Beshalach 5780: Rabbinic Intern David Chapman
This year, the Jewish calendar puts the holiday of Tu b’Shevat, affectionately called the birthday of the trees, right up against Parshat Beshallach, this week’s Torah portion. This is fitting because, while it was originally about the agricultural year, Tu B’Shvat has come to be seen as a celebration of the earth’s bounty. We observe Tu b’Shvat by eating foods associated with the land of Israel, as our religious school students did this week, as well as thinking about our connection to the land and to the environment. And among the many dramatic events in this week’s parsaha is an important story about the connection between food, faith, and liberation -- the story of the manna. A month after Bnai Yisrael leaves Egypt, they cry out to Moses and to God that they are hungry. In response, manna appears - a snowlike food that tastes, according to the Talmud, like whatever you need it to taste like in that very moment. The manna will sustain Israel for the next 40 years until we arrive in the promised land. At first, they loved it so much that they disobeyed God’s instructions and collected more than they needed to. But God had the last laugh -- whatever was leftover at the end of the day rotted before sunrise, except on Shabbat.
But before we talk about the manna, I want to tell you another story of food, faith, and liberation. This story starts in 1979 in the Soviet bloc state of Czechoslovakia. In October of that year, playwright Vaclav Havel was sentenced to a 4.5-year prison term. His crime was protesting another imprisonment – that of the psychedelic, Frank Zappa inspired rock band Plastic People of the Universe. The Plastic People were jailed by the Communist government for the crime of non-conformity – their long hair, their atonal music, their weird lyrics, and their association with the underground – were perceived as a threat in Soviet Czechoslovakia. The Plastic People’s official crime was “organized disturbance of the peace” – Only under the kafkaesque Communist justice system could something be both organized and a disturbance -- it’s a contradiction in terms.
Havel, by this point, was a well-known dissident. His plays satirized life under Communist rule, and were secretly performed in basements. He was one of the framers of Charter 77, a manifesto demanding that Czechoslovak citizens actually enjoy the rights that are afforded to them – on paper – in the country’s constitution. As in other Eastern bloc states, regardless of what the laws on the books said, citizens lacked basic rights such as freedom of expression, education, and religion.
In prison, Havel’s manna was tea. He became a tea fanatic. He wrote to his wife Olga long paeans about his newfound love for tea, a beverage he said he had only previously enjoyed about once a year.
“When I was outside, I didn’t understand the cult of tea that exists in prison, he writes, but I wasn’t here long before grasping its significance and succumbing to it myself … including it as an inseparable part of my “self-care” program.”
He then describes in detail all the wonderful qualities of tea: it warms, it cures, it reduces weariness, it soothes, and so on.
For Havel, drinking tea becomes a sign of personal freedom, even in the midst of his ordeal as a political prisoner. But remember, Havel is dependent on the prison guards for the tea leaves, the cup, the hot water, and the peace and quiet to drink it. Like the manna in the wilderness, Havel’s tea is contingent on him following certain rules. In truth, Havel’s tea is only a charade of freedom, and on some level Havel must know it.
Right before God makes the manna rain down for Bnai Israel to eat, they are complaining about their hunger. Actually they do a lot of complaining in the weeks following their redemption. When they complain about their lack of food, they actually reminisce about the sir-habasar – the pots of meat and the lechem – the bread, that they apparently enjoyed in Egypt. A midrash makes it even clearer – in Egypt, the Israelites were slaves but they served royalty. Thus they could enjoy any food they wanted from the marketplace, even meat. And to go from that to this, potentially dying of hunger, which is the worst kind of death according to the midrash.
However, unlike the complaining that they do later on in Sefer Bamidbar, the book of Numbers, this complaining is not met with divine punishment but rather, a kind of divine reward: they get water and they get food, mainly manna. One might think that each time their needs are met, their next complaint will be milder. Wouldn’t they recognize that the system is working? But no … this is a story of a people becoming bolder as they move into freedom. The complaining gets more aggrieved and more direct each time it happens. That’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen! But they’ve now seen what it feels like to have their demands met. The buds of Israel’s freedom are starting to appear. So each time, their requests get more direct and their constituency grows. Watch what happens in the text: The first time they are thirsty, the Torah says “va’yi-lonu haAM al moshe.” The People grumbled against Moshe. The second time, before the manna, it’s va’yi’lonu Kol ADAT Bnai Israel Al Moshe. – the entire community of Israel. The third time, it goes back to haAm, but the verb changes. Instead of grumble, we now have vayarev – to quarrel, a much stronger term that’s connected to Riv – a trial. T’nu Lanu Mayim, they say to Moshe. Give us water. Each time, even though experience might show them their demand will be met, the rhetoric gets stronger.
