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Bread of Abomination – Mikeitz

In last week’s parsha we read about Yosef running Potiphar’s household -

ויעזב כל אשר לו ביד יוסף ולא ידע אתו מאומה כי אם הלחם אשר הוא אוכל...

(בראשית לט, ו)

חז"ל interpret this in two alternative ways. The first is that Potiphar allowed Yosef free reign in his household to do with as he wished, with the exception of Potiphar’s wife (the word לחם is a euphemism for “wife”), even though Potiphar was a eunuch and could not have marital relations. The second interpretation is that Potiphar allowed Yosef to run everything in his household except for anything connected to bread (actual bread, no euphemisms).

We learn in this week’s parsha, that the brothers went down a second time to Egypt to purchase grain. Yosef treated them better than he had the first time and he gave them bread to eat, but he ate separately from them and both Yosef and the brothers ate separately from the Egyptians.

וישימו לו לבדו ולהם לבדם ולמצרים האכלים אתו לבדם כי לא יוכלון המצרים לאכל את העברים לחם כי תועבה הוא למצרים.

(בראשית מג, מד)

Yosef ate alone because he did not want his brothers to see him eating separately from the Egyptians and thus realize he was not an Egyptian, because he was not ready to reveal himself to his brothers.

This week’s parsha is all about food and more specifically, bread and grains. The parsha begins with Pharaoh’s dreams about the seven fat and thin cows, the seven healthy and withered stalks of wheat, the seven years of plenty and famine. It goes into vivid detail how Yosef stockpiled grains and wisely distributed them, all the while procuring additional assets for Pharaoh.

In this shiur I would like to focus on the mutual abhorrence that the Egyptians and the Israelites had for each other’s bread (both considered the other’s bread an abomination) because it gives us great insight to the diametrically opposed life philosophies of the Torah and the Egyptian culture.

Egypt was undoubtedly the superpower of the time, because they were the “bread basket” of the world. Egypt was idyllic for grain production because it combined the fertile Nile Basin - perfect for growing grain and because it was also desert - the perfect dry conditions to store grains for extended periods (if the climate is too humid, the grains go moldy). It is actually not very different today - the world superpowers America and Russia are also the largest suppliers of grain to the world (this is where their true “superpower” lies, not in their nuclear arsenals, but in their ability to supply food for their own and other populations).

Where grains abound, so does baking knowledge and Egypt was also the first “baking superpower”. Much of our modern baking science is derived from the ancient Egyptians. They were avid experimenters and were the first to discover the benefits of combining the fermentation process with bread and are credited with “discovering” yeast.

Until ancient Egypt everyone used to individually bake their own bread in their own homes. There is no evidence of industrial bread production or even “professional” bakers, until ancient Egypt. Archeologists have uncovered remains in the pyramid building sites in Giza of vast industrial infrastructure for baking bread and brewing beer (the froth from the beer was used to ferment the bread, hence their proximity) presumably to feed the prodigious workforce that constructed the pyramids. We read in last week’s parsha that Pharaoh had his own professional, royal baker (who met with a bitter end because he was not meticulous in his work).

Baking prowess is not essentially a bad thing. The problem is how they abused this knowledge and power.

Egypt wielded their “bread” like a weapon. They literally held in their hands the power of life or death (by famine). Bread was not simply food the Egyptians ate - it was tangible evidence of their “superiority” over other nations.

They used it ubiquitously in their numerous pagan rituals. In Egypt, bread assumed numerous and varied shapes and forms, many overtly sexual in nature, associated with their obsession with fertility. Bread was also enhanced with many additives - most notably sweeteners like honey - and was often brought as a sacrifice or buried together with deceased Egyptian nobles.

Contrast this with the bread of Am Yisrael, the simple עוגות מצות of Avraham and his descendants, the bread of צדיקים that was פת במלח תאכל.

It is therefore not surprising that the Egyptians were not attracted to Israelite bread, to them it must have seemed primitive and tasteless (you could probably compare it to the way a Frenchman today considers Ethiopian flatbread). But that is not how the parsha describes it. It says that the Egyptians considered Israelite bread an abomination, a really strong word for simple dislike or disgust. So much so that they would not eat bread together with an Israelite and not even allow an Israelite to come near their bread (as in the case of Potiphar).

