Manna in the Desert

Rabbi Margaret

This Shabbes is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It follows by a day the provisional determination of the International Court of Justice of the United Nations that Israel may be committing, or on the way to committing, genocide in Gaza.  And it is Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song, the Shabbat of deliverance, the Shabbat of Mi Chamocha. Oh what a frightening, saddening time to offer up songs of praise! 

In our parshah the the fleeing slaves, trapped between the pursuing army of Egypt at the rear and the ocean ahead, witnessed the sea split open to let them pass through, then close again, engulfing Pharaoh’s soldiers, horses and chariots.  Once across, the astonished Israelites sang a song — ashirah l’ADONAI ki g’oh ga-ah — sus v’rochavo ramah vayam — I will sing to the mighty, awesome God — horse and rider have been hurled into the sea!  Thus Shabbat shirah — the Shabbat of song, of The Song.

This sui generis moment when the sea splits — theologian Emil Fackenheim calls it a root experience, an experience so , deeply embedded in Jewish consciousness that it stays with and within us ever since, a source of hope and courage in every generation.  

How long did it take for the sea to split?  For the 600,000 Israelites — and women and children, as Torah accounts — and their animals, laden with unrisen bread, and the great mixed multitude that traveled with them, to pass through the columns of water?  Some hours?  A day or two?  Maybe it was very quick, so as not to afford the pursuing soldiers the chance to catch those at the rear of the fleeing throng.  At any rate the sea re-closed itself.  Our ancestors — we ourselves, according to the famous midrash — were now firmly on the other side.

And then what?  Immediately after this root experience:

Moses caused Israel to journey from the Sea of Reeds and they went out to the Wilderness of Shur; they went for a three-day period in the wilderness, but they did not find water.  They came to Marah, but they could not drink the waters of Marah, because they were bitter; therefore they named it Marah.  The people complained against Moses, saying “What shall we drink?”

Imagine…  this incredible, mind-blowing, once in an eon divine intervention, and then being immediately plunged into the wilderness with no water, no map, no path, no known future.  We know, because we read ahead, that they would be there for only three days (“only” three days without water… imagine again…)  Then on to the next camp spot, this time with water that wasn’t potable.  We know that there will be miracles, that God will show Moses a tree to throw into the bitter water to sweeten it, that they will all leave Marah and land up at a place with twelve springs of water and seventy date palms.  But they don’t know this.

They left the twelve springs and the seventy date palms and headed en masse into Midbar Zin.  I’ve been there — that is some rough country, very beautiful and very dry.  Presumably, speculates Rashi, the food that the fleeing Israelites packed must have started to run out, because they begin to worry not only about water but about food.  And then, in our aliyah, comes the advent of mon — manna.  Quail make a brief appearance as well, but the real focus is on the manna.

וַיְהִ֣י בָעֶ֔רֶב וַתַּ֣עַל הַשְּׂלָ֔ו וַתְּכַ֖ס אֶת־הַֽמַּחֲנֶ֑ה וּבַבֹּ֗קֶר הָֽיְתָה֙ שִׁכְבַ֣ת הַטַּ֔ל סָבִ֖יב לַֽמַּחֲנֶֽה׃ 

In the evening quail appeared and covered the camp; in the morning there was a fall of dew about the camp. 

When the fall of dew lifted, there, over the surface of the wilderness, lay a fine and flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. 

When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” —for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “That is the bread which יהוה has given you to eat.”

I had fun reading various this-and-that about what manna might really be, though I don’t really care.  I favor its miraculous appearance.  Still, here’s a bit from those cute guys at Atlas Obscura about the dispute between botanists Harold and Alma Moldenke and entomologist Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer:

In their book Plants of the Bible, botanists Harold and Alma Moldenke argue that there were several kinds of food collectively known as manna. One of these, they posit, is a swift-growing algae (from the genus Nostoc) known to carpet the desert floor in Sinai when enough dew on the ground allowed it to grow. The Moldenkes also make the case that a number of lichen species (Lecanora affinus, L. esculenta, and L. fruticulosa) native to the Middle East have been known to shrivel up and travel tumbleweed-like on the wind, or even “rain down” when dry. Nomadic pastoralists, they report, use the lichen to make a type of bread….

Poking a hole in the lichen theory, however, is the fact that L. esculenta, one of the most commonly cited possibilities for a “manna lichen,” doesn’t grow in Sinai. Instead, the current frontrunner in the manna quest is not lichen or algae but a type of sticky secretion found on common desert plants. Insects that rest on the bark of certain shrubs leave behind a substance that can solidify into pearl-like, sweet-tasting globules. Often referred to as manna, this secretion has both culinary and medicinal uses. In Iranian traditional medicine, one variety is used as a treatment for neonatal jaundice. In his 1947 article “The Manna of Sinai,” Bodenheimer floats the theory that this substance may have been what the ancient Israelites ate as well. He also identifies the species of scale insects and plant lice whose larvae and females produce the so-called “honeydew.”

I was also happy to read, in another Atlas Obscura article, about the Sicilian farmer Giulio Gelardi, who harvests the sap of ash trees and sells it to top chefs.  I also learned that manna — the ash tree version — is refined into mannitol, an ingredient in laxatives.

But of more serious interest is the system for harvest outlined in our aliyah:

This is what יהוה has commanded: Each household shall gather as much as it requires to eat—an omer to a person for as many of you as there are; each household shall fetch according to those in its tent.” 

