Manna From Heaven

The purpose of this blog is to add some brain satiety to the Shabbat table. Please share.

First question for your table: what's your vision of the most heavenly breakfast?

There's an interesting debate about the meaing of the word "manna".

Just after the Exodus, the Jews (then called Israelites) are hungry. They have plenty of meat, but that's dinner food - who wants to eat chicken or steak for breakfast?

So God starts to serve them a heavenly breakfast. It appears on the ground every morning (on a protective layer of dew) in the form of some kind of ... what?

That's precisely the question. What was it?

They looked at it and say, "MAHN HU!"

Or perhaps they are saying, "MAHN HU?"

According  to the first version, they're saying, "It's food!" According to the second version, they're saying, "What is it?"

Moshe replies, "It's bread from Heaven!"

What does it taste like? Hebrew school kids learn the midrash that it tasted like whatever you imagined it to taste like. They love that. What there teachers never tell them is that this magical Holodeck-quality of the mahn only worked for righteous people. For average people, it tasted like bread dipped in olive oil, za'atar, and salt (not too bad, right?).

This topic reminds me of a family game we played one night this week called "Questions" - you take turns asking each other personal dilemmas. One of the questions was, "If you had to choose, which would you prefer: you can choose one food that you will have to eat for the rest of your life, or for the rest of your life, you'll have to eat whatever someone else chooses for you?

Shabbat Shalom 


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