Taste and See

by Margaret Feinberg

  The same leaven that’s in them is already in you.

  * * *

  The judgmental nature, the critical eye, the insidious pride we notice in others, wait to rise up in us too.

  Maybe you’ve felt the leaven bubbling in your heart.

  One particular person in my life causes me to sour. I am annoyed by her religiosity, by her black-and-white rigidity, by her constant assessments that no one can live up to. When she asked that a girl who uses a wheelchair be removed from her daughter’s playgroup because she slowed her child down, I wanted to throw a desk through the window. And by desk, I mean her.

  Just like that, I realize that what’s rising in her heart is identical to what’s in mine.

  If I allow my annoyance to rise, my leaven will push me away from her and her friends. The swelling in me can disrupt our entire community. No matter how justified we feel, there’s no space for judgment in our hearts. It rises up and makes us cynical and angry toward others until we’re tiptoeing around the very people we’re meant to engage and embrace.

  Of course, Jesus tells us to beware of the hametz. The only antidote to the leaven of sin is Christ’s work in us. We must invite Christ to pull us away from our judgments, tear open our intentions, and scour our hearts. When we do this, we are able to live in a closer relationship with God and others.

  WHEN EIGHTEEN MINUTES IS BARELY ENOUGH TIME

  Retrieving a red stoneware Le Creuset bowl from the shelf and a matching plastic mat, Andrew pours a combination of barley and emmer flour. I’d never heard of emmer before. The grain is translated as “spelt” in the Bible and also known as farro.

  To this day, no one knows which flours the Israelites used the night they fled Egypt, but Andrew makes an educated guess. He’s chosen barley and emmer because of these grains’ ability to tolerate poor soils and still produce high yields. These characteristics made them popular in the ancient world—especially among the poor.

  As he bypasses the measuring cups and scales on the counter, Andrew explains that in antiquity cooks often lacked access to weights or measurements. Most ancient bakers learned to cook without them.

  “For us, it’s good to practice,” he reminds.

  I’m curious what we’ll add to spice up the recipe. Sea salt? Garlic? Oil? Nothing at all, he advises, because this is the bread of necessity, the bread of affliction.

  “Not even a pinch of salt?” I prod.

  “You must remember when the Israelites escaped Egypt, they were not having a wonderful time,” he explains. “The matzo during Passover isn’t celebratory but commemorative.”

  The oven dings at 490 degrees. Andrew sets eighteen minutes on a timer, then pours water into the mix. His agile fingers dance throughout the dough. He pauses to add a splash of water or a sprinkle of flour to achieve the right consistency. A baseball-sized portion emerges. He maneuvers the mound back and forth on the plastic kneading mat.

  “You must practice,” he says, nudging the dough my direction.

  Kneading gives the bread its texture and stability. I repeat the same motions, but odd shapes, not at all lunar, emerge from my efforts.

  Eleven minutes.

  Andrew snatches a rolling pin from the drawer and pinches the dough into four pieces. He dusts the kneading sheet with flour, then rotates one piece of dough back and forth with the pin until a flat, tortilla-looking object emerges.

  “You do the next one.”

  Seven minutes.

  Sweat drips from my forehead as I roll the dough hard and fast. The shape looks suspiciously like Jabba the Hutt.

  I scoop the form onto a parchment-lined pan.

  Andrew hands me another lump of dough. I thought the “bread of affliction” was something you ate, not something you do.

  Five minutes.

  Now for the marks of affliction. Using a fork, we pierce the thin layer like a checkerboard. For a bread to be considered unleavened, none of the naturally occurring air pockets can measure more than an inch in diameter. Messianic Jews at Passover sometimes compare the indentations to the holes or stripes of Christ in his suffering and death.

  Andrew slips the pans into the oven. Together, we watch the countdown. He pulls the unleavened bread out with three seconds to spare. We barely make it. I can’t help but wonder if that’s how God’s people felt when they disappeared into the night.