There is something much deeper and more fundamental at work here than simple culinary tastes.

Pharaoh considered himself a god, the Nile was also considered a god. The Egyptians could not stomach the concept that they were not lord and master over something as basic as their daily food. Quite the opposite, they flaunted their “mastery” of everything connected to bread and wielded it as a weapon and a symbol of their superiority over every other nation on earth. To even consider that there is a higher Power (G-d) beyond themselves that determines the availability of food, or lack thereof, was abhorrent to them. It was much akin to דור הפלגה who built a towering skyscraper in the clouds to defy G-d, mistakenly believing that they were the masters of their own destiny and that no flood (or any other force of nature) could touch them.

The Egyptian bread also typified their philosophy of instant gratification, by adding sweeteners, such as honey, that stimulate the reward centers in the brain and create a pleasurable physical sensation. This correlated with their hedonistic philosophy of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”.

Obviously the Torah philosophy is the exact opposite of the above. We understand the true Source of our daily bread and this is expressed in numerous forms as part of our religion, in our תפילות and in our daily business dealings.

It is therefore not difficult to understand why Hashem chose מצה  as the bread of our freedom during our Exodus from Egypt. This is also the reasoning behind the subsequent prohibition of offering any מנחה offerings on the מזבח which contain sourdough or honey, the very symbols that Egypt flaunted.

When Hashem asks דוד המלך -

תערך לפני שלחן נגד צררי (תהילים כג, ה)

it means that the breads (לחם הפנים) brought on a table before Hashem should fly in the face of those brought by Hashem’s enemies on their pagan altars.

It seems pretty straightforward from the above why these two elements – sourdough and honey – are unwelcome elements in the מנחות (except for two, the שתי הלחם and one of the breads of the תודה, which is the subject of another shiur).

From laboratory experimentation in our institute we uncovered a chemical correlation between sourdough and honey, which is counterintuitive, not what one might expect.

You would think that honey makes the bread sweet while sourdough fermentation of bread makes it sour and this is true. What most people do not know however is that sourdough fermentation of the dough ALSO adds an element of sweetness to the resulting bread. We discovered this by baking numerous doughs at varying time intervals. The longer the dough was allowed to ferment, the more the resulting bread became sour, but there was also an increasing element of sweetness in the resulting bread (both increasing sourness and sweetness). We detected this by comparing the sample bread to a control bread which had not fermented at all. This control מצה bread was not sweet at all (nor sour). This is chemically explained by the fact that the fermentation process breaks down the starch in the flour (which is neutral in taste) into glucose molecules (which are sweeter than starch) thus adding an element of sweetness to the resulting bread - in addition to the element of sourness from the production of acids (lactic and acetic) created by the sourdough.

We are exploring the possibility that this could be used as a chemical “marker” to define at which exact point dough starts to become חמץ. It is groundbreaking and fascinating ongoing research we are conducting together with Bar Ilan University.

So not only is there a philosophical connection between honey and sourdough in the context of the Egyptian culture, there is also a chemical correlation between sourdough and honey’s effect on bread and may explain the prohibition of these two specific elements on a scientific level as well.

There is also a halachic נפקא מינה to the above that is relevant even today, even in the absence of the בית המקדש which pertains to the challahs we eat on Shabbat. The Sephardic custom is that one does not make המוציא on any bread that is noticeably sweet, it is instead considered מזונות. The Ashkenazi custom is different, that if one eats a שיעור, even of a sweet bread, it is considered המוציא.

If something was wrong with sweet things like honey, why did Hashem promise us a land flowing with milk and honey? The answer is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with honey, כל מה שברא ה' לכבודו ברא .   The problems only begin when we abuse Hashem’s creations for the purpose of עבודה זרה like the Egyptians did.

 

Shabbat Shalom

Eliezer Meir Saidel

Showbread Institute

www.showbreadinstitute.com

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