 So in case you haven't noticed, Judaism has numerous occasions where our hands are washed ritually. Many times. For example, the first thing getting up in the morning, the custom, the tradition is to as soon as we wake up to wash our hands ritually. After leaving a cemetery, the custom is to wash our hands ritually. After cutting our nails to wash our hands. After getting a haircut. Now I go to a barber at Lawrence and Bathurst, where probably at least half the people going there are religious Jews. So at the barber, there is a special cup at the sink where you're able to wash your hands after the haircut. People wash their hands often before prayer is accustomed to wash your hands. And there are other times when hands are washed. Tonight what I want to focus on is the ritual washing of hands before and after a meal. Now strictly speaking, we don't have to wash our hands before any meal. Strictly speaking, the custom, the practice is to wash our hands any time we're going to eat bread. Bread is often the staple of a meal. Even if you're just going to have a piece of bread and that's the whole meal, you still wash your hands. So what is the purpose of washing our hands before bread? So the reason requires us to go back in time to the temple that stood in Jerusalem. The priests that served in the temple did not work. They didn't have normal jobs. And the priests were supported by the tithes of the rest of the Jewish people. Jewish people had to give approximately 2% of their crops. 2% of their produce had to go to the priests. This was called truma. It was called truma. And that's what the priests would live on. This truma was considered to be holy. The truma was considered to be holy. And the priests were not allowed to eat it if they became ritually impure. If they came in contact with a dead animal, with a corpse, there are many things that could render someone ritually impure. And if a priest became ritually impure, they were not allowed to eat from their truma until they went through a process of purification. And even if they were pure, they were required to wash their hands before they ate their truma. The reason that hand washing became obligatory for all Jews is very interesting. Once the temple was destroyed, the system of ritual purity and impurity fell out of use. Because the main impact of ritual purity and impurity is that if you were impure, you couldn't go to the temple. Now that there's no temple, there's no real benefit, there's no real impact today of being ritually impure. As a matter of fact, today everyone is considered to be ritually impure. But the sages were concerned that if the priests got out of the habit of washing their hands, maybe they wouldn't do it more regularly when the time came for them to again resume the eating of truma. So in order to get the priests to keep them in the habit of washing their hands before they ate their truma, the sages decreed that all Jews should always wash their hands before they have bread, so that now all the Jewish people, we just as a routine, we get used to the idea that before we have bread, we wash our hands so that the priests, when the time comes, will certainly be careful to wash their hands before they have their truma. A second reason for giving, given for the hand washing, was that the priests didn't only wash their hands before they ate their truma, the priests would wash their hands before they did any service in the temple. If a priest was going to serve in a particular day, and let's say offer sacrifices in the temple, the priests would have to wash their hands before they served in the temple. And our sages teach us that today we don't have a temple, but today our tables in our homes are compared to the altar in the temple. The food that we eat at our tables is considered to be like the sacrifices that were brought on the altar in the temple. We're supposed to see our active eating as not just eating to satisfy hunger like a dog would do. We're supposed to see eating itself as a holy activity, as a ritual, as a spiritual activity. So we're supposed to think of our table as an altar. Our food is a sacrifice. We're supposed to see ourselves in some way, each of us, as a priest. And so in order to make the active eating more spiritual, we also wash our hands today every time we're about to sit down to a meal with bread. A third reason is given for why we wash before eating bread. The truth is that bread is different from many other foods that we eat. You can pick a banana off of a tree. You can dig a potato out of the ground. But bread is not such an easy thing to produce. There's a tremendous amount of work that goes into producing bread. A tremendous amount of work. It's quite an achievement from start to finish to have in front of you a loaf of bread. In effect, our hands represent the work that we do. We'll be speaking about why we wash our hands. So our hands, what do they represent? Our efforts and the work that we do. And what the bread represents is basically human ingenuity and human achievement. The problem is that we must not think for a moment that the bread comes from our hands. The Bible tells us that one of the great dangers of life, especially when we have things materially, is we're going to say, It's my strength and my might that have gotten me all of these things. So here, bread is something that took a tremendous amount of human effort. And the Torah doesn't