The great lies

There are several lies that we spread throughout our Shabbat meals or any time we happen to eat bread or drink wine.  We bless G-d for being the one who removes bread from the ground. The problem is that as far as I can tell, bread doesn’t grow from the ground.  There is a wheat stalk that grows from the ground and after much toil from many people, it becomes flour that is either combined with water and yeast by us or by the bakery, and after letting it rise, we turn it into bread.  Similarly, by the blessing on wine we call it the ‘fruit from the vine’.  Again, wine doesn’t grow on the vine, but grapes do.  The wine only comes along after a lengthy process that requires both patience and wisdom. If so, why do we bless wine by talking about the fruit?

Wine and bread have unique blessings that differ from all other food.  The reason is because they are both the result of a deeply human endeavor. Everything in the world comes about via a process of construction or a process of distillation. Bread is the paradigm of construction. It is a combination of two different parts, flour and water, that is combined to create a new object. Remarkably, despite being created from two different items, the bread sticks together and forms a unit. In contrast, wine is the paradigm of distillation.  It is about finding the part of an object that you want and discarding the rest.  This is the essence of many industries, such as mining and cosmetics.  Regardless, both wine and bread are unique in that they are both created after human ingenuity has taken its course.  And yet, we thank G-d at precisely that stage because we understand that our human ingenuity and the potential placed in wheat and grapes is also from G-d.  

  Given that, it makes sense that wine and challah are the two mitzvoth discussed right after the Jewish people sinned by sending spies to the land who came back with a negative report.  According to one idea, the problem is that in the desert the Jews were living a miraculous existence that defied nature.  The spies were loath to abandon that and were nervous about leaving the heavenly realm in the desert for a natural land where we would have to go back to harvesting, planting, and herding. For this reason, they slandered the land.  The mistake was that they didn’t realize that going back to a natural existence didn’t mean severing a connection with G-d. It only meant that G-d would play a role through the context of nature. This is exactly what wine and bread teach us and it is likely why the way to fix the problem of the spies was to learn about the depth of these mitzvot and of what it means to go to Israel. It didn’t meant disassociating with G-d, but realizing that G-d exists in the natural process just as well.