Serving Hashem at the Table: Eating as Avodah

1“And you shall serve Hashem your God, and He will bless your bread and your water, and I will remove illness from your midst.”¹ The holy sefarim, the Toldos Yaakov Yosef, the Maor VaShemesh and the Tiferes Shlomo, all ask the same question. Why does the verse open in the plural, “And you shall serve …,” and close in the singular, “and He will bless your bread …”?

2Later in the parshah it is written: “And against the nobles of Bnei Yisrael He did not stretch out His hand; they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”² The Ramban explains that they held a celebration and made the day a festival.³ It is indeed a duty to rejoice at receiving the Torah, just as “we make a feast on completing the Torah.”⁴ Here too, at Sinai, on the day of the Torah's “wedding,” the day Israel received it, they did the same. But why did they busy themselves with eating and drinking right after receiving the Torah? It would seem more fitting, once they had received the Torah, to learn more Torah rather than to eat and drink. Rashi, too, writes: “‘They beheld God’: they gazed at Him with a coarse heart, in the midst of eating and drinking; so says Midrash Tanchuma.”⁵ Rashi's words are astonishing and hard to understand.

3aIt seems that we can explain this as follows. We know that avodas Hashem, the service of Hashem, has two parts, the spiritual and the physical. Avodas Hashem through Torah and prayer is spiritual service. Besides this, part of avodas Hashem lies in physical things, such as eating, drinking and a person's other needs, which are to be done for the sake of Heaven. As the Shulchan Aruch writes, all of a person's intentions should be for the sake of Heaven: “In everything he enjoys in this world, he should not intend his own pleasure, but avodas Hashem. As it is written, ‘Know Him in all your ways,’ and as Chazal said, ‘All your deeds should be for the sake of Heaven.’ Even optional things, such as eating and drinking … should all be for the service of your Creator …”⁶ So far its words.

3bThis is a great principle in avodah. It is not enough to serve Hashem through Torah and prayer. We must also take care that our dealings with physical things are for the honor of His Name and meant for the sake of Heaven, not merely for desire and indulgence. Tosafos, the classic commentators on the Gemara, cite a familiar Midrash: “Before a person prays that Torah should enter his body, let him pray that delicacies should not enter his body.”⁷ “Delicacies” here means eating out of desire.

3cThis explains a story that Chazal tell in the minor tractate Derech Eretz Rabbah.⁸ “It once happened that R' Akiva made a meal for his students … The foolish one among them took the vegetable stalk in one hand and bit into it. R' Akiva said to him, ‘Not so, my son; rather, put your heel on it in the bowl⁹ …’ Afterward he said to them, ‘My sons, I did all this only to test you, whether you have good manners or not.’” His students had come to R' Akiva to learn the way of avodas Hashem, mainly in Torah and prayer. Even so, he needed to teach them how to serve Hashem in their eating too. For this is the preparation that lets words of Torah enter their hearts, as we saw in the Midrash that Tosafos cite.

4The great tzaddikim would sanctify themselves while eating even more than while praying and learning Torah. Through their service at the table they reached very lofty understanding and very high levels. This is explained at length in the holy sefer Shulchan HaTahor of R' Yitzchak Eizik of Komarna.¹⁰ [This is what it says: “It is also brought in the sefarim, and it is the tradition we have received, that the tzaddikim were privileged to feel great delight and the radiance of the Shechinah while they ate. My teacher, of blessed memory, told me this when I spoke with him about eating and about keeping away from the pleasure of desire. He said that the sweetness of the yichudim, the mystical unifications, at the time of eating makes it impossible to feel the pleasure of the food.”] So for them the eating itself became a path to holiness. Along the same lines, we find in the sefarim that when a person eats for the sake of Heaven, his eating counts as if he had fasted. As the Gemara says, whoever eats and drinks on the ninth of Tishrei, the day before Yom Kippur, is credited as if he had fasted on both the ninth and the tenth.¹¹ Because his eating on the ninth is done properly, for the sake of a mitzvah, he is considered to have fasted two days, for all of it counts as done for the honor of Heaven. But these levels belong only to Hashem's special servants; not every person is privileged to reach them.

5This is what the verse means by “And you shall serve Hashem your God.” In the Mechilta deRabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Chazal expound this as prayer: “And so it says, ‘and to serve Him with all your heart.’ What is the service of the heart? It is prayer.”¹² Right next to this the verse says “and He will bless your bread.” It hints that just as there is avodas Hashem in prayer, there is also an avodah at mealtime, when Hashem gives you your bread and your water. But the two kinds of service differ. Serving Him in prayer is a path open to the many as well. Only a few individuals in each generation, however, are privileged to serve Him through eating, raising their eating up to Heaven. That is why the verse speaks of prayer in the plural, “And you shall serve,” and of eating in the singular, “and He will bless your bread and your water.” And for whoever is privileged to attain this service, serving Him in physical things as in spiritual ones, the verse ends with a promise: “and I will remove illness from your midst.” This means the healing of the soul from its ailments, which Hashem's servants draw down through their meals, and all the more so the healing of the body.

6After receiving the Torah, and before the sin of the Golden Calf, Bnei Yisrael stood on the level of angels. That is the meaning of “they beheld God, and they ate and drank”: they made a feast for completing the Torah, and even as they ate and drank they were completely bound to Hashem in lofty deveikus, cleaving to Him.

7Rashi hints at this when he says “they gazed at Him in the midst of eating and drinking.” Their service in eating was as lofty as the service of prayer. Just as in spiritual matters a person can reach deveikus with Hashem through the power of prayer, so through eating and drinking he can reach “they beheld God.” [When Rashi says that this was “with a coarse heart,” he means that they did it with great fervor and with no restraint at all, until they peered at the Shechinah, and for this they were punished. But at its core the episode shows how great their stature was.] The Torah recorded it to show us “the way where light dwells”¹³ in avodas Hashem. It shows us how to reach this high level, where even while eating and drinking a person stays bound to his Maker and holds fast to Him.

8[There is another way to explain why they ate after the giving of the Torah.¹⁴ As is well known, the Ramban writes on the mitzvah “You shall be holy” that with it the Torah commands a person not to be “a scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah.”¹⁵ Even when he eats permitted foods or deals with other permitted things, if he does not bring the holiness of the Torah into them and sanctify himself, he can, Heaven forbid, become a scoundrel through them. Based on this, we may say that before the giving of the Torah, Bnei Yisrael had not yet been privileged to eat in holiness. Once they received the Torah, they knew that they must bring physical things, too, into holiness. So as soon as they had received the Torah, they sat down at once to eat in holiness and purity, dealing with the physical as the Torah wishes. And indeed the Torah testifies that they then reached lofty levels, the level of “they beheld God.”]

9So may Hashem grant that we too have some share in this service, and that even while we are busy with physical things we serve Him as we should. Through this may we be privileged to bring our redemption near. Amen.