Parashat Emor, Leviticus 21:1-24:23

This week's parasha has generously been sponsored by Maria Mancano, in memory of her 'Zia', Virginia Mancano.
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Make the performance of our rituals as fresh as our weekly challah.

Study with Baruch Sienna

In this week's portion of Emor, we continue with more laws regarding the priesthood and who is eligible to serve in the sanctuary. The parasha includes a description of the festivals, and then concludes with a short chapter describing the lighting of the menorah, the bread offering, and a short narrative of a blasphemer.

Twelves loaves (representing the twelve tribes) made from fine flour were placed on the table in the sanctuary. The bread of offering is referred to elsewhere in the Torah (Ex. 25:30) as lehem panim. This 'display bread' is called 'shewbread' in the King James Version and I always think of Ed Sullivan, "we have a really big 'shew'" when I see the word 'shewbread.'

The word challah- which means loaf [of bread or dough] is used here. Many readers are probably familiar with the mitzvah of 'separating challah' - taking a small portion of dough (that used to go to the Cohen)  but nowadays is burned (Num. 15:20). Separating challah was one of three mitzvot the Rabbis identified as being obligations for women.  (The acronym for the three: Challah, Nidah - purity, and Hadlakat haNer- candle lighting- spell the name: Channah, known for her heartfelt prayer and considered a model of female piety.) There is also a volume in the Talmud called 'challah' that deals with the details of tithing dough.

Today, the term challah has come to refer to the special bread for Shabbat. In the Ashkenazic tradition, this is usually a rich, braided egg-bread in honour of Shabbat. Traditionally we bless two challot on Friday night, to remember the double portion of the manna that fell on Friday. The challah is sprinkled with sesame or poppy seeds as a further reminder of the manna: either because of the sound of the word manna (like 'mohn') or its description in the Torah as a small, white seed.

I once heard Rabbi Larry Kushner tell a wonderful story that he learned from Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi about this week's verse. It can be found on the web in various versions, and in his anthology Eyes Remade for Wonder, and as a children's book (illustrated by Gary Schmidt) called 'In God's Hands.' that he published with Jewish Lights.  The story is of a rich man who dozes off in services, and unable to sleep soundly on the hard wooden bench, hears the verses we read this week, to put twelve loaves of challah in the sanctuary. He thinks it odd that God would address him personally, but he does it, and no sooner has he left when the poor janitor, at his wits' end, prays to God for a miracle for himself and his family. Of course, when he opens the ark, and finds the twelve challahs he is overjoyed. The rich man returns, thinking God must have been teasing him, but when he sees his challahs gone, he promises God to return next week with even better challah (with raisins, too). This challah switching ritual goes on for years-- until their little game of hide-and-seek is discovered by the rabbi who confronts them.

"I see," said the rich man sadly, "God doesn't really eat challah."
"I understand," said the poor man, "God hasn't been baking challah for me after all."
They both feared that now God would no longer be present in their lives. Then the rabbi asked them to look at their hands. "Your hands," he said to the rich man, "are the hands of God giving food to the poor. And your hands," said the rabbi to the poor man, "also are the hands of God, receiving gifts from the rich. So you see, God can still be present in your lives. Continue baking and continue taking. Your hands are the hands of God." (adapted from Eyes Remade for Wonder, pg. 63.)

In this story, the challah becomes a symbol of how we are 'God's Hands.' But in the Torah, we appear to be feeding God. In fact, it was a widespread practice in the ancient Near East to lay out bread on an altar daily to feed the deity (like the oranges offered in small Buddhist shrines found at the entrance of Chinese restaurants). Biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom suggests that putting out loaves only once a week may have been to distance this practice from the cultic procedure of providing sustenance to God. I would imagine that replacing the loaves only once a week would mean that they would be rather stale by the end of the week. Hence according to the midrashic imagination the sacred loaves in the Tent of Meeting never grew stale. "A great miracle was performed with the show bread, for when it was removed it was as fresh as it had been when it was set out" (Menachot 29a). According to Hirsch, the loaves remained fresh all week to demonstrate God's everpresent care.

In our house, it has become a custom for me to make the whole wheat challah my family enjoys every week (I do get the week of Passover off). One of the advantages of making challah yourself, is that you are not limited to making the traditional braided egg bread. For example, I am sure that readers are familiar with the traditional round loaves used during the High Holy Day period, but there are other traditional shapes: a ladder for Shavuot, or the challah in the shape of a bird, an open hand or a key. Although I always use the same recipe, I sometimes experiment with the shape; I have even made a challah in the shape of a fish (for Rosh Hashanah), the four species on Sukkot, a tree for Tu Bishevat, and in the shape of a giant hamantashen for the Shabbat near Purim. I've even put it chocolate chips instead of raisins! 

I mention these untraditional customs that I have adopted in my weekly challah baking ritual for a reason. I think the challah staying fresh is a metaphor for our religious practice. I know that my family enjoys fresh challah every week- sometimes it's still hot out of the oven when we sit down at the table. But making the challah every week sometimes feels stale. There are weeks that I'm too busy or too tired or too stressed to want to bother. Today, anyone who practices religious ritual knows that keeping them fresh is a constant struggle. It is easy for ritual, once fresh and meaningful, to become rote and a thoughtless habit. Kissing a mezzuzah entering/ exiting a room can be a moment of awareness, or a reflex with no thought. It is so easy to go through life - 'going through the motions.' The whole point of ritual is to focus our attention and make an ordinary act a moment of consciousness. Instead of just eating, we recite a blessing to help us be thoughtful and express gratitude. It's ironic, then, when ritual itself also becomes rote. The rabbis warned of this, in discussing prayer:

When you pray, make your prayer not a routine, but a plea for mercy and a supplication before the Holy Blessed One. R. Eliezer said, 'When a person makes their prayer a routine, it is not supplication. What is meant by one whose prayer is routine? R. Jacob bar Idi said in the name of R. Hoshaia: anyone whose prayer is nothing but a heavy burden. Rabbah and R. Joseph both said: The one who is unable to bring something fresh into it. (Berachot 29b)

The rabbis understood that there was a tension between the keva (the fixed text and standard ritual) and kavannah. Making fresh challah each week is not that difficult; to perform the mitzvot with equal devotion that is not faded or impaired is sometimes more of a challenge. Unlike in the Sanctuary, in order for us to have fresh bread, we have to bake a new challah every week; the same is true for religious practice. We can use the same recipe, but stale ritual will not nourish us.

Shabbat Shalom

BDS