Why would this be? Much has been written about Israel’s residual “slave mentality” as they left Egypt. Maybe they longed for the meat pots because the thought of living directly off the land as a free people was daunting. Or maybe now, once their basic needs are finally being met, when they once again experience a bout of hunger or thirst, they get more agitated, not less. God’s miracles of redemption fade further into their memory.
Old ways of thinking do die hard. Hundreds of years of enslavement must have made an indelible mark on Israel’s psyche. Vaclav Havel, in another one of his letters to Olga from prison, wrote about his own version of this after a much shorter term without freedom:
I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them.
In Havel’s view, the antidote to bitterness is remaining open to the world. I see Israel’s increased agitation each time they briefly experience hunger or thirst as a sign of this kind of openness. Openness means having an expectation that the world can get better. Now that they have experienced a life of freedom, they want more of it. They are literally tasting their freedom.
However, this sets up another, potentially problematic dynamic however – whereas they were once dependent on their slavemasters for their sustenance, now they are dependent on God for their daily bread. A conversation recorded in the Talmud, in tractate Yoma, drives this point home: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai is asked: the does why מפני מה לא ירד להם לישראל מן פעם אחת בשנה ? manna not descend for Israel just once a year (in order to satisfy their needs)?
The answer comes in the form of a mishal, a parable about a ruler whose child only visits once a year because that is when the child is given an allowance. The manna, explains Shimon bar Yochai, falls every day so that Israel will direct its heart to God every day in anticipation of it.
Sounds nice, right? But in a commentary on this parsha, Rabbi Alana Alpert turns this thinking on its head. This is the same dynamic, she argues, that creates dependency on aid in hunger-stricken communities, she argues. Dependency on food aid – programs like soup kitchens and food pantries – can perpetuate the injustice of chronic hunger, especially if they are not paired with other kinds of activism and advocacy. Yes, having manna is better than not having manna. Just like having food aid is better than not having food aid. And for Havel, having his tea is better than not having his tea. But let’s not confuse aid with independence. Remember, the manna only comes because God decides to offer it. Havel’s tea ritual might be comforting, but it is still happening in prison.
Even in this parasha, God specifies that the manna is only for the intermediary period between Egypt and the promised land. When Israel enters Eretz Yisrael, the manna stops falling and Israel must grow, save, and distribute its own food.
Manna – mere food availability – is too low a bar. It is for that fleeting moment between redemption and liberation. Indeed, Israel’s ultimate aim will be food sovereignty, or, one might say, food liberation. It is important for us to support local food banks here in our community, like the New York Common Pantry or the Met Council’s Kosher Food Network. But we must also fight for systemic changes that will address the root causes of hunger nationally and globally. That’s why I hope you’ll use this Tu b’Shvat to think about our own commitments to fighting hunger on a global scale. American Jewish World Service and Mazon are two organizations that offer excellent resources for those who want to address food insecurity through a Jewish lens.
Thinking again about this progression from hunger, to dependency to sovereignty, it occurs to me that Havel also experienced this. He ultimately achieved sovereignty, on several levels. When he was writing to Olga about his obsession with tea, he knew eventually he’d be released from prison but of course he didn’t know how, or when, or what would happen after that. He was released in the early 1980s and, along with his Charter 77 colleagues, which at that point numbered over 1,000, spent the rest of the decade articulating a vision for their country’s future. After the fall of Communism, Havel, who was by then a national hero, was elected the first President of post-Soviet democratic Czechoslovakia, and later, the first President of the Czech Republic, serving until 2003. From starting out as an underground dissident to drinking tea in prison to leading his country finally into freedom. From hunger, to dependency, to sovereignty.
After his release, Havel continued writing. In his memoir, Disturbing the Peace (named after the same crime the state police accused the Plastic People of the Universe of, setting off his political journey in the first place), Havel writes about the distinction between hope and optimism. Hope is a state of mind, he writes, not a state of the world.
Hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
I believe Bnai Israel also moves towards hope over the course of this parsha – from a triumphant determinism at the shores of Yam Sof that everything will be ok, to a higher spiritual level of hope – that things could be even better, but they have to agitate – ok, sometimes they may have to complain – to get there.
This Shabbat, I hope we can all find both: the daily blessing that comes from recognizing God’s steady presence in our lives every day, and the hope we can turn that blessing into liberation.
