The Jewish people complain to Moses: “we remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for free…” Oh to be free! They continued to rant about their present misery, in which they now have to eat this manna that they actually have to grind, cook or bake.
Doesn’t this sound a bit twisted? Nostalgia is one thing, but this seems like a blatantly false memory. Free? What kind of freedom is it when you are slaves from morning till night? So they were fed to keep them alive, but that’s what they are longing for now? The free food?
I had the following thought as I was trying to make sense of this: In Egypt they were worked to the bone, but their food was not given to them as wages. Their food was given, not according to how hard they worked, but according to their needs to keep them alive. So in a sense they were receiving food for free, in that there was no connection in their minds between their work and their livelihood.
The generation of slaves that left Egypt had grown up there, and knew no other type of life. They hadn’t the slightest concept of a society in which you were responsible for your own livelihood, and so one of the hardest things about leaving Egypt was the fact that suddenly they were slaves to no-one and had to take responsibility for their own lives. As much as the manna was given from Heaven, they still had to go and collect, and prepare it to make it edible, a new experience for them.
What’s so amazing is how it’s possible to be freed from the most oppressive regime, and yet still long for the “free food”. It seems that this is one more aspect of the slavery itself, in the sense that so long as they didn’t have to work for their own living, they would remain small minded, unable to innovate and imagine a better existence.
So from parshas Beha’alothcha, we have yet another vital lesson then from the Exodus from slavery. That is that responsibility for your own life is at the heart of being a faithful Jew. God wanted, not a nation of slaves who would forever be on the lookout for a free hand-out, but a nation of exuberant, lively people, who would take their lives into their hands and create their own future.
