Created in the Image:
“The Bread of Life” prayer at Multi-Faith Service 3 24 2022
As you know, the US Senate recently passed a bill mandating daylight savings time all year. Now, for us here in Arizona, this is rather amusing; it apparently means our stubborn insistence on refusing to spring forward and fall back has been right all these years when people everywhere else in America made fun of us. So there: we Arizonans were right all along about Daylight Savings Time!
But my friends, the debate about just when morning should begin is not a new one. In fact, there is a beautiful story in the Babylonian Talmud, the great Jewish source of law and lore that was completed in the 5th century. I first learned this passage from an Episcopal rector doing interfaith work years ago, and later looked it up in the original Aramaic. This is the story:
There is a great debate in the Talmud about just when Jews are supposed to say morning prayers. These prayers, the Shma, affirming the oneness of God, must be said after sunrise, when night has ended, dawn arrives, and morning has come. The Talmudic discussion is about what that means, just exactly when night has ended, and morning has come. One rabbi says that morning has come when a person can tell a black thread from a white thread—which doesn’t take much light. Another rabbi argues that this is too lenient a standard, and night is over, and dawn has arrived, when a person can tell a blue thread from a green thread, a much harder standard.
After much discussion, the answer is given: the dark night is over, dawn has arrived and morning has come when we can look upon the face of another human being - and see there the image of God, the tzelem Elohim.
I love that story. The dark night is over and morning begins when we can look on the face of another human being and see there the image of God. Whatever color, denomination, nationality, race, gender, height, shape. Each human being is created in the image—if only we are enlightened enough to see it there.
I’d like to add one more element to this beautiful idea. For when we join with our neighbors and break bread together, when we can participate with them in that most basic of all human activities, eating the very bread of life that keeps us whole, we are more than seeing them as fellow creations of God. We are also reaching across all those artificial boundary lines that separate us, and sharing an experience that connects us in that most basic of ways. And if we can do that, well, then we are on a path of friendship and mutual understanding and support and good.
The Jewish prayer for bread is both simple and paradoxical. It says, “Blessed are You God, Ruler of the Universe, who brought forth bread from the earth.” Yet we know that bread is a joint project of human cultivation and the divinely given natural world. There are no bread trees—only planting and cultivating wheat, harvesting, milling, and baking. That is, the most basic Jewish food prayer highlights our covenantal connection to the One God. Anything we do is accomplished in partnership, with God and with our fellow human beings.
And so, I offer this short prayer: Baruch Ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, Hamotzi Lechem min Ha’aretz—we bless You, God, Ruler of the Universe, who allows us, through our work, to make bread from Your earth, so we can share it with all other people, all made in the image of God.