I checked out the volume of an omer, and here’s what I found:

The Jewish Study Bible (2014), however, places the omer at about 2.3 L (0.61 US gal). In traditional Jewish standards of measurement, the omer was equivalent to the volume of 43.2 chicken's eggs.

Back to our text:

The Israelites did so, some gathering much, some little. 

But when they measured it by the omer, anyone who had gathered much had no excess, and anyone who had gathered little had no deficiency: each household had gathered as much as it needed to eat. 

Amazing — think about that: one person gathers gallons and gallons; another is able to manage only a cup or two.  And somehow — miraculously again —the rations even out, and everyone has the right amount.

A few verses later: 

On the sixth day they gathered double the amount of food, two omers for each; and when all the chieftains of the community came and told Moses, 

he said to them, “This is what יהוה meant: Tomorrow is a day of rest, a holy sabbath of יהוה.  Bake what you would bake and boil what you would boil; and all that is left put aside to be kept until morning.” 

So they put it aside until morning, as Moses had ordered; and it did not turn foul, and there were no maggots in it. 

Then Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a sabbath of יהוה; you will not find it today on the plain. 

Six days you shall gather it; on the seventh day, the sabbath, there will be none.”

There’s a little bit of struggle about this, and then:

Mark that it is יהוה who, having given you the sabbath, therefore gives you two days’ food on the sixth day. Let everyone remain in place: let no one leave the vicinity on the seventh day.” 

So the people remained inactive on the seventh day. 

The house of Israel named it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and it tasted like wafers in honey.

What would it take on those first couple days/weeks/months/years to only gather a day’s worth of manna for your household and leave the rest on the ground?  In the most real, concrete way one would have to trust.  One would have to trust that their needs and their family’s needs would be met — and this against vast evidence to the contrary: most especially 400 years of slavery, still fresh fresh fresh in the minds of every person out there in that wilderness.  This same God who let us languish under the whip of the taskmaster for four centuries is now sprinkling some weird substance on the ground and telling us to take only what we need for today.

Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about how to face challenging and uncertain times — haven’t we all?  And I keep circling round to this matter of trust.  The ba’alei mussar — the great traditional teachers of spiritual formation — call this bitachon — like the Hebrew slang BETACH — of course!  Surety.

Rabbeinu Bachya, opening sha’ar ha-bitachon — the gate of trust, defines his term:

What is Trust?  It is tranquility of soul in the one who trusts; his hearty reliance on the one in whom he trusts, that the latter will do what is right and proper in the matter of the trust, to the extent of his ability and knowledge, for the benefit of the one who trusts.  The essence of his trustfulness is his sure confidence that the person in whom he trusts will fulfill what he promised and execute what he pledged himself to do; and even in matters wherein he made no promise nor gave a pledge, has it in mind to benefit the one who trusted him — and all this out of pure benevolence and kindness.

I’d like to invite us all to think for a minute about who we trust in our lives.  Who do you know who will “do what is right and proper… to the extent of her ability and knowledge” for you?  How does it feel to trust someone?  Does trust come easily to you?  

It is a great gift to have people in our lives who are trustworthy.   It is a blessing to know that someone has our best interests at heart, to know that they will do what they have offered to do, that even if they have not explicitly said so they will try to help us in every way.  Our ancestors must have had some measure of that confidence from the manna.  It was there every morning.  Every Shabbat there was double.  It was reliable, and after awhile, I suppose, they relied on it.  

Though now and then — from these very first days — the Israelites would rear up and say, “Take us back to Mitzrayim, where at least we knew we would have food and water,” in fact they had no way to get back to Mitzrayim.  There was that ocean in the way.  They had little choice but to trust.  Or to despair, which they often did.  Soon enough they will experience plagues and snakes and ground opening up and swallowing people.  Their leader, in whom they trust at least a little bit, will go up a mountain and — for all they know — never return.

This is the landscape in which we live as well.  We are also in the midbar — in the wilderness.  Our access to food and water is only so certain.  Things could change in a minute, as they have for people in Gaza, in Israel, in Ukraine, in Yemen, in Congo, in Haiti.  We can’t go back to the past either.  Here we are. We don’t know what will happen in the future.  We can either trust or despair.  

I think there is another kind of bitachon, another kind of trust, which is not really about outcomes.  It is not about whether there is manna on the ground in the morning or not.   “What is trust?” asks Rabbeinu Bachya — It is tranquility of soul in the one who trusts.”   This kind of bitachon says that, no matter what the external conditions, we will never be alone.  We may suffer, we may hunger, but we will be in God’s hand.  It is about experiencing the world not necessarily as a safe place but as a loving place.

I am very much drawn to deepen the quality of trust in myself, even as life in this midbar gets more precarious.  There is a place — up against the face of the closed sea ahead, with the clatter of hooves and chariots behind — when we really have only one choice: to trust or not to trust.  At such a moment I hope to drop into a state of bitachon, of tranquility of soul.  Manna may or may not be there in the morning.  And at that wild moment it may not be about outcomes at all but about who we stand there with, about the earth below our feet, the lives we have been gifted to live for as long as we have, and about some kind of great love and awe that we got to be in this world at all.

Mi chamocha (in Shirat Ha-yam trope)