Man oh Man – Behaalotcha
The dieting industry today is a multimillion dollar industry. Every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane who think they know a little something about nutrition have written a book about dieting. The Atkins diet, Jane Fonda diet, watermelon diet, seaweed diet, high-fiber diet, low-fiber diet, what-is-fiber diet, keto diet, two-day-a-week diet, 1-second-a-week diet, Beverly Hills diet, cabbage soup diet …… and if I continued, I would fill up the entire space for the shiur. Similarly with the so-called “diet food” products on the market today – that list could fill a book, not a shiur.
Why is it such a successful industry? Why do people go on diet in the first place?
Certain people go on special medical diets prescribed by their doctor because they are lacking something in their system. The vast (excuse the pun) majority of us however go on diet – to lose weight! If people in the world didn’t need to lose weight, the multimillion dollar dieting industry would …. go on diet. So why do so many people need to lose weight today? Oy, that’s a long story- so long in fact it goes back 3331 years, to the year of our parsha.
But before I get into that I would like to tell you another story. The story is about Adam and Chava in Gan Eden. When you read Chazal describing the food that the two first humans in history ate in Gan Eden, it sounds like they are describing a 100-star hotel. Delicious, fresh, ready-made pastries that grew out of the earth on tap (Etz Yosef, Sanhedrin 59b). Adam and Chava would walk through the garden with baskets, a wind would blow through the trees and mouth-watering food of every description would fall into their baskets (Ketubot 111b). Not only was the variety and quantity of sustenance limitless, even the waiters were the crème-de-la- crème. Angels (no less) would decanter vintage wines into Adam’s goblet and expertly spit-roast spare ribs and entrecote steaks in Mendel’s Sweet and Tangy BBQ sauce for Chava (Sanhedrin 59b). This food is described by Chazal as לחם אבירים, as it was perfectly absorbed into the איברים, leaving no waste products. There were no dieticians in Gan Eden, because who needed them? Cooking? Baking? What was that? Everything was available on tap, free, whatever and whenever you wanted.
Imagine if someone offered you to be able to eat as many Saidel’s Chocolate Babkas as you want, free Saidel’s Apple Pies and Honey Crunch for perpetuity - and you would never put on an ounce, however many you ate! Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Adam and Chava had a pretty good deal going for them, they never needed any diets. There was only one diet – the G-d diet!
Despite this idyllic scenario, we humans have something genetically inbred in us that is self-destructive. Never mind that we have everything we could possibly want or need – even EVERYTHING can eventually become boring! “Hmmm, what shall I eat today? Let’s peruse this menu with 120 million options ……………. Oh dear, same-old, same-old …….. But hang on! I see something that is not on the menu ……..” and suddenly our eyes are drawn away from the the “same-old, same-old” to the new kid on the block and oh Man! does that look appetizing. “Never mind that G-d told us that was the only thing we couldn’t eat, I have just got to get a bite of that!” Not that the newbie was any better than the other 120 million items on the menu (it was vastly inferior), but it had a big plus – the danger/naughtiness factor! The Torah calls this תאווה –
ותרא האשה כי טוב העץ למאכל וכי תאוה הוא לעינים (בראשית ג, ו)
The rest of the story you know. Adam and Chava ate from the only thing they were not supposed to eat and suddenly ………… dieticians were born.
Adam and Chava were born into that idyllic reality - that was their norm, they knew nothing else. Am Yisrael, who left Egypt, were born into a different reality. They were born in to the same culinary reality that we have today, with regular food – bread, meat, wine, fruit, etc. The norm for Am Yisrael was the same as it is for us today - you think you are eating the food, but you are only “renting” it. A few hours (or less) after you eat, you have to go to the bathroom, because this kind of food is not לחם אבירים, it leaves waste products (and waist products).
In slavery in Egypt Am Yisrael ate regular food. Perhaps not the highest quality food - that is why we eat לחם עוני on Pesach - but decent food nonetheless. HKB”H was kind to us. Every time the women went to draw water for their husbands to drink they found fish swimming in the water, which they fed their starving families.
זכרנו את הדגה אשר נאכל במצרים חנם (במדבר יא, ה)
The erev rav who were not enslaved, were privileged to enjoy higher quality food in Egypt –
בשבתנו על סיר הבשר באכלנו לחם לשבע (שמות טז, ג)
When HKB”H freed Am Yisrael from Egypt they ate the matzot they baked in Sukkot. When that ran out soon after, Hashem fed them Man. And פלא פלאים, look how the Torah and Chazal describe the Man - it is a carbon copy of Gan Eden. Food that is ready to eat, no cooking or baking required. Food that has 120 million different flavors and textures. Food that has no waste products. You simply open your door and there it is – an omer measure per person, on the doormat, like the bottle of milk (for those who remember better days). Welcome to the 100-star “Desert Inn” hotel! In-house laundry service, no dieticians in residence.
And that is how it was – pretty much exactly – for the Tzaddikim in Am Yisrael. For the erev rav, the אספסֻף, things were slightly different. They had to go out of the camp to collect it and although it was versatile, they still had to cook it and bake it before they had something ready to eat. But even for them, there were no dieticians and no “waist” products.
