God Is in the Details:
Understanding the Complex, Complicated World We Live In

By BRENT CHAIM SPODEK

Parashat Ekev (Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25)

Judaism's framework of blessings on food can appear utterly bewildering.

According to the rabbis, everything edible falls into one of six categories, each with its own blessing, and it can be more than a little confusing to determine how to categorize any given piece of food. Bananas, for instance, seem to grow on trees, so you might assume that when you are eating a banana you would say, "Blessed are you, Adonai, Master of the Universe who creates fruits of the tree." Not so fast! Due to a quirk in how banana trees grow, the rabbis consider them part of the earth, and the proper blessing is, "Blessed are you, Adonai, Master of the Universe who creates fruits of the earth." Of course, if you were eating a banana with yogurt, you would have to decide whether the essence of that eating experience was the banana, in which case you'd make the b'rachah on "fruits of the earth" or the yogurt, in which case you would say, "Blessed are you, Adonai, Master of the Universe whose word brings everything into existence."¹

The intricate complexity of this system seems very far from what Moses tells the Israelites as they prepare to enter the land of Israel. In Parashat Ekev, he says "And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you." (Deuteronomy 8:10)

How simple and uncomplicated! Eat to the point of satisfaction and offer God blessings for the bounty we enjoy. That's it.

Indeed, within the rabbinic tradition, there is a strong voice that says that our blessings of gratitude need not be more complicated than "Blessed is the Merciful One, the master of this bread." (Brachot 40b)

According to Rav, one of the central authorities of the Talmud, one could fulfill the obligation to thank God with that simple blessing, which seems so congruent with Moses' teaching - eat, be satisfied and give blessings.²

Yet ultimately, the rabbinic tradition went in a different direction altogether, toward greater specificity and greater potential for confusion, and no explicit reason was ever given for this decision. The earliest layer of rabbinic history (Mishna Brachot 6:1) takes it as a given that there are different blessings for different foods, and the rest of the tradition follows from there.

In demanding that we offer God blessings specific to the gifts we have received, perhaps the rabbis were making a profound statement about how to navigate a complicated world. We can travel through the world, oblivious to the complexity all around us. Or we can stand in stupefied wonder at the systems which we inhabit, and feel incapable of understanding those systems, much less acting within them.

For those of us who aspire to live an ethically demanding Judaism, neither of these options is sufficient. The Jewish tradition demands that we understand the complex systems which we inhabit.

It really is difficult to remember that bananas grow from the earth, or to know how Congress works, or to understand the conditions under which our food is produced. To even come close requires serious attentiveness to, and engagement with, a world that defies complete comprehension. Yet the Rambam teaches that the root of human evil is lack of knowledge. We simply cannot do good in the world which God created if we don't understand how it works. Conversely, knowledge of the universe brings us closer to God and closer to just behavior. To be ignorant of the world, particularly when knowledge is available, is to reject the world which God created. Every day, most of us eat food grown by far away strangers and wear clothes whose origins are a mystery to us. It would be very hard to learn about the provenance of everything we put into or on our body and discern whether we are benefiting from the suffering of others. But as Jews, we are obligated to try to understand this complicated world, from how bananas grow to how banana growers are paid.

The rabbis mandated that we understand the differences in our food before we approach the Creator of all food with thanks. Even more than that, when we are faced with the complexity of the world, we should dive in. Just as this is true for the complexities of how plants grow, it is also true for the complexities of the economic system that brings our food to us - who grows it and who pays their wages; what kinds of businesses our financial investments support; how our tax money is spent; who makes the decisions which affect our lives; and on and on and on. God is in the details, and that is where we should be as well.

¹ Orech Hayyim 204:12; for more on blessings in general, see Klein, I. (1979). A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice. New York, KTAV. Chapter 3.

² Rav's commitment to an informal, even intimate form of blessing is congruent with his teaching at Yerushalmi Brachot 9:1 where he insists that the standard blessing formula include "You" in addressing God because of Psalms 16:8 which reads "I have set the Lord before me always."

Reprinted with permission from American Jewish World Service.