Echoes of Eden
Rabbi Ari Kahn
Parashat B’shalach
Heavenly Bread
The road from Egypt to Mount
Sinai was not an easy one. The difficulty was not only due to the nature of the
terrain the Israelites had to cross, or even the fact that their former masters
pursued them in a murderous frenzy; the basic logistics of the care and feeding
of such a large populace proved to be a formidable challenge. Having Divine
logistical support proved quite advantageous, as they made their way under the
protective cover of clouds of glory, the sea split miraculously at their
approach, and their drinking water flowed from a rock.
While all of this help
was, quite literally, a Godsend, there was one type of assistance that went
beyond their physical needs, providing sustenance that was spiritually transformative
as well: the manna. The manna fell every morning, six days a week, with a
double portion on the sixth day; on the seventh day, no manna fell. The lesson
of Shabbat was “hard wired” into the food they ate, giving their most basic physical
sustenance religious significance.
Although Shabbat was
first introduced in the early verses of Bereishit, we have no evidence that the
Divine perspective on creation to which Shabbat bears witness – that God
created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh by ceasing to create
- had somehow trickled down to human awareness or practice. Before they left
Egypt, did the Jews know about the Sabbath day?
There is a rabbinic
teaching (Sh’mot Rabbah 1:28) that the Israelite slaves were granted a weekly
day of rest in Egypt. On the advice of an Egyptian prince named Moshe, Pharaoh
instituted a six-day workweek for the empire’s slaves, as a means of increasing
their productivity. It is altogether possible that no one, Egyptian or
Israelite, suspected that this day of rest had religious significance, not to
mention religious origins or motivation: Pharaoh would most certainly not have
acquiesced to Moshe’s suggestion had he known that he was granting a religious
freedom.
But what of the slaves
themselves? Did they see their day of rest from the toils and tribulations of
slavery in physical/social terms, or as a religious/spiritual necessity? Once
freed, did they conclude that their new society had no need for a day of rest because
they were no longer physical laborers? Their new reality was so completely
different to the reality they had known in Egypt: Their food fell from heaven,
and the “work” they had to do to access the manna only vaguely resembled
standard agriculture. They “harvested” fresh produce each day without the
back-breaking tilling and sowing, planting, pruning, and myriad other laborious
tasks that every farmer knows so well. In fact, their food did not even grow
from the ground; it came down from heaven. In a sense, there was something
almost “Eden – like” about their existence. Was there a need for a day of rest
in this idyllic existence, they might well have wondered?
The manna gave a clear
and resounding answer: Yes, even in the desert, protected and sustained by
miracles, there is Shabbat. Apparently the Shabbat experience in the desert was
designed to be very different from the Shabbat they had known in the dark days
of slavery. In Egypt, the most important element of the seventh day had been
the cessation of labor; the spiritual and theological experience of emulating
God and giving testament to His act of Creation was arguably eclipsed by the
sheer relief from excruciating physical labor.
In the desert, when
they are free almost entirely of physical constraints, God comes into focus. The
manna is the ultimate teaching aid: The first lesson is that all food
ultimately comes from God. Consider the slave mentality: They had, for hundreds
of years, been building great edifices for the Egyptian empire. Despite the
misery of their lives, they were able to see the tangible results of their
labor, and to draw a direct correlation between effort and result. Though they did
not benefit from their accomplishments, they were able to measure their progress
and perhaps even take pride in what they had built. But the slave can feel alienated
from God; slaves do not sense a partnership with the Almighty. On the other
hand, the farmer, whose livelihood is dependent upon the cooperation of “nature,”
is acutely aware of each and every one of the problems that can destroy a crop.
The farmer has a far more organic sense of partnership with God, and a far more
natural need to pray, to communicate with his or her “senior partner.”
In the desert, the
Israelites were not farmers; they had no need to do work of any kind - and yet,
they “harvested” the manna. Their sustenance would still be the result of a
sort of partnership with God, and the method through which their physical needs
were met served as both a respite from the years of servitude and an
introduction to the new reality that awaited them in the Promised Land. The
desert experience allowed them to internalize the concept of a partnership with
God, and to prepare themselves for the reality that awaited them in the Land of
Israel – a reality that combines physical and spiritual sustenance; a reality
which taught them to look heavenward for sustenance.
Through the manna, they
learned the most basic lessons: God created the universe and everything in it
in six days and rested on the seventh. He alone is the source of all
sustenance, both physical and spiritual, and on Shabbat, when we give testament
to God as Creator and Sustainer of the universe, we recharge not only our
physical strength, but our spiritual resources as well.
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