Welcome to the alliteratively and delightfully entitled Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah (it’s still pronounced “Controversial” – I just think I’m being clever). Subscribe to continue to receive these and please share with those you think would be interested.
I. The Pixarification of Judaism
Few images are as iconically Jewish as a Friday night Shabbat table, front and center of which are two covered ḥallot next to a cup of wine. But if you asked most Jews why we cover the ḥallah for kiddush, their answer would be best termed “cute” – we don’t want the ḥallah to become embarrassed.
I’m sorry – what?!
But I want to unpack my main issue with this explanation for a moment because my gripe is not that it just sounds silly – because, after all, many things in Judaism sound silly (and not just to people who aren’t familiar with them). So why am I so bothered by this?
And my answer can’t be the kind of answer I usually offer when bothered by a certain practice or popular motivation for a practice – where I’ll point out how loosely connected the explanation is to Jewish tradition as a whole.
Because in this case, the fear of embarrassing bread has a long and serious history. It’s quoted by a host of great rabbis – including, per the Beit Yosef, Rosh and Mordekhai – and codified as one of the rationales for covering the ḥallah in Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher’s deeply influential Ṭur (O.Ḥ. 271), which was the inspiration for the Shulḥan Arukh.1
But the specific reason I resist this explanation is because it requires a unique assumption about Judaism and halakhah to justify it. Its entire premise rests on the belief that we anthropomorphize objects.
And this is a problem because there aren’t any other areas of Jewish practice where we assume objects have feelings. Sure, there are many instances where we are cautioned against showing disrespect to Jewish objects – but that’s not because we are worried the object will have its feelings hurt but because we don’t want to display contempt for mitzvah objects.
Ultimately, I think that any explanation that requires a unique assumption inconsistent with Judaism writ large – or, at least, otherwise unattested to within Judaism –will always be a bad explanation.
But, yes, the fact that this explanation also sounds really silly when said out loud doesn’t help. It makes a central Jewish practice sound like the setup for a future Pixar movie: One week, the family forgets to cover the ḥallah and it gets so embarrassed that it runs away and all the other foods in the kitchen have to find it and Lessons are learned (basically a rehash of Toy Story).
And while it’s one thing for children to be taught this idea, when adults declare that a major Jewish practice is motivated by our belief that bread has feelings, I think that something has gone wrong.
II. Why We Do Things in Judaism
There’s an overarching topic here: Why do we do the things we do in Judaism? And while the simple answer is always “Because God says so” – and a worse version of that answer is either “I read it in a book” or “a rabbi told me it was a thing” – the actual answer to the question begins with two key concepts.
And here I borrow the terminology of Rav Soloveitchik that, ever since I first heard it, has become for me something with tremendous explanatory power (and while it’s the first time I’m mentioning it on Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah, it’s something I’ve mentioned many times before in other contexts).
Jewish practice is motivated by two concepts: the technical and the thematic. The technical is just as it sounds: we do X because of some technical reason – because of some dry legal notion. The thematic, however, offers a more “inspirational” reason behind the practice; we do X, either because of some powerful spiritual idea or because there is a crucial message we’re trying to impart to ourselves and others.
And the various different reasons why we cover the ḥallah – because, in a surprising turn of events, there’s more than one reason! – perfectly illustrate how the technical and thematic interact, along with their potential pitfalls.
III. Why We Cover the Challah
The first reason could not be more of a super-technical-and-absolutely-disinteresting reason for the practice.
In Talmudic times they didn’t eat around dining tables. Rather, people reclined on couches and attendants would bring small tables to their side upon which was their meal.2 The gemara thus states that while, ideally, the table isn’t brought out on Shabbat until after you’ve made kiddush, if the table is already out then you should cover it while you make kiddush (Pesaḥim 100b).
And in translating this law into a world of dining rooms, Tosafot (Pes. 100b s.v. she-ein) explain that because it’s no longer possible to bring in the table after you’ve made kiddush,3 you cover the food instead – so that, after you’ve made kiddush you can have a “voila!” moment and unveil the meal.
And in justifying their rationale they quote the Sheiltot of the great R. Aḥai Gaon (d. 752 C.E.), who argues that it’s necessary to cover the food lest it look like you were planning on snacking before Shabbat began – in other words, you want it to be clear that you set the table and made the food specifically for Shabbat, and so you don’t unveil the food until after Shabbat has formally begun.
Now, I know you had many questions while reading this explanation. First, it has nothing to do with ḥallah and everything to do with food. Second, why not just wait to bring out the food to the dining room table until after kiddush – surely that would be an equally sensible translation of the gemara’s world?
There are two competing answers here (and probably far more if I thought about it for longer): the first is that, nowadays, we don’t put any other food on the table so covering the ḥallah is the last vestige of this practice that we observe. The other answer would be that maybe we should put out all the food first and cover it (which, ostensibly, is the position advocated for by the Shulḥan Arukh ha-Rav [O.Ḥ. 271:17] and seems to have been the practice of R. Soloveitchik).4
Regardless, this is a clearly technical reason for covering the ḥallah. There’s no wider message here, it’s derived from a specific series of laws and principles.