But again, that “niggling”, self-destructive, genetic defect in them reared its ugly head again התאוו תאוה. It started with the erev rav, but also filtered through to the rest of Am Yisrael, the longing for that only thing NOT on the menu. Never mind that the menu had 120 million options.
Some of the Mefarshim דנים אותם לכף זכות, that Am Yisrael were not born into that reality, like Adam and Chava. They had eaten actual steak and Nile Perch before and even though the Man could taste like steak and Nile Perch, it was not exactly the same eating experience. Also Am Yisrael were alarmed that they were eating, non-stop – and they never had to go to the bathroom. For someone who is born into the reality of having to go to the bathroom, you could easily, mistakenly, think – that after a while, you will eventually explode. It took a while to understand that Man was perfectly absorbed in their bodies.
However, the hardest part of eating the Man was none of the above. For the erev rav, the hardest part was not having a spare loaf in your pocket (as the Ramban says quoting Yoma 74a). To have to go to sleep at night with the uncertainty what the next day would bring. The Tzaddikim, who had unswerving bitachon in HKB”H did not have this problem, but the lesser of faith lived in perpetual uncertainty of their sustenance.
Obviously this was not the case, the uncertainty was perceived, but not real. The whole episode had a master plan behind it. HKB”H was restoring the world to how it was before חטא עץ הדעת, elevating Am Yisrael, after leaving Egypt, to the level of Adam and Chava before the sin, before giving them the Torah. This was the reason that the world was created בראשית – for Am Yisrael and the Torah, which are both called ראשית.
The true reality is that like the Man, our everyday food is totally dependent on Hashem anyway, even today. Hashem makes it rain, or not. He makes the crops grow, or not. We can try to control this as much as we like, with drip irrigation, with desalination, with genetic engineering, with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, etc. etc. but at the end of the day we cannot totally control our sustenance – not the food we eat, nor the money we earn.
In a society such as the one we live in today, where chickens are not born, they are manufactured, ready portioned out in vacuum wrap on the supermarket shelf. Where the money we make is because of our “foresight” in putting away that savings scheme or “wisely” investing in that hot stock option. Everything is כוחי ועוצם יד, Hashem has no part in it at all. It is all our advanced knowledge and technology, our skill, our intuition, our insight and talent, our planning for tomorrow, that we have a spare loaf in our pocket, just in case.
This kind of society is the same as the generation of Migdal Bavel, where after humanity was erased by Hashem in the Flood (except for Noach and his family), humans no longer wanted to live in “fear” of waking up the next morning to find themselves up to the wazoo in water. So they used their “smarts” to build a towering structure, reaching the heavens, higher than the highest possible water level, deluding themselves into thinking that they could behave however they liked, and not have to live in fear of suffering the consequences, as the previous generation of the Flood.
And what did it take? Not a cataclysmic end-of-days event, like a meteor striking the earth, it was a simple communications malfunction – a problem with Google Translator. They woke up one morning and they couldn’t understand their next door neighbor and their entire society, with all its technology and knowledge fell apart. All it takes is a simple virus, like Corona, to take all our savings schemes, all our supersonic airplanes, all our advanced economies, our science … and everything grinds to a halt.
We have the ability to control our destiny and it is not by trying to “control” our destiny. It is by listening to what G-d tells us. So we developed a vaccine to this virus … more כוחי ועוצם ידי. Hashem has a shortage of viruses? What happens next time when He unleashes one we can’t develop a vaccine for?
The lesson of the Man is to trust in HKB”H and abide by his commandments. Those that did slept well at night and woke up the next day. The erev rav were wiped out in קברות התאוה and were never heard of again.
Yes, we must do our hishtadlut. Save money for a rainy day. Invest wisely and work hard. Develop vaccines against diseases that plague us. Try forge peace with our neighbors. But never, for one second, think that we are in control.
HKB”H tells us explicitly what we need to do to control our destiny –
ועשיתם את חקתי ואת משפטי תשמרו ועשיתם אתם וישבתם על הארץ לבטח. ונתנה הארץ פריה ואכלתם לשבע וישבתם לבטח עליה. (ויקרא כה, יח-יט)
It seems so simple, and it is. What is monumentally difficult however is making the initial “switch” in our mind and – letting go, relinquishing our illusions of power. That is the key, once that is achieved, the rest flows on its own. We develop a real relationship with our Creator and we learn to control that self-destructive part of us that is our יצר הרע.
Today we don’t have the Man, but we have the next best thing, coming up real soon, it is called Shmita. We have a golden opportunity to demonstrate the same bitachon that Am Yisrael had in the Midbar with the Man. Let’s not miss this opportunity.
Then we will all be able to check in to that 100-star “Desert Inn” hotel, with Mei Eden on tap and spare ribs on the spit, in Mendel’s Sweet and Tangy BBQ sauce, and finally ……………. I can stop with this infuriating cabbage soup diet!
מן in gematriya is כאדם וחוה.
