What is it? Sometimes the Torah introduces its greatest lessons through a moment of pure confusion. “What is it?” was the reaction of the Jewish people to something they had never seen before. It was the heavenly bread that sustained them in the desert. So they named it Manna, which literally translates as, "what is it?". As the Torah describes: When the children of Israel saw [it], they said to one another, It is manna, because they did not know what it was, and Moses said to them, It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. (Exodus 16:15) “What is it?”, Manna, captured the essence of the food which defied description, and presented a fascinating contradiction: on its own, it was said to have no specific taste, yet the Sages taught that it could taste like anything a person imagined. Because it lacked a fixed flavor, the experience of the meal depended entirely on the consumer’s ability to cultivate their own imagination and intention. As the Talmud explains: “And its taste was as the taste of a cake [shad] baked with oil [hashamen]” (Numbers 11:8). Rabbi Abbahu said: Shad means breast. Just as a baby tastes different flavors from the breast, {since the taste of the milk changes somewhat depending on what foods his mother eats}, so too with the manna, every time that the Jewish people ate the manna, they found in it many different flavors, based on their preferences. (Yoma 75b) This serves as a powerful metaphor for the "daily manna", the ongoing blessings we experience in our lives; , our breath, our health, our relationships with our loved ones. The danger of a daily blessing is that it can become “tasteless” and “bland” precisely because it is constant. When we experience the same gifts every single day, we run the risk of taking them for granted and losing the joy and the pleasure they once provided. This is the true "test" of manna: can we continue to find flavor in a gift that arrives every morning? The Torah suggests that the secret to sustaining this appreciation lies in the name itself. By asking, "What is it?", by stopping to experience the wonder, we refuse to let the gift become invisible. We cultivate a sense of admiration, delight and appreciation for the daily blessings we experience. By asking “what is it”, by nurturing the appreciation for the miracle, we can access the deeper blessing of life, enjoying unique, beautiful taste in our lives every single day.