  BREAD’S PLACE AT THE TABLE

  The flat, unleavened bread looks like an oversized round cracker. Unlike prepackaged matzo sold at the store, this right-out-of-the-oven bread has a soft, chewy consistency.

  “Add this,” he advises, smearing on a dollop of white goat butter. The bread takes on the flavor of fresh goat cheese. Nom, nom.

  I’m chewing on a slice of history. When humans transitioned from being hunter-gatherers toward farming, bread made its first major advancement in the Fertile Crescent of the modern Middle East. Genesis alludes to this shift when Jabal’s descendants live in tents and raise livestock, while his brother, Tubal-Cain, forges all kinds of tools from bronze and iron. Grains flourished with the invention of the plow.

  Portions of the harvests were mushed into porridge. Others were baked. Beans and other legumes and anything forage-able that offered the slightest nutrition were added to the dough. Ancient loaves were dense, dry, and heavy. Most contained so many impurities, including small rocks, they would be deemed a dental hazard and inedible today. Yet most of the world lived hungry, and any source of food was received as a gift.

  From bread’s earliest days, fluffy white rolls and loaves were always more desirable and enjoyed by the social elite. The peasantry relied on darker grain breads baked every few weeks or months. Some of these loaves became so stale, pieces had to be hacked apart and soaked in water before they could be consumed.

  Throughout history, wars were fought and empires overthrown over lack of access to this basic food. The rising cost of bread played a key role in the start of the French Revolution as well as the more recent Arab Spring uprisings.

  Only recently have innovations led to the ability to create inexpensive, mass-produced bread, with its uniform shape, bright white appearance, spongy texture, low cost, and even slices. Ironically, now the pendulum swings in more affluent countries back to the darker, chewier, artisanal whole wheat breads. Even in bread, we crave what’s harder to obtain.

  In some developed countries today, bread creates a different kind of rift. The warm loaves that once drew families together have now become a source of division with the recent surge in food allergies and calorie counting.

  I know I’m not the only one who struggles with allergies or intolerances to certain kinds of grains. It’s estimated that 1 percent of Americans have celiac disease, an autoimmune disease requiring a strict gluten-free diet, and eighteen million Americans have non-celiac gluten intolerance. Some people simply feel better when they don’t eat bread. Others eliminate bread from their diets to trim calories or embrace breadlessness as part of a low-carb lifestyle.

  Avoiding bread is a privileged choice. To this day, much of earth’s population derives the majority of its calories from baked grains. With an estimated 30 percent of human calories derived from bread, only the wealthiest people in the richest parts of the world can afford to stop eating it. If eliminated from our collective diet, two billion people would starve to death within months.

  * * *

  Table Discovery: God commands Ezekiel to use a combination of “wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt” to make bread. If you’d like to experiment with new baking recipes, all of these flours can be ordered online. Leif and I have been enjoying experimenting with bean flours, which are gluten free.

  * * *

  The opportunity to skip bread was never an option in the ancient world. In Hebrew, the word for bread, lechem, is synonymous with “food.” When God says to Adam, “By the sweat of your face, you will eat your bread,” some translations read, “you will have food to eat.” Even the “staff of bread,”
also described as the “staff of life,” implies that bread is so essential that it makes it possible for a person to walk.

  Indeed, if you follow the breadcrumbs through the Old Testament, you’ll find them appearing at pivotal moments. Remember the poor baker for whom Joseph delivers nightmarish news. And Sarah, who bakes for a holy trio, then learns a baby is on the way. Jacob adds a slice to the meat stew when he convinces Esau to sell his birthright, and Elijah survives on the bread of ravens. Then there’s Gideon, who gains confidence from a dream about bread; meanwhile, Boaz and Ruth, share an appetizer involving—you guessed it—bread.

  Who can forget that incredible moment when God sprinkles the desert with “manna,” a bread so mysterious you’ll never find it on a grocery shelf? Raised on the bread of Egypt, the people of God view the wafers from heaven with suspicion and ask, “Manna?” which, in Hebrew, means “What is this?” But the question runs much deeper than What’s this newfangled dish on God’s menu?

