The rules governing blessings over food seem straightforward, though as we’ve seen in recent days, the particulars can get complicated fast.
The daf begins with a mishnah:
If they brought salted food before him to eat first and bread with it, he recites a blessing over the salted food and thereby exempts the bread, because the salted food is primary while the bread is secondary to it. This is the principle: Any food that is primary and a secondary food is with it, one recites a blessing over the primary and, in so doing, exempts the secondary from its own blessing.
This seems straightforward. If two foods are eaten together, you bless the food that is primary and don’t say anything on the food that is secondary. This is why during Shabbat dinner on Friday night we say the Hamotzi blessing over challah bread at the start of the meal and do not then say individual blessings over the other foods we eat. The basis of this practice is the expectation that bread is the primary aspect of the Shabbat meal, a rabbinic assumption that says much about the place of bread in the food culture of the time (and likely the reason for Rav Pappa’s ruling on page 41 that a blessing for bread covers an entire meal).
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But that assumption is challenged by the mishnah itself, which has just told us that when you eat salty food and bread together, it’s the salty food that gets the blessing. Can there really be a situation, the Talmud wants to know, when salty food should be considered primary to bread?
The answer is yes: when people are eating the fruits of Genosar. These fruits, according to the commentator Rashi, come from the area around the Sea of Galilee and are apparently quite delicious, as the Talmud goes on to describe in some detail. They are so delicious, in fact, that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish would often lose his bearings when eating too much of them and need to be helped home. For reasons never quite explained in the Talmud (though they are discussed in later commentaries), when people eat these fruits, the salty food eaten with them becomes the core of the meal — not the bread.
All of which brings into stark relief a fascinating aspect of the rules around blessings over food. While there are many such rules, some elements of the practice come down to our own sense of what we are consuming — what is the core of our meal and what is the side dish. For a system that loves precise categories and definitions, this particular question turns out to be at least partly a matter of taste and opinion.
The Talmud wants us to bless our food before we eat, but our tradition acknowledges that for a blessing to be a true expression of gratitude, it must account for our own sense of the food we consume. The question is not just what we are eating, but how we are eating. And from the answers to those questions, the blessing should flow.
Read all of Berakhot 44 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on February 16, 2020. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
