Friday night Shabbat meals are defined by two important Jewish staples- Challah and wine. It is hard to call it a Shabbat meal without these two minimal requirements. What is interesting, though, is that these two items make entering Shabbat a unique challenge. What is the problem? Shabbat is a celebration of an important fact- G-d created the world. One way our sources tell us to strengthen that fact is to meditate on all the sweet fruits, vegetables, animals, and vistas on this small, scenic planet. This brings us to a slight conundrum. What you won’t find walking around is wine trees or challah trees. Why? Because it takes quite a bit of human ingenuity to make wine and bread. If so to celebrate Shabbat properly we should take a juicy peach and a thick steak as they seem to be more directly a product of G-d when compared to the wine and bread that required human interference to produce. So what is the idea?
Wine and bread represent the two different ways human beings express their creativity in the world. Let’s take wine. Wine is the process in which we unleash the potential inside of a grape. It is a process of taking what is already there and making it better. Bread is a different type of human ingenuity. It is a process of taking two different items, flour and water, mixing it with yeast, giving it time, and producing a whole new compound.
That is the reason why we start Shabbat with these two items. It is specifically with the two items where it is difficult to see G-d’s hand in it because ours is so prominent that we challenge our self to still thank G-d for it. Why mention this now? Because the idea of wine and challah directly follows the sin of the spies to teach us at the heart of the sin was this specific issue. While living in the spiritual richness of the desert, seeing a natural land felt devoid of the divine, almost like going back to Egypt, so they spoke ill of it. They didn’t realize that life is about seeing through nature to see the divine. In a similar vein, we are supposed to see the divine through human ingenuity as we enter into Shabbat, specifically because it is difficult.
