Behaalotecha: The Israelites' Ravenous Hunger

Certain texts paint the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness as one of being held in the bosom of God, as it were. For example, Deuteronomy 1:31 or Deuteronomy 29:4-5:

On the whole, though, the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness is not one of bliss. In parshat Behaalotecha, the Israelites are bitterly complaining to Moses about the lack of food.

They had of course complained about this previously, even immediately after leaving Egypt (Exodus 16), but it is still puzzling. It was only a couple years earlier that the Israelites had witnessed the miracles of the Exodus—the ten plagues, the parting of the sea, the pillar of fire, the utter destruction of Pharaoh's vaunted army. And even now they are being led on their journeys by a miraculous pillar of cloud or fire. Could it be that the Israelites are somehow still not convinced that they have God’s support?
If the Israelites’ frustration with Moses is reaching the boiling point in this parsha, one can certainly say the feeling is mutual. Moses has had just about enough of them. We sense that Moses is enjoying far greater intimacy with God than with the masses he is supposed to be leading. Moses effortlessly enters into conversations with God, but it seems he has no inclination to talk to the masses unless God directly instructs him to do so. Moses cannot anticipate the Israelites’ needs, sympathize with their situation, or even understand their hardship. Indeed, in the wake of this latest series of grievances, Moses asks God to absolve him entirely of his responsibility for the Israelites, stating that he would rather die than continue to have to deal with their neediness (Numbers 11:15).

But why in fact are the Israelites so needy? Why don’t the people follow the model of their leader and have faith? Moses certainly isn’t complaining about where his next meal is coming from, or what type of cuisine it will feature, so why should they? God brought them all this way; why do the Israelites still find it so impossible to trust that God will provide?
The Sifrei (cited by Rashi) offers a hint to an answer in its discussion of the Israelites’ complaint in 11:4-5: “...the Israelites wept, and said ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for free (chinum)…” The Sifrei rejects the idea that “free” here means without cost. Instead, the midrash states, “What does ‘free’ mean? Free from the commandments.” It is not just that the Israelites want food, but that they want to be sustained in a manner that is not contingent on obedience to God.

I think this is getting at something important. The mishna in Kiddushin (4:14) states: “Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar said: Have you ever seen a wild animal or a bird that has a job? And yet they are sustained without difficulty. And behold, they were only created to serve me, whereas I was created to serve my Creator. Therefore, should I not also be sustained without difficulty? However, because I committed wicked deeds, I destroyed my sustenance.” The gemara there brings a similar baraita and also cites Jeremiah 5:25, “your sins have withheld the bounty from you.”

Putting aside any naturalistic objections we may have over whether wild animals are indeed “sustained without difficulty,” consider what Rabbi Shimon is saying. The statement that wild animals “were created to serve me” seems to point to the idyllic world of Genesis Chapter 1, where it is stated that man shall rule over all the animals (1:26), conveying the sense that animals are to be subservient to man.

One might therefore reason, as Rabbi Shimon does, that if God providentially sustains the animals, then via the kal-v’chomer, God would providentially sustain man as well. But there’s a problem: The sinful nature of man.
Staying in Genesis, the “wicked deeds” that Rabbi Shimon mentions may be a reference to the sin of Adam, the sin that abolished that idyllic world of early Genesis. It is this sin that specifically invoked the curse (Genesis 3:17-19) that man should no longer receive divine sustenance, but be condemned forever to eat only “by the sweat of your brow.”

Rabbi Shimon seems to be saying that in an idyllic word, God would indeed provide for man, but the intimate relationship between God and man was fundamentally fractured when Adam violated God’s will. After Eden, man must always toil to provide his own sustenance. Yet Rabbi Shimon does not place the blame solely on Adam, and indeed does not even mention his name. He says it is the sinfulness of “my deeds” that prevent direct providential sustenance. It is every person’s own inevitable sinning that prohibits the direct providential sustenance of Eden.
Was it really necessary, though, for Rabbi Shimon to argue this position? It seems fairly uncontroversial that a person needs to make a living. Did anyone ever say otherwise? Perhaps so. Indeed, Rabbi Nehorai, later in the same mishna, claims to teach his son only Torah and no vocation. But I don’t think this is what Rabbi Shimon is addressing. Instead, I think Rabbi Shimon may be responding more directly to a different sort of teaching. In the Gospel of Luke chapter 12, Jesus lectures his disciples:

Essentially the same parable is also found in Matthew Chapter 6, concluding, “Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
Rabbi Shimon was probably teaching several decades after these Gospels had been composed (long after Jesus had died), so perhaps he may have heard this “parable of the raven.” Rabbi Shimon’s own parable could then be seen as a rebuttal to the teaching of Jesus: The ideal world of Eden, including God’s providential sustenance, was destroyed with Adam’s act of defiance. Since that time the essential nature of man has been to inevitably violate God’s will, and therefore to go along laboring under the curse of Adam. As a consequence, one may never rely on God’s providence for sustenance.

Early Christians considered Jesus a “new Adam,” as in Romans 5:19:

Rabbi Shimon’s rebuttal holds that it cannot work that way. Each individual’s own human nature and each person’s inevitable sins are what preclude reliance on Divine sustenance. The banishment from Eden cannot be renegotiated.
Considering this, we can see that the reliance of the Israelites upon Divine sustenance in the wilderness was a fundamentally unnatural situation, one that was at each moment in tremendous friction with their own mortal nature. One might say that, on account of this, the wilderness experiment was destined to go awry in exactly the way that it did. Complete obedience to the Divine Will was never a possibility for ordinary people, so the Israelites’ reliance on Divine providence for sustenance was continuously undermined by their legacy of being descendants of Adam, of being human.
The Israelites did indeed want their food chinum, “free from the commandments.” They needed sustenance not in recompense for pristine devotion to God, but as the natural reward of toil, of earning it by “sweat of their brow,” as humanity was intended to do. But this natural state of affairs was denied to them while traveling in the wilderness. This is, I think, why we see the Israelites unable to ever get on board with God’s providence the way that Moses does. For the Israelites, it was intolerable to depend upon Divine providence that they knew they in no way deserved, and that could therefore be revoked at any moment. They wanted to be free from an impossible way of living.
In Moses’ summations of Deuteronomy, the hardships of the wilderness experience are presented as a “test of faith,” the deprivation of food and subsequent miraculous appearance of manna intended to demonstrate that “not by bread alone does man live, but by whatever Hashem decrees” (8:3).

It may not be entirely clear whether the Israelites ultimately passed the test of the wilderness, or even whether Moses himself did, but there is one thing that was proven: Man may not be able to live by bread alone, but to live by faith alone is no more attainable.