When I was a child my family rarely recognized Jewish holidays and traditions.  My father maintained an atheist household and held no great regard for the old ways of his forebears.  My mother deferred to him even if she might have preferred to be more observant.  We went to friends' homes for Passover sometimes, and that was about the extent of our participation in traditional Jewish life.

I truly enjoyed celebrating Jewish traditions.  Even at a young age I remember thinking that at the rate I was being exposed to them, I could reasonably expect to memorize only one of the many prayers that I heard recited.  I wanted to keep inside of me some small token of this odd world that seemed close to me, yet out of reach.

I chose one prayer to memorize on the basis of how musical it sounded.  It had a friendly word in it: “motzi”, that vaguely resembled my nickname.  It was short enough that I could handle it, and common enough that I could learn it and enjoy reciting it when it came up.  And so as a child I privately set out on my first memorization challenge.  I memorized the HaMotzi.

Since I knew this was a blessing over the bread and that the word bread was somewhere in it, I assumed that my favorite word “motzi” meant bread.
I never forgot the prayer throughout my life, though I rarely heard it as I grew older and grew even further away from Jewish traditional life.

Then I found the Messiah of Israel.

The great joy in coming to believe in Yeshua was the discovery of how Jewish it is to follow Him.  For the first time in my life I began to take an interest in things Jewish because they all seemed to point to Him. 

I began to hear my old friend the HaMotzi again, and to memorize and exercise other prayers that go with it.  In the course of my Hebrew language studies I discovered that when the boy is searching in the woods for a stick, and then he finds the stick, the word “motzi” is used.  The boy brings forth the stick from the woods.  Or perhaps the Lord brings forth the stick for the boy.  Somehow the finding is more than casual, and the “bringing forth” suggests a supernatural encounter with a Creator who causes substance to materialize out of nothingness.

One Passover I was learning about Yeshua’s last Passover supper, and how he spoke the HaMotzi over the bread in a way that gave new meaning to the bread, and that led to what we now practice as the Communion.  He took the familiar tradition of breaking bread and showed how the broken bread was His body, broken for us.  Likewise He took the cup and identified it as His shed blood, the blood of a new covenant. His HaMotzi prayer was probably similar to mine.

The Lord opened my eyes then, completing the gift He gave me when He put that prayer in my heart some forty years prior.  He showed me that the bread of the HaMotzi blessing could be understood as the person of Yeshua, who is the Bread of Life.  God brought forth the Bread of Life from the earth when He rolled the stone away and lifted Yeshua from the tomb, raising him from the dead. The HaMotzi speaks of the Messiah's resurrection, His victory over death.

God planted a seed in me and after many years of incubation the seed bore fruit. He planted a seed of the Bread of Life, and in due season, brought forth the full flowering of a fervent faith in Yeshua. Right inside my heart He brought forth from spiritual death a gushing up to eternal life that is my joy and hope in Yeshua Messiah, Bread of Life.