  The Israelites have known only enslavement for generations. The honeyed bread of heaven contrasts with the stale bread of their sweaty toil in Egypt. Now God promises to feed his children for free and give them an entire day of rest each week. The offer seems too ridiculous, too foreign, too unbelievable. In this context, What is this? takes on new meaning.

  The only life the people of God have experienced is slavery, exploitation, and hoarding. Manna upends all they’ve ever known.

  In Egypt, Pharaoh demands bread.

  In the wilderness, God dispenses bread.

  In Egypt, the Israelites endure hard labor to survive.

  In the wilderness, the Israelites gather with ease.

  In Egypt, those who lord it over the Israelites do so for their own profit and gain.

  In the wilderness, the Lord provides for his people’s freedom and abundance.

  In Egypt, bread symbolizes human power.

  In the wilderness, bread symbolizes God’s divine power.

  Even the delivery mechanism of the sweet bread trumpets a new day has come for the Israelites. In Egypt, God declares, “I will rain down the worst hail that has ever occurred in Egypt from the day it was founded until now.” In the wilderness, God showers bountiful, delicious provision.

  God invites the entire community to rise and shine, to taste and see his goodness together. “In the evening you will know that it was the LORD who brought you out of Egypt, and in the morning, you will see the glory [or presence] of the LORD.”

  For those brutalized under Egyptian rule, the free lunch seems too good to be true. It takes forty years in the wilderness to recognize how much love, grace, and freedom God kneads into every morsel.

  With so many mentions of bread, I know I’m just beginning.

  WHAT GOD WHISPERS THROUGH BREAD

  I wipe a schmear of goat butter from my bottom lip.

  “One more thing . . . working on . . . must try,” Andrew mutters, pulling a tray from a low hidden shelf.

  The pan contains what appear to be four large, unbaked molasses cookies with sea salt. But they aren’t cookies at all. The round, flattish loaves are bread—half barley, half emmer flour, seasoned with cumin—still popular in Morocco today. The oven must cool to 450 degrees before they can bake.

  While waiting, Andrew explains the communal nature of bread making.

  In ancient Israel, the whole family shared the hard labor. The work began in a field, plowing the soil and planting last year’s kernels. Together, the family tended the field and prayed away famine and pests, in hope the stalks would sprout, lengthen, and yield a bounty of food.

  The family endured sunburn and sweat, aching muscles and strained backs, to harvest the grain with sickles. When the yield was at hand, the work had just begun. Then they must pound and winnow (blow air) through the grain to remove the outer husk. Those who couldn’t afford access to a mill used their own mortar and pestle to grind their grain.

  Since the harvest had to carry the family through an entire year, only a small scoop of the flour was mixed with water and kneaded in a bread trough, while the bulk of the flour was safely stored away. The dough was then taken to the oven—but not a family oven. Most families couldn’t afford their own stove. Instead, they used a communal oven.

  “With so many loaves in a single oven, how did the families tell them apart?” Andrew asks with a professorial tone.

  I can’t solve the riddle.

  Andrew shows me an image of two ancient loaves from AD 79. After a nearby volcano buried Pompeii, the round masses were preserved to perfection inside an oven. Each loaf bears an insignia according to its baker. That’s how families identified their baked goods.

  What catches my attention are the pizza-slice-shaped cuts on the breads’ surfaces, which allowed the loaves to be easily broken into portions, and explains why, wherever bread appears in the Bible, there’s never a mention of a bread knife nearby. The pre-cuts allowed people to tear the bread with ease, hence the term “breaking bread.”