But there’s a much more powerful answer also offered by Tosafot that is relevant to our parashah, which describes the miraculous manna that the Jewish people received from God to sustain them as they wandered the wilderness.
And it’s worth pointing out that the gemara (Berakhot 39b, Shabbat 117b) stresses that the reason we have specifically two loaves of bread over Shabbat is in recognition of the double portion of manna that the Jewish people received every Friday:
On the sixth day they gathered double the amount of food, two omers for each (Ex. 16:22).
And with this in mind, Tosafot suggest that we cover the ḥallah in order to sustain this analogy a little further: just as the manna was covered with a layer of dew (Ex. 16:13–14), so must our loaves be covered with a cloth.
And this is a textbook thematic reason: we cover the ḥallah in order to express what I think is a really powerful idea at the heart of Judaism (and one I hope to explore at greater length at a later point) – that we must reenact or even relive moments and miracles from our history. We cover the ḥallah to remember the miracles God performed for our ancestors and thus see the ḥallah we’re about to eat as a continuation of that miracle.
IV. The Pitfalls
Yet, despite the beauty and power of the manna-based reason, it’s not one you hear most often. For some reason, people prefer talking about the bread’s feelings over the symbolism of the double portion of manna. And here, I’d like to suggest a (somewhat speculative) theory of how this happened.
And it goes back to the idea of technical and thematic reasons – and their point of failure. Because the technical and thematic work best when in tandem. It’s why my favorite time of the year to use the technical-thematic distinction is during Pesaḥ, when we have a bunch of things we do at the Seder for hyper-technical reasons but there’s a proliferation of nice ideas that anchor them (the Four Cups of wine is a good example: pairing mitzvot with wine is a standard thing Ḥazal do – see Kiddush and Havdalah as obvious examples – that’s your techincal reason; but there’s the well-known thematic idea that the cups also correspond to the four expressions of redemption).
But when the technical and thematic don’t work well in tandem – when one has nothing to do with the other – their explanatory power is far less compelling. All of a sudden, it seems like ideas are emerging from the ether with neither rhyme nor reason to explain them.
And that’s the problem with the manna explanation. Sure, it’s a powerful idea, but it exists independently of the technical reason. And so, it becomes a powerful but loosely-connected justification for our practice.
But in an ideal world where the technical and thematic work in tandem, we’d explain mitzvot by first noting the technical reason, after which we’d share the meaningful thematic one that emerges from the technical. And here there is a really good example of this: a different technical-thematic explanation of why we cover the ḥallah in which they work in perfect tandem.
V. Why the Challah is Embarrassed
One of the most important yet hyper-technical areas of halakhah concerns the correct order of berakhot. When faced with a variety of foods, which berakhot do you make first? And usually, when faced with a meal at which both bread will be eaten and wine will be drunk you’re supposed to make a ha-motzi on the bread – which is always the greatest priority – before a ha-gafen on the wine.
But on Shabbat this presents us with a problem. Because you need to make kiddush – i.e., a ha-gafen – first. And what this means is that we need to come up with some way of not making the ha-motzi first, while keeping the bread on the table. Hence a surprisingly simple and elegant solution: just cover it. And if it’s covered, we’re not required to make a berakhah on it first.
But as satisfying as a technical reason as it is, it doesn’t really give us a take-home message. There’s nothing thematic about this answer. And, on a Friday night in particular, when a family is sat around a table and there’s an opportunity to share some values, the need to offer a meaningful reason becomes more pressing.
Hence the desire to not embarrass the ḥallah. It’s not actually a rationale – but it’s a really important thematic value derived from the technical. The ha-motzi should come first, the ḥallah is effectively spurned in favor of kiddush – so we cover it to spare its blushes.
The point is not that the ḥallah has feelings but that we should be careful about hurting the feelings of others, even when we’re fulfilling the commandments of God. And this is a supremely important value to share.
But what happened at some point, I think, is that the technical reason got severed from the thematic. Because, especially when talking to children – for whom this message is so important to impart – it’s much easier to drop the dry, technical reason. And, before you know it, you have successive generations raised on just one explanation for why we cover the ḥallah, even though it’s the least serious and convincing explanation that exists.
And that leaves us with a Pixar-based Judaism, where all of a sudden all objects have feelings. Which, I think, gives us two options: either reclaim the technical – explain the order-of-berakhot issue before sharing the value, or share a different thematic reason.
Because, if we’re not caring about technical reasons anyway, the idea that we continue to receive God’s blessing via modern manna – the ḥallah on our tables – is a much more justified and meaningful explanation to offer.
Though the Ṭur thinks it originally comes from the Yerushalmi there is no version of the Yerushalmi in existence today that contains the idea.
The next time you’re sat in front of the TV eating your dinner on a tray table, tell yourself that you’re just recreating how Ḥazal did it.
Though I’d love to see someone install a Wallace & Gromit style contraption in their home that does this.
There’s a point worth making about Shulḥan Arukh ha-Rav by the Alter Rebbe of Chabad. While for Chabadnikim it’s obviously one of the most important halakhic works ever written, for people who aren’t Chabadnikim, it’s still an important, interesting, and influential halakhic work. It’s just that if it offers an opinion at variance with most other poskim non-Chabadnikim aren’t bothered about just ignoring it.