We are taught in the Talmud that Hashem blessed Shabbat through the manna and sanctified Shabbat through the manna.
That is, the miracles associate with the manna effected the blessing and sanctification of Shabbat.
What were the miracles?
First, the context: manan itself was a miracle: bread from heaven, delivered in a "box" of dew, which melted by mid-morning, but which, once collected and measured, could be cooked or baked, which assumed a variety of delicious tastes, which, no matter how much or how little were collected, measured out to just enough for each individual's needs, "knowing" which household to be measured out at, which, if stored for the night, becomes its mirror image, a stinking, maggoty mass, which, via complete and perfect absorption into the body, eliminated the need for elimination.
Yet, it is only miraculous if viewed from within non-Edenic context, where toil and exertion is the norm, where the fruit bears the taste and nourishment and not the tree, where death and decay hold sway. Viewed from an Edenic context, mann is the norm! Indeed, over the period of forty years in the desert, the people become jaded, and grow inured to the on-going miracle of the mann. They complain about the "light, light" bread, the insubstantial sustenance. The daily miracle has disappeared into the fabric of the presumptuousness of nature.
Comes Shabbat, and a miracle happens: the miracle ceases! No manna! What they have prepared prior to the onset of Shabbat, and only that, is what they have to eat! If they store it for the night, it stays good! Shabbat brings with it the reassertion of nature and its slow, toilsome processes. With the cessation of the miraculous, and the re-emergence of the realm comprehensible to the human, comes the sanctity and blessedness of Shabbat.
Blessing is connection to plenty: the realization that sustenance is not merely available in instantaneous quanta of ephemeral plenty, or not, that toil is "hardwired" into reality, but so is its reward - that realization is in itself an inexhaustible source of plenty.
Sanctity emerges through separation: the very separation of our realm from the realm of the miraculous, the assertion of our realm as G-d-intended place in its own right, contain the seeds of a powerful sanctity.
Rav Yehoshua Kahan
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Rav Yehoshua Kahan is a teacher at Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He has held pulpits in Knoxville, Tennessee and Los Angeles, and served as educational director of Livnot U'Lehibanot. He blogs on Parashat Hashavua here |