparation, can be eaten ‘on the run’ and have subsequently downgraded
life’s sustaining activity to a mechanical chore with the rhythm: open, chew,
swallow. As a result, the processed and preserved foods we once were amazed by in an era
of space exploration have become daily fast food on earth. We know that there is something
more to eating. Take the following tale, for example:
Rabbi Yosai
the Elder would not permit his meal to be prepared until he had first prayed to God for
sustenance, and had waited for a moment. Then he would say: “Now that the King has
sent sustenance, let us prepare it.” –Zohar, ii, 62.
We are not
suggesting that you completely restructure your life to find the time to sing praises over
your plain yogurt or turkey sandwich. You may not want to sing praises over any food that
you put into a lunch box. But what would it mean to stop, just to stop for five seconds,
to close your eyes, take a deep breath and recite a blessing before you took your first
bite?
You
might ask -- Why say a blessing?
One reason
is that a blessing acts like a speed bump, slowing us down, raising our awareness of what
we are about to do. Take, for example, the blessing over a grapefruit— Borey pree
ha’aytz. “Blessed are You who created the fruit of the tree.” The
blessing gives us the awareness that we are taking part in the wonder of creation, at that
moment, we might think of a fruit tree, and our minds can wander from there. We might
consider the amazing fact that from something so hard as trees comes something so soft as
fruit. Or we might think about a particular fruit tree, or a time when we picked a
fruit—all levels of awareness that can flash into our consciousness for just a moment
and bring a fullness of experience to our first bite of fruit.
Or take the
prayer over yogurt, shehacol neheyeh bdvaro.
That all exists on account of God’s speech. You might reflect on Reb
Nachman’s teaching that an angel hovers
over each blade of grass, whispering, “grow! grow!” or consider the amazing power that words have to
encourage growth.
The
blessings are signposts which direct us to the experience we are about to encounter. In
the ritual below, you’ll find the blessings for various foods.
THE RITUAL:
Baruch
Atah…
For
wheat, rice, oats and barly
…borey
miney mezonot
Creator of
many foods that sustain us.
Produce
…borey
pri adamah
Creator of
the fruit of the earth.
Bread
…hamotzee
lechem min ha-aretz
Who brings
out bread from the land.
Wine
…borey
pree hagafen
Creator of
the fruit of the vine.
Smelling
a fruit’s fragrance
….notayn
rayach tov b’payrot
Giver of
fine scents to fruit.
Eat a third,
drink a third, and leave empty in your stomach the remaining third. If anger overtakes
you, there will be room for your stomach to expand and you will not suffer!
- Gittin 70
Birkat
hamazon’s four central blessings:
Hazan et
hakol
Nourishing all creatures
Al
ha-aretz v’al ha mazon Visualizing the field
Boneh
yerushalyim
Imagining the holy city
Hatov
v’hamativ lakol Continuation
of goodness
Commentary by Reb Zalman:
Eating as one grows older can change from an act of pure pleasure to
“I’ve got to take this pill and that supplement and swallow this and watch
that.” Sitting down at the kitchen table
becomes part of a daily regiment. I’m thankful to have a great cook in my house, my
wife, Eve, and we often go to the farmer’s market together. That’s where you see
that u’mlo ha-aretz kevodo, the whole earth is filled with God’s glory. There
you can see how a thing grows--you see the roots. So many of the foods that we see in the
supermarket have been stripped of this.
I once suggested that on Shabbat it should be a custom to give the
stomach a rest from processed foods. The poor in the shtetl would sing about eating
turkey, quail or fish. For us, the best foods are the natural and organic ones.
I want to draw people’s attention to the blessings after eating
which I translated. A new translation is a new song, and we are taught “Shiru
l’adonai shir chadash!” Someone
might ask “What is wrong with the old ones?” Even old songs can be sung like new
songs. Each generation has its songs and even the old songs are sung in new ways. What
counts is not the words but the attitude.
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