blogs/brentspodek

Judaism’s framework of blessings on food can appear utterly bewildering.

There are six categories of food, each with its own blessing, and it can be more than a little confusing to determine which blessing goes to which food.

Bananas, for instance, seem to grow on trees, so you might assume that when you are eating a banana, you would say “Blessed are you, Adonai, Sovereign of the Cosmos, who creates fruits of the tree.” Not so fast! Due to a quirk in how banana trees grow, they are considered part of the earth, and the proper blessing is “Blessed are you, Adonai, Sovereign of the Cosmos, who creates fruits of the earth.” Of course, our tradition further specifies that if you were having a banana with yogurt, you would have to decide whether the essence of that eating experience was the banana, in which case you “fruits of the earth” or the yogurt, in which case you would say “Blessed are you, Adonai, Master of the Universe whose word brings everything into existence.”

The laws regarding blessings seem to go on and on and on…

This all seems very far from what Moses tells the Israelites as they prepare to enter the land of Israel. In Parshat Eikev, he says simply “And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.”

How simple and uncomplicated! Eat to the point of satisfaction and offer God blessings for the bounty we enjoy. That’s it.

Indeed, within the rabbinic tradition, there is a strong voice that says our blessings of gratitude need not be more complicated than “Blessed is the Merciful One, the master of this bread.” According to Rav, one of the central authorities of the Talmud, one could fulfill the obligation to thank God with that simple blessing, which seems so congruent with Moses’ teaching – eat, be satisfied and give blessings.

Yet the rabbinic tradition went a different direction, towards greater specificity and greater potential for confusion and no explicit reason was ever given. The earliest layer of rabbinic history takes it as a given that there are different blessings for different foods, and the rest of the tradition follows from there.

In demanding that we offer God blessings specific to the gifts which we have received from God’s world, perhaps the rabbis were making a profound statement about how to live in a complicated world.

One can travel through the world, oblivious to the complexity all around us. Or one can stand in stupefied wonder at the systems which we inhabit, and feel incapable of understanding those systems, much less acting within them.

But if we fancy ourselves Jews, if we simply consider ourselves to be ethical people, that is not enough.

The Jewish tradition demands that we understand the systems we inhabit precisely because they are complicated.

It really is difficult to remember that bananas are vegetables, or to know how Congress works, or understand the conditions under which our food is produced. To even come close requires attentiveness to a world that defies complete comprehension. Yet the Rambam teaches that the root of human evil is lack of knowledge. We simply cannot do good in the world if we don’t understand how it works. Inversely, the Rambam teaches that knowledge of the universe brings one closer to God and closer to right behavior. To be ignorant of the world, particularly when knowledge is available, is to reject the world which God created.

The rabbis mandated that we understand the differences in our food before we approach the Creator of all food with thanks and indeed, when we are faced with the complexity of the world, we should dive in. Just as this is true for the complexities of how plants grow, it is also true for the complexities of who grows our food and who pays their wages, where our invested money goes, how our tax money is spent, who makes the decisions which affect our lives, and on and on and on.  

God is in the details, and that is where we should be as well.