want us to think for a moment that the bread comes from our hands even though a lot of our effort went into it. We must not think that the bread really comes from our hands. We have to always realize that the bread is a gift and a blessing from God. So washing before we eat bread symbolizes the idea that we're cleansing ourselves of any bit of human arrogance. Any bit that might think to ourselves, Look what I've done. Look what I've accomplished. And we seek to humbly acknowledge that God is the source of our bread, not our hard work. And we wash the same way that the priests washed in the temple. That's how we wash in the same way, with a vessel, with a cup pouring it over each of our hands. Why is that? Why do we imitate the washing of the priests? Because the priests certainly, we know, did not work. They didn't work in the fields to produce their food. The priests were supported by the tithes of the people. The priests were people who could not feel that they themselves worked hard for their bread. That was not something that the priests could ever fool themselves about. The priests knew that they were being fed from the gifts of others. And so we wash like the priests washed, so that we'll become aware of the fact that our food as well is a gift from God. Now that is the washing before we begin the meal, before we have bread. But there is a practice that we call mayim achronim. The last waters, the waters that come at the end of the meal. And this is a very curious practice. The Talmud teaches that the reason we wash our hands at the end of the meal, it's going to sound bizarre, is that after a meal there is a special salt that is present on the table called melach sedomis, saramite salt, salt from sedom. And the Talmud says if you get this into your eyes, you'll go blind. So the Talmud says that at the end of the meal, in order to make sure you don't get this saramite salt in your eyes, you wash the tips of your hands. You don't have to wash the whole hand. Just the fingertips are washed to make sure you remove this saramite salt from your fingers. Now, can we understand this on a deeper level? So I believe that we can. Salt, in many kinds of literature, represents the taste of something. Saramite salt is the taste of sedom. Now, sedom, we know from the beginning of the book of Genesis, was one of the wicked cities that were destroyed by God. They were so wicked and so evil that God destroyed them. What was the problem with sedom? What was their sin? So the Talmud explains that there was a philosophy in sedom. They had a philosophy. And the philosophy in sedom was shali shali ve shalkha shalkha. What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours. That was their philosophy. So in sedom, they believed that if you had stuff, you were fortunate. If you didn't have stuff, that was too bad. And so in sedom, they institutionalized cruelty. In sedom, it was prohibited to help anyone else. It was prohibited to give charity. It was prohibited to give people that were starving food. Because if they don't have it, that's their problem. What's yours is yours, what's theirs is theirs. This is the philosophy of sedom. And it led to cruelty. Now the Talmud teaches that before a person eats, they have two hearts. But after they eat, they have one heart. Talmud teaches this. Before you eat, you have two hearts. After you eat, you have only one heart. What does this mean? So what it means is that before you eat, you're hungry. And if you're hungry, you know what it's like when someone else is hungry. You can empathize with someone that's hungry because you know exactly how they feel. So the Talmud is saying before you eat, you have two hearts because you know how it feels to be hungry. And if someone comes to you that's hungry, you know exactly how they feel. The great danger is that after you eat and you're satiated and you're full, you only have one heart. You cannot feel their pain anymore. You cannot identify with their hunger. You're not able to empathize with them. So the Talmud is teaching us here that after the meal is over, there's a great danger of sodomite salt. There's a great danger that this flavor of the cruelty of sedom will blind your eyes to the needs of the poor. That's what the Talmud is saying. And it says that there's a salt from sedom and it can go into your eyes and it can make you blind. What it's saying on a deeper level is that the danger after a meal is over is that you can become desensitized. You can become desensitized to people that are needy and hungry because you now are full. And there's this coarseness of insensitivity that becomes a form of cruelty. This is sodomite salt. And so the sages teach us we should be mindful of this. It's very easy when you finish your meal to walk away from the table and not even realize you've gone through this kind of transformation. Not even to be conscious of the fact that before I was hungry an hour ago and now I'm full. Thank God. And not to be aware of the fact that your sensitivity to others has been diminished. So the sages teach us to help us become more sensitive to the desensitation that takes place after we've eaten the meal. They say, wash your fingertips to remove that sodomite salt. It doesn't happen magically. It happens by focusing on why we're doing it and meditating and thinking about the fact that this ritual was designed to help us stay people that are sensitive to others.