“My days are consumed like smoke,
My bones are charred as the dead,
My heart is withered as grass,
For I have neglected to eat my daily bread.” Psalm 102
Why would life be so desolate just because you did not eat bread? A better question is, ‘what is bread to the psalmist?’ Bread is the fabric of all life. Within the tradition, the all-encompassing blessing over food is the one for bread. Whenever a Jew sits down to eat there is the regular staple of bread present. It is the same with the Sabbath when we place on our table, two loaves of special bread, hallah. When you say the blessing over bread it encompasses the entire meal. Everything else is subsumed under the category of bread. It is not the same with any other blessing, only bread. What makes bread so special?
In fact, the blessing for bread is actually wrong. The blessing read, “Who brings forth bread from the earth.” Does God really do this? Or is it more correct to say that God brings forth wheat from the earth? We take the wheat and do the rest.
The Lord gives us a raw product, we work with it, bake it into bread and then acknowledge God as the master. The Talmud tells is that we are like the bread. God gave us our soul, implanted it within our body and then watched to see how we developed the product.
A rebbe was asked by his disciple to point out where God is. The rebbe said haMotsie, the blessing over the bread, then pointed to the loaf that he had just eaten. See berachot 59a The fact that man and God labor together to produce a finished and beautiful product proves what we are capable of doing with our God-given gift. It begins inside.
We do not have to travel far or look to distant lands to locate kernels of holiness. They exist on our table, in our self.
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