Bless You

The other day, Little Miss told me that she wanted to drink more water as a health measure. Water is so boring, though, that she found it difficult to follow her intention. I suggested (I'm not quite sure why the idea occurred to me) that she might get more inspired to drink water if she said the traditional Jewish blessing beforehand. Fortunately, she loved the idea. (She's always ready for any spiritual development, which is just one of the things I love about her.)


The blessing over a drink of water goes "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, that everything exists by His word." As with most blessings, this one intends among other things to draw our attention to what we are doing and to the One who provided us with the opportunity.

Now, not all foods and drinks require the same blessing, and knowing which blessings to say and in what order provides us with further consciousness. All blessings have the same format; they all begin "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe..." (in Hebrew, of course). Which of the many hundreds of conclusions do we say? That depends on what we are about to do. Here are some for various foods.

For bread, we say "...who brings forth bread from the Earth."

For other baked goods or grain foods, "...who creates species of nourishment."

For wine, "...who creates the fruit of the vine."

For apples, pears, avocadoes, oranges, and anything else that grown on trees, "...who creates the fruit of the tree."

For other growing things, like potatoes or corn, "...who creates the fruit of the earth." (This also applies to bananas, interestingly; it seems the ancient Rabbis who wrote all these blessings recognized that banana palms are not like other trees.)

For other foods, like meat, milk, eggs, and of course water - in short, just about any non-plant food - "...that everything exists by His word."

If one is about to eat a full meal including bread, the blessing over bread covers all the other foods on the table. If there is no bread, one says the blessings for all the foods one is about to eat, in a certain order. I can't quite remember what the order is for sure; I think one blesses wine first, then grain foods, then tree fruits, then earth-growing foods, then everything else. Anyone interested should ask a rabbi.

All of these complex rules would probably drive a devout Christian out of his or her mind. They are the sort of things that drive us away from a true relationship with God, or so say the radio preachers. As long as we remain true to God and His word, they say, rules regarding food and drink are "inessentials" and can only distract us from God.


I beg to differ. The Christian attitude makes perfect sense in context, since Christianity (of the fundamentalist kind, anyway) sees physical involvement as a trap and a snare, and the world as Satan's kingdom until the Second Coming. The Jewish attitude, on the other hand, is that the world is not a distraction from holiness, but the means to achieve it.

It is God, say the rabbis, who gave us the physical world and all its pleasures. We can always participate in them unconsciously, as beasts do, but they're really there to bring us closer to God by elevating our performance of them to a sanctified action. That's why we say blessings, to make the ordinary act of eating into a prayer. The mystics go so far as to tell us that "sparks" of holiness reside in our food and drink, and in all our daily activities, scattered through the world in the time of Adam and Eve; by saying blessings and performing these activities with the proper devotion, we can "elevate" the sparks of holiness back up to Heaven where they came from. Once we have elevated all the sparks, we will find ourselves in the Messianic Age.


Well, heck, if I can help bring that about just by waiting a few seconds before I sink my teeth into an apple, it seems like a small price to pay.

Benshlomo says, Bless you - it's not just for sneezing anymore.