The Hunger Beneath the Hunger

Rabbi Hugo Gryn survived Auschwitz as a young teenager. He spoke often about those years — the scarcity, the fear, the desperate effort to preserve every scrap of food.

When Hanukkah arrived that first year, Hugo's father did something shocking. He took a small lump of margarine — precious, hoarded — and used it as fuel to light the Hanukkah candle.

Hugo was stunned. Why did you waste it?

His father looked at him and said: We know that humans can live for three weeks without food. But without hope, we cannot live properly for three days.

That has stayed with me for years.

Because Jesus said the same thing in the wilderness, in his own way. One does not live by bread alone. There is more to life than the material, the surface, the immediate. There is a deeper hunger — for meaning, for connection, for wholeness. A hunger, really, for God himself.

And here is what I know to be true: that hunger can be misdirected. We can look to the wrong things for comfort, for connection, for relief. Not bad things necessarily. Even good things — work, exercise, relationships — can become the wrong source if we are leaning on them to fill a hunger they were never meant to fill.

I think about a serious back injury I had a few years ago. For three weeks I couldn't walk. Couldn't run, couldn't surf — all the things I love, all my outlets for managing stress and anxiety, gone. And I found myself asking a question I hadn't expected: What is my life without this?

When we find ourselves in those wilderness moments, when everything we know to be true and real is stripped from us, have we learned to rely on the true source? Have we been in touch with the hunger beyond the hunger?  To know that no matter how beautiful the gift, (surfing, running) it is not the deeper source… It is not the well…

All of this raises the questions: What are you standing on today? And is it deep enough to hold you?

Prayer: God of hope, you alone are the well that does not run dry. In our wilderness moments, when the things we lean on are stripped away, may we discover that you have been there all along — deeper than our fear, stronger than our need. Amen.

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