At the time of the Temple in Jerusalem, a dozen loaves of bread representing the 12 Tribes of Israel, called “Showbread,” were presented by priests on a special table every Shabbat as an offering to God.
Eliezer Meir Seidel, an expert baker and owner of the Showbread Institute in the Samaria community of Karnei Shomron, is proud that he can now produce the special 12 loaves of “wonder bread” displayed weekly in the Temple.
From the musical instruments of the Levites to the unique spice mix of the holy incense, more and more scholars are delving into the ancient components used in the Jewish Temple that stood in the center of Jerusalem more than 2,000 years ago.
The First Temple, built in the 10th century BCE during the reign of King Solomon, was destroyed in about 587 BCE during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. The Second Temple, built almost a century later, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.
The holy Temple, which many believed represented the ideal society, was in many ways a microcosm of life, with thousands of craftsmen of every type taking part in its operation and upkeep. This included the art of baking.
Making the Showbread is neither easy nor obvious, especially since the method was lost hundreds of years ago. Seidel spent no less than a decade consulting with rabbinical and academic figures to decipher the secret method of preparation.
Changing direction
Seidel was born in South Africa and immigrated to Israel 40 years ago, when he was 21. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics, but for 25 years worked in the Israeli high-tech industry, mainly in programming.
Since his bar mitzvah, he developed a hobby of baking bread, but it remained just a hobby until the global economic crisis in 2008 caused the American company that employed him to go bankrupt.
“I had a hard time finding a job,” he says. “After a few months of failed attempts, I decided to change my profession and opened a boutique bakery behind my house in Karnei Shomron. My wife and I baked healthy, organic breads with an emphasis on traditional Jewish breads.”
One day, one of his neighbors brought him The Five Kinds of Grain, a book by Bar-Ilan University Professor Zohar Amar, an expert in rediscovering the flora and fauna of ancient Israel.
“In the last part of the book, there was a chapter on the Showbread,” says Seidel. “Until then, I thought I knew what it was, but after reading that book, I realized that I knew nothing about it. At the end of the book, there were pictures of experiments that Prof. Amar conducted in baking the Showbread and the truth is that his experiments at the time were not very successful.”
Seidel contacted Amar, introduced himself as an expert baker and offered to join his research on the subject. “Prof. Amar was happy and we have been working together on Showbread research for the past decade,” he recalls.
Bread lab
“It’s not just the Showbread,” Seidel clarifies. “We are interested in all the Temple meal offerings, including the sacrifice of Thanksgiving and the two leavened loaves of Shavuot.”
Seidel’s bakery has become a research institute for Showbread and the other meal offerings. “We have essentially become the meal offering laboratory of the Temple Institute and Bar-Ilan University,” he says. “When Prof. Amar conducted research two years ago on the grain wafers used in the Thanksgiving sacrifice, for example, he did all the experiments at our institute.”
Because he has researched bread in depth in Jewish tradition, Seidel knows that most of what is considered Jewish bread is actually drawn from foreign sources.
“The braided challah that all of Israel eats on Shabbat is an invention of Christians in Germany in the 16th century,” he says. “We copied it from them. The bagel, which for some reason is considered traditional Jewish bread, was also used for Christian worship in Europe at the beginning of the ninth century. The only bread that is exclusively Jewish is the Showbread. It is not a copy of any other bread in the world.”
‘Knead’ to know
Showbread isn’t your normal grocery variety. First of all, it’s huge—about the size of a microwave oven. Then there’s its special shape.
“There are several opinions in the Talmud about what the Showbread looks like,” says Seidel. “One opinion says that it looked like a ‘broken box,’ a kind of rectangle, and there is another opinion that it was ‘like a kind of dancing ship.’ It was not very clear what this meant, so we did a lot of research to get to the bottom of the matter.”
He continues, “We studied ancient manuscripts of Rashi on Tractate Menachot, including from the Vatican Archives and the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Eventually, we came to an interesting conclusion. The drawing that appears in Rashi for Tractate Menachot in most of today’s versions, where the bread is shown like the letter V, is not like the original, and in fact, the true shape was a ‘dancing ship’ that looks more like the letter U.”
To this end, the institute produced special molds for very large bread. “Without exaggeration, we conducted thousands of experiments in baking bread, with all kinds of combinations of ingredients,” Seidel says. “I do the physical experiments at the institute, but I consult with many people beforehand.”
A new dimension
One of the questions that preoccupied the institute’s staff was the thickness of the Showbread, according to the sources, it had to be a tefach, about 8 centimeters or 3.5 inches. Showbread is actually a type of matzah, meaning it can’t be leavened, and if that were not enough, it is distributed every Shabbat after a week of laying it out on the Showbread table in the Temple. The sources describe a miracle in which the bread was always warm and fresh as if it had just come out of the oven. But you can’t rely on miracles, so Seidel’s institute racked their brains on how to make the bread reach such large dimensions and also come out edible.
Seidel refused to accept the results of Amar’s initial research on Showbread, which yielded bread that the professor admitted was “not that edible and not really tasty.”
“You are not allowed to bring anything bland to the Temple,” he says. “The rule in the Temple is ‘There is no poverty in place of wealth.’ You cannot settle for a poor product. That is why we tried very hard to ensure that the Showbread that comes out of the institute is delicious, and the bread that we managed to bake after many years of experimentation is indeed very tasty.”
To meet the halachic requirements, the question arose at the institute as to how to achieve the necessary thickness made from the ingredients mentioned in the Torah. “Rabbi Yosef Karo asks this in his commentary on the Kesef Mishnah on the laws of Tamidim and Musafim (the daily and additional sacrifices), and it seems absolutely impossible, especially when we remember that this bread can’t be leavened. In order to bake bread to the height of a tefach, without leavening, we had to consult with experts on the subject of leavening.”
For a whole year, Seidel and Amar discussed this issue with Rabbi Shabtai Rappaport, former head of the Higher Institute of Torah Learning at Bar-Ilan University.
“We were looking for a way to leaven bread without it being halachically considered leaven, and we finally came up with a satisfactory solution. We managed to get it to the height of a tefach,” he says. “Once this thickness was achieved, it gave the bread a stability that was not present in the breads obtained in Amar’s research up to that time. His breads were very fragile.”
Is it possible to rise bread without leavening it? “We discovered that it is! There are all kinds of techniques to do this. Amar suggested that it could be done using baking soda combined with a certain acid, but that didn’t do the trick. We were only able to raise the bread to a height of half a hand. We tested all kinds of solutions, including fermenting in a vat.”
The deeper meaning
Seidel thinks the bread’s U-shape resembles a smile and he believes this is the Showbread’s true message, which, according to tradition, brought wealth to the nation.
“The bread was distributed every Sabbath between the outgoing and the incoming priestly watch. In the Second Temple, there were around 250 priests in each watch,” he says. “The 12 loaves were distributed among about 500 priests! Each priest received a kezait (an olive’s size), and according to other sources, even less, and the miracle was that it was enough for everyone and satisfied them all.”
Though it took years to discover, Seidel has no problem sharing the recipe. “It’s not a secret that we have kept at the institute. We even published a book on the subject, Meir Panim. In addition, we hold workshops on the subject, go to ulpans, yeshivas, schools and community centers, deliver them at bar mitzvah events, and we also have workshops for preparing all the other offerings.”
Seidel says that in order to inspire the people of Israel at this difficult time and in the future, it is not only desirable but necessary to revive this tradition and arouse in people “a desire for the Temple.”
This article was originally published in Hebrew by Olam Katan.