God Squad: Welcome Rosh Hashanah with generosity, gratitude

Last Sunday night was the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and every year at this time I send along to you, my dear readers, a brutally edited, short version of my Rosh Hashanah sermon. Hope you all have a sweet new year whenever you count its beginning. God bless you.

This is a sermon about bread, but it does not begin in a bakery. It begins in the Temple in Jerusalem where, according to verses in Exodus and Leviticus, among all the holy objects, called in Hebrew the klei kodesh — objects like the ark, the menorah, the altar of sacrifice and the wash basin — there was also a golden table upon which there were 12 loaves of unleavened bread, six in one pile, six in the other.

The key to understanding God's message for us in the symbolism of the show bread is to begin with the cultural significance of all bread.

To make bread, the early humans had to settle down from being hunter gatherers and become farmers who grew wheat and barley, which required irrigation, which required mathematics and geometry, which required raising an army to protect the fields, which required metallurgy. Bread is the beginning of civilization and a moral challenge to civilization. The distribution of bread to the hungriest is the most important test of the health of a culture.

The show bread is a reminder that just as God feeds us, so must we feed others. We cannot pray to God when we are starving — and if we do pray, we are praying for bread. Hunger wipes out the meaning of any other prayer. As Gandhi famously taught, "To a hungry man God is bread."

I learned the truth of Gandhi's teaching one day at the Mary Brennan INN, a soup kitchen in Hempstead run by Jean Kelly along with 14 others on Long Island. The Rev. Tom Hartman and I were helping serve lunch one day when a girl named Maria arrived with her mother and little brother. They came from their car, which was also their home.

Maria walked right past the fried chicken, green beans and mashed potatoes and went straight to the dessert tray, which that day featured a cake donated by Emil at Black Forest Bakery in Lindenhurst. The cake was decorated with "Happy Birthday" written in red icing. Emil would have filled in a name for a buyer of the cake, but that day there was no buyer. There was, however, Maria. She stared at the cake and with a huge smile asked me, "How did you know that today was my birthday?"

Gandhi was wrong. Sometimes for a hungry person God is bread, and sometimes for a hungry little girl God is a birthday cake.

Another story:

A student asks his teacher, "What is the difference between Heaven and Hell?"

The teacher responds, "In Hell, all the people are sitting around a huge table filled with every kind of delicious food and fine wine. They can see the food and smell the food and touch the food, but they cannot bring the food to their mouths because their arms are locked and stiff."

"That is indeed Hell," says the student. "And what is Heaven like?"

The teacher responds, "In Heaven, all the people are sitting around a huge table filled with every kind of food and fine wine. They can see the food and they can smell the food and they can touch the food, but they cannot bring the food to their mouths because their arms are locked and stiff."

Puzzled, student asks, "Teacher, what is the difference between Heaven and Hell?"

The teacher smiles and says, "In Heaven, the people are feeding each other."

Our bread must not only feed us. Our bread must feed each other. The lechem panim (or show bread) only fed the priests. The bread of our world must feed the world.

Bread is also a lesson to give thanks for the little things.

A friend of ours was invited for dinner at Bill Paley's mansion, formerly on Searingtown Road in Manhasset. At the beginning of the meal in the CBS CEO's immense and ornate formal dining room, a butler brought Bill a dinner roll on a silver plate. In a strange and intricate ritual, Bill first smelled and caressed the roll, then tore it apart and ate it slowly with his eyes closed. My friend asked him what he was doing, and Bill answered, "If I can appreciate this roll, then I can appreciate everything else I have."

Bread leads us to gratitude, and gratitude leads us to God. There are fancier lessons I could teach you but none more important than the lessons of bread.