By the Sweat of Your Brow

 The first human tale from Genesis has always energized me.  It consists of a perfect universe where the only flaw was God’s final creation...humanity.  Everything worked in harmony until man was invested with a single mitzvah of refraining from eating one specific fruit and this he could not keep. 

“And He said to Adam, “Because you ate from the Tree which I specifically told you not to eat, the earth is cursed on your account.  You will eat from it with pain for your whole life...You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow, until you, yourself, return to the ground....” Genesis 3

Many questions arise from this episode.  Here is one:  What is the meaning of this ‘sweat’?  Is it simply that humanity will have to work for its food where previously it was a gift?  Since the Torah uses its words with deliberation, the word sweat must not be redundant, unnecessary.  It must teach us something of depth, meaning.

            What do we know about sweat?  We know that it is salty, which is the reason why Jews customarily put salt on their bread before saying HaMotzie (reminding us of both the curse and the labor involved with making it).    We also know that salt changes the character of the food (the taste is altered) and of the land (where there is salt in the earth, little can grow).

            In times when purity was of utmost importance in Jewish life, a teaching emerges about the impact of sweat.  If a person were stirring a pot with ritually pure hands, but the pot is impure, her hands contract its impurity.  Where a person stirs a pot with hands that are ritually impure [they may have, for example, come in contact with death] and the pot was pure, the pot contracts the impurity of the hands.  Rabbi Yose comments that provided her hands dripped sweat into the pot.  Mishna Makhshirin

            Judaism is largely about recognizing that which inheres in all things.  Sweat transforms any item into something else.  It makes bread into a commodity that stems all the way back to the Garden of Eden.  Sweat allows us to contaminate, or be contaminated, without taking proper care.  Yet, perhaps the greatest benefit of sweat is that it allows us to appreciate the effort expended to make something happen.  Nothing, but nothing comes without labor, sweat.  I suspect that if we were to do something as inconsequential as thinking about where all our goods came from, it would permanently change our lives.