What Bracha Did They Say On Manna?

I was pondering the subject of this week’s sermon when I happened upon a startling story in The New York Sun, with the headline “Chicken Tastes Supreme After 50 Years in a Can.” The article, picked up from the British press, describes an English couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Lalley, who got married in Feb. 1956. For their wedding, they prepared a hamper of what was then the height of post-war luxury: sandwiches, hams, cheeses and shortbread biscuits. Topping it all off was: a whole roast chicken preserved in its own jelly and sealed in a tin. The Lalleys and their guests gobbled up everything but left the chicken, which moldered for half a cen- tury in the Lalleys’ cupboard. In Feb. 2006, on the occasion of his golden wed- ding anniversary, Mr. Lalley celebrated in the best way he knew: you guessed it. “Our grandchildren were appalled, beg- ging me not to eat anymore,” he told the reporter; “but I knew that if it smelled ok, it wouldn’t do me any harm.” Mr. Lalley’s children, now all adults, remem- ber a childhood punctuated by threats from their father that he would take the chicken out from the cupboard and feed it to them. The tin “disappeared” briefly when the Lalleys moved, but then, to his relief and the family’s consternation, Mr. Lalley found it behind some beans. Canning experts interviewed by the reporter explained that because the preservation process for canned meats occurs at 120 C, all microbial causes of botulism are killed and the food can in theory last forever. In fact, a can was recently recovered from Capt. Scott’s explorations in Antarctica in 1901, and it was still deemed safe. Mr. Lalley now plans to auction the empty can on ebay.

Our parsha also depicts a singular case of food preservation. Moshe and Aaron are instructed to take some manna and place it in the Ark in a tzintzenes, an earthenware jar, to preserve it for generations. This, then, is the first and perhaps only case of canned foods in the entire corpus of the Jewish cannon. Millenia before canned soup, there was canned manna; you might say that before Campbell’s there was… Manna- shevitz. Of course, it was not the can- ning process that provided for the manna’s preservation; after all, this was the very same substance that when left overnight, the Torah tells us, quickly became wormy and rotten. Rather, this preservation of manna in the Ark occurred miraculously, and when the aron was hidden before the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th century BCE, the canned manna inside went with it and is there to this day. And the question is: why was Moshe command- ed to preserve this one of the myriad of miracles from the midbar? Why, upon entering Eretz Yisrael, was it deemed so important to retain this reminder of the way in which Israel found sustenance in the desert?

The answer, I think, is that as the Jews entered the Holy Land, as the miracles so necessary in the desert providing for their every need ceased, and as the Jews began to provide for themselves – tilling the soil, planting seed, harvesting grain – they needed a reminder that it is the Almighty that is the omnipotent provider and sustainer, that the God who caused the manna to fall is the same God who causes crops to grow, herds to increase, and wealth and possessions to accrue.