Parashat Shemot: Moshe’s Miraculous Nourishment
How Does Eating Evolve from Hidden Constriction to Preparation for Redemption?
Why is Bread Associated with the Woman in the Torah?
Bread is often associated with the woman, not only as the one who prepares nourishment, but as the one who restores wholeness. In recent times, the minhag for women to bake enough challah to fulfill the mitzvah of hafrashat challah – separating a portion of the dough in remembrance of the gift given to the Kohen during Temple times – has been powerfully revived. Chazal teach that this mitzvah is a remedy for Chava’s sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge (Yerushalmi, Shabbat 20a), and Rabbi Yehuda even identifies that tree as a wheat tree (Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 40a). Bread thus carries within it the potential to heal the primordial fracture introduced by eating from the wrong place, at the wrong time. For this reason, baking and separating challah has become a segulah (spiritual remedy) for blessing – particularly for finding one’s soulmate, for healing, and for new life – as women pour their prayers directly into the dough, kneading hope, faith, and longing together with flour and water.
On a personal level, this teaching has accompanied me for many years. I baked challah again and again, praying with a full heart that my son would find his bride – and Baruch Hashem, he eventually did. I have also been part of groups of forty women performing hafrashat challah for the merit of loved ones who needed healing, sought their soulmate, or longed to conceive children. In our times, for many of us, eating bread is reserved almost exclusively for Shabbat. As the centerpiece of the Shabbat table, challah signifies far more than food; it embodies covenant, relationship, and home. I remember vividly how, as a new student in yeshiva, being invited to eat bread at a Shabbat meal by a mentor family was a vital part of my teshuva process. Eating bread – which requires special blessings before and after – draws us into meaningful connection. It is therefore no coincidence that I met my husband while eating bread at such a Shabbat table.
How Did the Infant Moshe Receive Pure Nourishment in the Darkness of Egyptian Exile?
Parashat Shemot opens in the suffocating reality of Egyptian exile, a world in which Jewish bodies are crushed by labor and life itself is threatened. The Torah describes explosive physical growth, yet immediately, that abundance is met with fear, oppression, and decrees of death. In such a reality, eating is barely mentioned at all. Nourishment is no longer a source of blessing or connection, but something constrained, uncertain, and bound to survival. Even when life continues, it does so under concealment and danger, stripped of dignity and holiness.
Yet within this distortion of nourishment, the miracle of how Moshe received nourishment from his own mother stands in sharp contrast. Miriam stood from afar and watched what was going to happen to her baby brother Moshe (Shemot 2:4). She witnessed how Pharaoh’s daughter rescued her and brought him to the Egyptian women to be nursed. Yet he rejected their breasts. So Miriam offered to bring a Jewish nursemaid to breastfeed Moshe, who, unbeknownst to Pharaoh’s daughter, was his own mother (Ibid 7-8).
Hashem declared: “The mouth of this tzaddik, which will one day speak with Me, shall not allow an Egyptian woman to say, ‘I nursed the one who speaks with the Shechinah.’ Therefore, he rejected their breasts” (Tanchuma, Shemot 7). Even milk – the most primal form of nourishment – could not be drawn from a source bound to impurity and idolatry. Moshe’s sustenance had to remain hidden and pure, provided secretly through his own mother. In the Egyptian exile, nourishment exists, but it cannot yet be public, secure, or sanctified.
Against this backdrop of dehumanization and distorted sustenance, the Torah waits until Moshe flees Egypt to reintroduce eating explicitly – not in a palace, and not under the control of power, but at the edge of the desert, in the home of Yitro. Only once Moshe steps outside the system of oppression does the Torah allow food to reappear as an act of dignity rather than control, as hospitality rather than exploitation. In the darkness of exile, eating is muted because it cannot yet fulfill its purpose. Only beyond Egypt can nourishment begin to return to its true role – restoring human dignity and preparing the ground for redemption.
What is Yitro’s Intention Behind his Words “Invite Him and Let Him Eat Bread”?
ספר שמות פרק ב פסוק כ וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל בְּנֹתָיו וְאַיּוֹ לָמָּה זֶּה עֲזַבְתֶּן אֶת הָאִישׁ קִרְאֶן לוֹ וְיֹאכַל לָחֶם:
(כא) וַיּוֹאֶל משֶׁה לָשֶׁבֶת אֶת הָאִישׁ וַיִּתֵּן אֶת צִפֹּרָה בִתּוֹ לְמשֶׁה:
“He said to his daughters, ‘So where is he? Why have you left the man? Invite him and let him eat bread.’” Moshe was content to stay with the man, and he gave his daughter Tziporah to Moshe (Shemot 2:20-21).
When Yitro says, “Invite him and let him eat bread,” the words carry far more weight than simple hospitality. Rashi, based on Midrash Shemot Rabbah and Tanchuma, explains that “eating bread” can allude to taking a woman in marriage – “Perhaps he will marry one of you.” This concept echoes the verse “Except for the bread that he ate” (Bereishit 39:6), which Chazal understand as referring to Yosef’s restraint from consorting with Potifar’s wife. The Torah itself reinforces this reading by placing Moshe’s willingness to stay with Yitro and his marriage to Tziporah in one seamless flow (Shemot 2:21). Several commentators note that the unusual wording “Why did you leave the man?” hints that Yitro already sensed Moshe was destined to become an איש/ish – a husband – to one of his daughters. Bread here is not merely sustenance; it is the symbolic threshold into home, covenant, and human unification. Just as in Parashat Shemot, where “let him eat bread” opens the door to belonging, marriage, and destiny, bread in our own lives continues to serve as a quiet but powerful gateway to unification, healing, and redemption.
How Does Bread Become a Test of Belonging, Unification, and Tikkun?
The Midrash teaches, “Great is a meal, for it draws near those who were far,” explaining that because Yitro said, “Invite him and let him eat bread,” his descendants merited sitting in the Lishkat HaGazit, the heart of Torah judgment (Pesikta Zutreta, Shemot 20:2). The Chatam Sofer adds a crucial layer: eating bread at Yitro’s table would reveal Moshe’s inner truth. It functions as a subtle but decisive act of alignment and identification. Food is not neutral; it binds a person to a source of sustenance, a household, and a world. To eat at someone’s table is to accept nourishment from their reality and to allow oneself, even quietly, to be shaped by it. If Egypt were still functioning as a source of identity or belonging for Moshe, he could not have truly eaten with Yitro, who had consciously separated himself from avodah zarah and from the worldview it represents. Moshe’s ability to eat at Yitro’s table revealed that his nourishment did not come from Egypt – neither physically nor spiritually – but from a home aligned with truth, hospitality, and moral clarity. Eating thus becomes a form of self-definition: it reveals where a person belongs, what kind of world they draw life from, and which values they are willing to internalize. In this way, bread is not merely sustenance, but a quiet declaration of alignment.
From here, many of the later sources unfold. Bread emerges as a symbol of woman, of sustenance, of Torah, and of unification; as the rectification of the split consciousness introduced by the Tree of Knowledge; and as the meeting point between giver and receiver, איש/ish and אשה/isha, Heaven and earth. In the darkness of exile, eating had been stripped of meaning. Here, with a single invitation to eat bread, nourishment is restored to its deepest purpose – drawing the distant close and opening the quiet path toward redemption.
