[Avodah] Berachot in the Course of a Meal

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 2:38pm GMT, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
: Summary: I really don't understand why "in the USA in 2012", the
: hamotzi on my hot dog roll -- which I'm using only to keep my hand clean
: and hold the condiments -- covers the hot dog itself.

That is pretty much the same question as Cantor Wolberg asked at the
top of this thread.

If I may paraphrase my initial answer: Berakhos are a bunch of rules
made by a Sanhedrin in order to make our "thank You for this food" as
specific and thus meaningful as possible. It therefore feels what CRW
called "artificial" because it is indeed artifice.

The didn't plan on cultural shift. For that matter, had we stayed in
the Middle East, they wouldn't have had to until the 20th century and
partial Arab assimilation of Western norms. They also didn't plan on the
end of the institution, so that a subsequent Sanhedrin isn't around to
fix the gap between eating style and hilkhos berskhos that opened up.

Ironically, it ends up making our "thank You" less precisely about
what we are thanking Him for. But since we are still blessing G-d for
what we ate (whatever that means -- "thanks" is only one possibility),
I don't think it calls for special measures to fix.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

Off-topic PS: Can anyone tell REMT and RAM how to set the timezone in
Juno? Both send their emails with a GMT timestamp, and if the thread is
fast-moving, it makes it hard to visualize their place in the sequence.

-- 
Micha Berger             Good decisions come from experience;
micha at aishdas.org        Experience comes from bad decisions.
http://www.aishdas.org                - Djoha, from a Sepharadi fable
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