“Look, babka,” Lori said excitedly. “Just like you got when we were in Brooklyn.”
Not only was it a babka, it was a chocolate babka, my favorite flavor. “And look at the label; it’s a ‘Brooklyn Babka,'”I said as I placed it in our shopping cart.
Turning the corner from the bread aisle, I envisioned myself strolling down 7th Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, stepping into D’Vine Taste, a Middle-Eastern grocery and deli, an authentic old-world neighborhood favorite. Instead of the specialty grocery store where Lori and I were shopping in Louisville, Kentucky, I visualized boxes of wheat bran matzos, horseradish jars, bottles of ale and olive oil, farro flour pasta, and kefir cheese lining the packed shelves in D’Vine Taste in Brooklyn.
I had been there months ago. Nalie Salem, co-owner, had let me sample the freshly made baklava and babka. She and her siblings immigrated to America nearly 40 years ago from Lebanon when her parents fled during Lebanon’s civil war. Her father was Jewish, and her mother was a Christian. “It worked because of the love in both faiths.”
I bought the freshly made baklava and babka with a promissory commitment to return for more, which I did two days later.
The babka I took to the Thanksgiving dinner, where we were guests of our daughter’s future in-laws. It was a genuine Big Italian Thanksgiving. Delicious food was abundant, and lively conversations were happening simultaneously, punctuated by hearty laughter. And my babka, a relatively common treat in New York, was a hit. “That’s a good babka,” was the consensus.
“Thanks to Nalie,” I whispered to myself.
It’s intriguing how something as simple as babka can act as a bonding agent for people from different backgrounds, people who may assume they have little in common only to discover, over something as simple as sharing babka, how alike they are.
Lori and I were hundreds of miles from home in a strange city, surrounded by people we had just met. In the sharing of babka (which was more like an appetizer before the main event: delicious turkey with gourmet-grade side dishes), we found commonalities.
Babka carried with it a shared memory. They had enjoyed this treat for years; it was something familiar yet special. Even though I had never had babka (other than the sample gratis of Nalie), I could join as we shared parts of the Seinfeld episode, “The Dinner Party,” highlighted by Jerry’s line, “That was our babka. We had that babka!.”
It was unleavened bread, not babka, that Jesus shared with His disciples in what Christians now refer to as The Last Supper. The disciples brought their collective memory of life with their rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. These men had grown up in Jewish homes, annually commemorating the Passover seder, sharing it with their family, and retelling the story of their ancestors’ miraculous escape from Egypt so long ago. Now, as followers of Jesus, they would share the story from a different angle: they would be celebrants of the Risen Lord. Weekly, in the simple sharing of bread, they would remember.
But they would also anticipate, for Jesus promised He would return.
Isn’t it like Jesus to take something simple, something ordinary, like bread, and make something miraculous of it? He does the same thing with ordinary people when we are willing to gather in his name around the table and share his bread.
How does that happen? It takes someone to serve (a Nalie?) and others willing to risk revealing themselves to God, trusting that He will reveal something of Himself. In sharing the bread, in being willing to consume and be consumed by it, we trust the ordinary into God’s extraordinary, miracle-working hands as we anticipate grace’s power to transform. Even if the change is minuscule, we don’t leave the table the same people as when we came.
The miracle is hidden deep in the folds of the bread.
It’s simply bread.
And then it’s not.
Looking at the babka in our shopping cart, I felt strangely warmed by God’s Spirit as I anticipated what could happen when Lori and I shared the bread. Gently, reverently, placing it on the check-out counter, grocery customers chatting all around me, I looked back at the bread and whispered to Lori:
“It’s as simple as babka.”