Before the ancient Hebrews could even start to schlepp those mighty tons of stone to their final destination – those monuments to a Pharaoh’s hubris -they first had to make the stuff out of which those pitiless chunks of rock were made. They didn’t just dig the massive blocks out of the earth…no, that would have taken centuries all by itself, and they were in too much of a hurry to get pout of there, suffering as they were under the heat of the Egyptian sun and the Pharoah’s lash,….no, there were no such gargantuan stones in the desert sands to be uncovered and then used and pulled all the way to the pyramid that haunted their nightmares….no such ready-mades to make their lives easier…no such luck.
First they had to make the mud.
For a very long time, all they could imagine were lives covered in sandy sludge and biting mosquitoes, their sinewy arms up to their pits in grime and sun-hardened bits. Oh, and there was straw in the mix as well…..sand, straw, water , that rare and precious resource… enough to make building blocks out of but never enough for a good bath.
Sand, straw and water…..mixing, much like the mothers of the family mixed the dough for the Shabbos loaf each week…mixing, toiling, one to nourish the Pharoah’s greed, the other to feed their depleted bodies. Bread and stone. Stone and bread. Mixing. Forever mixing. Their slavish lives a conglomeration of toil, pain, sunburn and hope.
And that is how the Hebrews metabolized their losses: their loss of freedom, their loss of sovereignty , their loss of everything but their God Yaweh who always seemed to be laughing at them….what had He to laugh about? Maybe He knew something they didn’t.
Like maybe He knew it was all FOR something good, this Hell in which they existed…on the other hand (does Yaweh have hands?) maybe he just smiled down on them in the form of brutal desert heat, because he knew how absurd it all was in the end….that even the angel wings they all dreamed of would eventually cover their scars, their boils, their rage.
In any event, that is how the slaves of ancient Egypt metabolized their losses: they made the sand their pain, dubbed the straw their cries, made the water the infinity of their tears, and mixing them all together, under the guise of reluctant slavery, their created one after the other the monuments to man’s folly, because in the end, the wisest of alchemists knew it all eventually came to dust.
And that brought a smile to even the weariest of cracked lips.
Jews always leavened their bread with laughter, and they do still, unto this day.