Flour, Water and Faith

Flour, Water and Faith                                  By: Sara Lamm

This week I did something brave. Or possibly foolish. The jury is still out.

Eight weeks ago, my mother handed me a jar of sourdough starter before I flew 6,000 miles back to Israel. I packed it carefully and hoped for the best. To be honest, we landed two days before Iran launched its attack on Israel, so my starter did not exactly get a warm welcome. But last week, I pulled it out of the back of my refrigerator, looked at it hard, and decided: we are doing this.

The consensus among people who know about sourdough is that if there are bubbles, no mold, and no strange smell, revival is possible. I am looking for bubbles. I hope that in a week’s time I come back to you with a crunchy, perfect first loaf of bread. Or a good laugh.

But in the meantime, I did a bit of a deep dive into sourdough — where does it come from, what is it really, what is this living thing I am trying to coax back to life? And it turns out, like most good things in life, I didn’t have to look any further than my Bible.

The Hebrew word for sourdough starter is se’or. It is a living, fermenting culture, passed from batch to batch, tended carefully, kept alive across time. Before the Jewish people left Egypt, God commanded them to remove every trace of se’or from their homes. Not just the bread. The starter itself. Gone. They left in such haste that their dough had no time to rise, and they baked matzah instead, the flat, unleavened bread that we still eat every Passover as a memory of that night.

They walked out into the desert carrying almost nothing.

And yet. Just weeks later, in that same desert, God issued a completely different command about bread. When the manna fell from heaven and sustained the people through the wilderness, Moses told Aaron to take a jar and fill it with an omer of manna and preserve it. Not to eat. To keep.

Moshe said, “This is what Hashem has commanded: Let one omer of it be kept throughout the ages, in order that they may see the bread that I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 16:32)

L’dorotechem. - Throughout your ages or your generations. God was saying: keep this. Let your children see it, and their children after them. Some things are meant to be carried forward, preserved, held up as testimony to what happened here.

There is a tension in these two commands that I find impossible to ignore. On the night of the Exodus, destroy the se’or, the rising agent. Let it go. Leave it behind. But weeks later, in the wilderness: preserve the manna. Keep it. Show it to your children and your children’s children. Some things you release. Some things you carry forward forever.

This past week, the Jewish people celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s 78th Independence Day. Seventy-eight years since a people who had just walked through the worst destruction in human history stood up and declared their statehood. The Holocaust did not happen in the distant past. There are survivors still alive today. The destruction, though, was total, the losses incomprehensible, the se’or of entire communities wiped out completely. And yet, within three years of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish people were planting a flag in their ancestral homeland.

If that is not bubbles in a jar, I don’t know what is.

Revival is not the same as continuity. The Jewish people who built this state were not picking up exactly where they left off. The communities were gone, the world they had known was ash. But they were not starting from nothing either. They carried something forward — something that could not be burned or exiled or destroyed. 

L’dorotechem. The knowledge of who they were. The memory of what had sustained them. The unshakeable conviction of what they were for. You cannot put that in a jar, but you can pass it down. And they did.

My mother’s starter may or may not survive my counter-top science experiment. I am watching it carefully. I am feeding it. I am looking for signs of life. And I find myself thinking that this is not so different from what every generation of Jews has done, in one way or another. You take what was handed to you. You carry it across whatever distance you have to cross. You open the jar on the other side, and you look, with everything you have, for bubbles.

Maybe in a few weeks, I’ll have crumbs to report.

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