Beha’alotcha 5768 - 14 June 2008

Here's the story. The Israelites are a slave people. They build pyramids for their Egyptian masters. They receive no pay. Their taskmasters beat them into forced labour. Then comes a miraculous exodus. Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt to freedom. This, they believe, can be nothing less than the work of God.

They travel through the desert to Mount Sinai where they experience that unique moment of revelation that we commemorated last week at Shavuot. As the story is presented in the Biblical text, God first brings us out of slavery and then, at Sinai, we enter a covenant, a special relationship with God. Leaving Sinai and heading towards the Promised Land, God is providing the water and plenty of delicious, nutricious manna for on the way. Things are really going well.

Except, these are the Israelites we're talking about. "If only we had meat to eat!" they whinge. "Remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt! The cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic!" - "Oy... now it's just this miraculous manna-from-heaven stuff. Boring!"

No, this is not a Jewish joke; this really is the Biblical text. But then why shouldn't the Bible give us our first Jewish jokes. Several times the Israelites are described as ‘a stiff-necked people' meaning stubborn. And in this section in the wilderness, it's the whinging and whining that comes to the fore. God's all-you-can-eat manna buffet just isn't quite up to scratch. It reminds us of the waiter serving a table of Jewish diners in a classy restaurant... part way through the meal he comes over to check "Is anything alright?"

Of course, it's always easy to find fault. Never mind whether in life the glass is half full or half empty; we're sending it back because it hasn't been cleaned properly. The challenge is to see the world as it is: honestly, with gratitude for that which deserves our gratitude, and resolve to change, if we can, that which is not as it should be. For the world is not as it should be, but that should give us hope not despair. That is how we will approach the holy Jewish task of ‘repairing the world' of tikkun olam.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the C19th German Bible commentator, sees the Israelites' complaints not as nostalgia - of seeing the slavery of their past through very selective, rose-tinted spectacles, but more a case of boredom with their present situation, where in fact all their needs have been met and they enjoy a near-perfect situation in the wilderness. And yet they need to complain. Each day they have manna and water, they are free, they have received Torah, the sanctuary has been built, but, Hirsch suggests, "their lives offer them no compensation, remain worthless and without meaning in their eyes." Hirsch imagines their complaint to evolve from their need for new challenges, visions and opportunities. An endless supply of fresh water and rich creamy manna in itself isn't enough.

Well fortunately, there's a way to read the Hebrew, a little feature of Hebrew grammar, that I think suggests exactly that. So here it is... Hebrew doesn't have many words. Or to be more precise, in Hebrew one word comes to be used in lots of different ways just by using different vowels or sticking prefixes on the front or suffixes on the end. And so verbs become nouns and nouns become verbs. It happens a lot in Hebrew but actually it happens in English too. In Hebrew its effect is often more of emphasis: in English it just sounds a bit poetic.

For example, in Hebrew a chalom is a dream, and in the Book of Genesis, Pharaoh says to Joseph "chalom chalamti". In English he might say "I had a dream" though word for word it would be "I dreamed a dream". ‘I dreamed a dream' sounds a bit more poetic, but it doesn't really mean much different from ‘I had a dream'. If you wanted to capture the emphatic effect of the repetition in Hebrew, the English translation would be something like ‘I did indeed have a dream' or even ‘Verily, I had a dream'!

In the fourth verse that Lauren read for us, there is a similar construction. We hear that the riff-raff among the Israelites hit'avvu ta'ava. Now a ta'ava is a desire or a craving, so the JPS translation of hit'avvu ta'ava, that they ‘felt a gluttenous craving' is a perfectly good one. We then learn what they gluttenously crave: "If only we had meat to eat".

But if that really were the case, the Biblical text could simply have said that they craved meat. Perhaps the Hebrew really does lead us to Hirsch's understanding that they are bored by having everything and hit'avvu ta'ava means ‘they craved a craving' - that what they craved for was a craving.  // That is, perhaps, our human condition. On the one hand we need to find contentment, to be grateful for cucumbers, melons, leeks and onions when we have them, but also for our freedom and for manna when we have those instead. And on the other hand complete contentment is illusory. To fulfil our task, we actually need to see what's wrong, what needs to be done, what needs fixing. And so when everything was perfect, they ‘craved a craving'; and the best they could come up with, what they now didn't have but still remembered having back in Egypt, was a nice bit of fish.

‘Craving a craving' means recognising where the world or our lives are not as they should be and being motivated to act accordingly. It does not mean finding problems where there are none, of thinking the worst of our situation. It's not an open invitation to whinge about nothing. In our Torah portion this morning it was the complaints that brought about God's anger and drove Moses to despair. If the stereotypical Jewish behaviour is to find something to complain about, the lesson of hit'avvu ta'ava in the wilderness even when you have all the fresh water and manna you need, is that we need to find something worthwhile to complain about, and rather than complain, to act.

Always look on the bright side of life... and then do your bit to make it brighter.

A German, a Frenchman, and a Jew are following the trail of the ancient Israelites through the desert. "Ach!" protests the German, "I am so thirsty! I must have a beer!" "Mon dieu!' exclaims the Frenchman, "I am so thirsty! I must have a glass of wine!" "Oy!" says the Jew, "I am so thirsty! I must have diabetes!"

...

May we always find that honesty with ourselves and in our assessment of the world around, so that we find contentment and gratitude, as well as inspiration and conviction to act.

Ken y'hi ratzon, may this be God's will, and let us say Amen.