Berakhot 38

Today’s reading continues to focus on food, the appropriate blessings and the intention behind our eating. The guidance on when to say a blessing over food is analyzed based on how it is intended to be consumed. If it is for medicinal purposes, no blessing is required. However, if the intention is to eat the food for pleasure but there is a medicinal side benefit, then a blessing is indeed required. It comes down to intention.

Is there a lesson in today’s reading about over-cooking vegetables that are normally eaten raw and destroying their native essence: “By whose word all things came to be, as boiling damages it qualitatively.” I may be looking for modern meaning in the text and the reference is specific to vegetables that are normally eaten raw, but I found it resonated with respect for the properties of food that come from the ground.

The reference to date beer made me wonder what it would taste like (“and one is forbidden to make date beer from them), and I discovered online that it is actually “a thing”: https://vinepair.com/articles/can-make-beer-dates/