  Remember Jesus’s flagship miracle of feeding five thousand people? Out of nowhere, a boy offers to donate his lunch—a child so unencumbered that he imagines his meager offering can make a difference. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, raises the question, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”

  Tucked into this question are carefully worded details. Notice that both the loaves and the fish are described as small. The numerals five and two are important because together they add up to the perfect number, seven, which symbolizes completeness or divine perfection throughout Scripture. But John adds a detail that none of the other Gospel writers add, and only a foodie would notice: the type of loaves.

  Twice in the story, the bread is described as barley, the food of peasants.

  Those loaves are likely marked by pocks from pebbles, stained with blackened ash from the oven, and embedded with charred grass. Jesus doesn’t multiply fluffy white bread. In using this particular flat loaf, Jesus echoes the refrain his presence has been singing since his birth in the stable. Jesus aligns with the poor.

  After the crowds are satiated, the disciples gather a dozen basketfuls of “broken pieces.” I always imagined the leftovers as crumbs. Yet they were more likely pre-scored portions of bread, which at the time were whole servings.

  The boy gives the barley loaves, and they represent the hard work, sacrifice, and gifts of the entire family. Together, the boy’s family has nurtured and invested in those grains. The communal act is inherent in the planting and cultivating and harvesting and kneading and baking and sacrificing.

  This communal nature stands in stark contrast to how many of us live today. Often when we encounter bread today, it’s a solo affair. We select a plastic-wrapped, perfectly shaped loaf from the shelf and race to the self-checkout or even place an online order that arrives at our door. All too often we eat in our cars and cubicles. More and more, we procure food alone and eat alone.

  Yet this hasn’t always been the way.

  From the beginning, bread was shared around a table—a table of working together, a table of living together, a table of vulnerability, a table of sacrifice, a table of thanksgiving. God set this table for the Israelites in the wilderness so they remember their deliverance. Christ set this table for the disciples in the upper room so we remember his sacrifice.

  With every morsel of manna, God whispers that we are never meant to go it alone.

  With every morsel of communion, God whispers that we are never meant to go it alone.

  Sometimes we must shake ourselves free from a world with lab-designed food and freewheeling individualistic spirituality and remember—from the field to the seed to the growth to the harvest to the grinding to the baking to the serving—the bread we eat is a communal act of God with us and us with each other.

  Jesus reveals, “I am the bread of life,” and calls us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Before his departure, Jesus instructs, “Take and eat; t
his is my body.” Jesus could have instituted any act in memory of him—the teaching of others, the washing of the feet, the removal of a betrayer. Yet he prescribes one act in remembrance: sip the wine as blood and chew the bread as body. Christ comes to earth in the presence of the Father and the Spirit. He doesn’t come alone, and the bread he calls us to eat is not meant to be consumed alone. He invites us to partake in the fullness of the Father, Son, Spirit, and community of the saints.

  We are created to live life around a table in the taking and breaking, giving and sharing, knowing and being known. Bread welcomes us into the community for which our souls were made.

  * * *

  Bread welcomes us into the community for which our souls were made.

  * * *

  Andrew pulls the Moroccan loaves from the oven. The cumin adds a hint of heat to the soft, hearty bread. Before I leave to catch my return train, Andrew slides a few loaves of the unleavened and flatbread in my bag. I’m grateful for the food, but even more, for the friendship.

  THE EIGHTEEN-MINUTE LOAF CHALLENGE

  One of my most regrettable moments in Israel involved our daily bread. Ido’s family and staff and I shared many meals together. We grew close fast, and I transformed from newfound friend to long-lost cousin.

  Every meal featured all the bread anyone could eat. The meals before Passover included enormous focaccia drizzled with olive oil and dotted with fresh garlic. Like mine, most people’s eyes were bigger than their bellies. Long after the plates were cleared, huge slabs of the uneaten bread remained on the tables.

  In a desire to help, I cleaned and tossed the leftovers for the first few days. Then I became curious, for it seemed as if the bread had been left purposely to linger on the tables.

  “Because it’s holy,” Mama Vered explained. “We offer it to the poor, and if they do not take it, we feed the birds and fish, but we never throw bread away.”