Torah reading: Numbers 8:1 to 12:16.
Haftarah reading: Zechariah 2:14 to 4:7.
This week’s parasha resumes the story that was previously reported in the latter part of the book of Exodus about the continuous whining and carping of Israelites as they wandered through the Sinai Desert. God took care of their everyday needs, providing a cloud that shielded them from the desert sun and all the mannah they could eat. But they couldn’t stop complaining, as detailed in this week’s parasha (and elsewhere in Exodus and Numbers) in chapter 11 of Numbers:
The people took to complaining bitterly against the Lord. . . . The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving, and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!” Numbers 11:1, 4-6.
And the Lord responded to this griping by killing a bunch of the complainers, first by creating a wildfire on the edge of the encampment (Numbers 11: 2), then by a plague (Numbers 11:33).
The Talmud, at Yoma page 75a, records a dispute between the the third century sages Rav and Samuel. Rav read Numbers 11:5 literally — the Israelites really liked fish and missed the fish they ate in Egypt, there was no fish in the riverless Sinai desert! But Rabbi Samuel read the reference to fish as a euphemistic reference to forbidden sexual relations. Samuel based his conclusion on the Israelites’ claim that the fish in Egypt was free. Surely, people had to pay for fish; for the Israelites, the price for the food that their owners provided was slave labor.
In the following generations, the rabbis continuing this discussion reported at Talmud Yoma 75a explained that every morning the manna fell in front of the tents according to the needs of each family. The larger the family, the more manna was piled in front of the tent. If a man had a child from an adulterous relationship, more manna fell in front of his tent, alerting his wife, the children his wife had borne, and the Israelite community, that the man had a child from another woman. The male Israelites who had not been faithful to their wives came to resent the manna and rebelled against Moses, because the daily fall of the manna made them responsible for their adulterous affairs, which now became known to their wives, the children of their marriages, and the entire Israelite community.
Which makes me wonder: What if manna fell today in front of the White House and Trump Tower? Or in front of the mansions of these wealthy right wing fundamentalist preachers?
Shabbat Shalom.