Leḥem: Broken Bread Mends

“And you shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me regularly.” (Exodus 25:30)

Glowing within the Holy Place of the Temple, the flickering flames of the Menorah made visible the Table of Showbread sitting directly across the ornate room.

The Kohathite clan, a line of the Levitic priesthood, would weekly replace the 12 loaves on Shabbat in ritual practice. It was emblematic of many things: sacrifice unto Adonai; the daily provision of Adonai to the people; a memorial of their collective story; a reminder of covenant.

Bread is a fundamental symbol of that which sustains us and the way in which we are sustained. It reveals our dependency, on God and on one another.

In Hebrew, the word for bread is leḥem. It is simple food - nourishment to the body - yet it is also very relational, sharing its root with lehalchim, meaning to weld or solder. Bread depicts the process of oneness.

Consider the act of making bread for a moment.

It begins as disparate elements: flour, water, yeast, salt. These ingredients, on their own, are incomplete; they lack substance and (in ways) even purpose. But through the process of kneading, they are bound together, and through the heat of the oven, they are alchemized into something greater.

The bread is made whole, exuding new goodness and flavor. In the Temple, it is set apart before the Lord, and around the table it is celebrated with thanksgiving.

But then - as if climactically - the bread is broken. The culinary composite is torn and consumed.

That which had been made (even sanctified) through a metamorphic process - transformed into a new creation - has simultaneously become a gift for the body of another.

Bread reveals that there is sacrifice in love - a kind of breaking that binds us.

Messiah Yeshua is the embodiment of this.

In a public declaration he identified himself as “the bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:41), and, during holy Pesach (Passover) week, we are told that “the Lord Yeshua on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, ’This is my body, which is for you’.” (1 Corinthians 11:23-25)

God-in-flesh - the prince of shalom wholeness - was broken that we might be welded and fused and mended, in our spirits and as a collective people.

The point is this: bread unifies.

Physical bread gathers us in homes around tables, the contextual paragon of communal intimacy. Spiritual bread refreshes the weary wanderings of our souls in this complicated world filled with darkness and light.

At the genesis of the first-century Church, the ancient historian Luke wrote this description: “And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46).

The word for generous here may be more accurately translated as “singleness or oneness,” like that of a smooth stone that remains intact and unbroken.

To reiterate, there is something astoundingly mundane and mysteriously unifying about the regular breaking of bread together.

But here is the painful (albeit hopeful) gist of it all: in the cyclical binding and breaking of Bread, we see the face of God (panim, “Presence” or “Face”) reminding us that there is no sacrifice without love, and there is no love without sacrifice.

In other words, to walk in the footsteps of Rabbi Yeshua is to be in the tension of being mended and struck down ten-thousand times over. It’s finding an amplified joy amidst overwhelming suffering in the here-and-now.

It’s to somehow embrace a self-love and self-care devoid of self-indulgence, while concurrently placing others before ourselves without depriving our own souls of the nourishment for which Adonai lovingly gives all of his children - including you.

Today, may we find ourselves breaking bread among one another, receiving Yeshua’s body broken for us (his “eu-charis-t”: his “good-gift”) as abounding pleasure and sustenance and beauty and wholeness. And may we, like Christ, enter suffering with a kind of compassionate joy that extends ourselves as a hope for healing amidst the fragmentation of others.