Okay, so I editorialized a little. The verse actually says “it is not by BREAD alone that the human lives, but by the word of G-d…” (Deut.8:3).
But what does the verse mean? The word of G-d is holy and spiritual, but our essential nutrients need to come from the ‘bread’ (which obviously represents food in general) we eat.
The Torah is actually telling us that when we eat, the ‘word of G-d’ is IN the food we’re ingesting, and THAT is the true battery-pack which gives us life.
Whoa. The ‘word of G-d’ is floating in my coffee?
G-d created everything with a purpose, a spark of potential meaning. And any article’s raison d’ etre is its very ‘soul.’ So when you purposefully engage something in life - whether it’s your pen, a tuna sandwich, or a heated moment- you actualize its soul. We can each activate the Divinity that’s lying just beneath life’s veneer, waiting to be touched.
So, from a Jewish spiritual perspective, life is like a big treasure hunt. Every day, and every hour, we search for the nuggets of meaning that are just waiting to be found.
Which brings us to food. When we eat in a conscious and meaningful way (e.g. to gain strength to live a life as our Creator intended), we access two levels of nutrition: A. The physical, which discharges material nutrients into our bloodstream B. The spiritual, a current of G-dliness to nourish our souls.
Matzah is a food with a unique spiritual ingredient. The Zohar, Kabbalah’s pre-eminent textbook, calls Matzah ‘the food of Faith.’ Eating the Matzah as a Mitzvah, and with spiritual consciousness, injects the nutrient of faith into our soul’s ‘bloodstream.’
When the Jews left Egypt, they were aware of G-d (after all, they’d just witnessed their own supernatural liberation), but the top-of-the-head-to-the-bottom-
Matzah is the gift of faith, in food form.
Three weeks from tonight, we’ll be sitting down to the first Seder. When you pick up that Matzah, please remember that it’s much more than a brittle cracker. There’s a special Divine gift there, the power of faith.
So let Matzah nourish your soul. It may be hungry.