Wait, Manna Was a Bad Thing?!
On Moshe's heel turn
Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah is back! I’m also actively working on a new bi-monthly series, Jewish Philosophy Fundamentals – yes, I was tempted to call it Jewish Philosophy Phundementals – where we will begin grappling with the Problem of Evil; that is, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
I. Moshe tears up the script
Back in Parashat Be-Ha‘alotekha, we read the Jewish people’s complaints about their subsistence off manna. Despite its miraculous wonder – earlier in the Torah we are told that it is literally “bread from heaven” (Ex. 16:4) – the people are frustrated. They not only desire meat but shockingly recall their slavery in Egypt fondly!
The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to!” (Num. 11:4–6)
This episode is clearly intended to reflect negatively on the people. Not only does the Torah stress that the manna was delicious, “it tasted like rich cream” (v. 8), but Moshe is so stressed by their complaints that he literally asks God to kill him rather than continue to deal with the people (vv. 13–15).1
More than this, the story ends with God striking the people with a plague in His fury at their lack of appreciation for His miraculous food (vv. 32–34).
Perhaps more shocking still is that this problem repeats itself with the second generation of the Jewish people in Parashat Ḥukkat. Once again, they express their frustration with the manna, “we have come to loathe this miserable food” (Num. 21:5), and once again God sends a plague to strike them for their impudence (v. 6).
At this point, then, you’d assume a clear theme to the Torah: that manna is a miraculous wonder and any criticism against it is unacceptable.
But we thus have a problem. Because as we read Parashat Ekev, we learn that Moshe himself didn’t get that memo.
At first, it doesn’t seem this way as we find ourselves reading what we might call, already three parshiyot into Sefer Devarim, a “classic” speech by Moshe.
After recounting to the people God’s gift of manna to cease “the hardship of hunger” and reinforce their dependency on God (Deut. 8:3), Moshe describes the miraculous life the people have lived in the wilderness – “The clothes upon you did not wear out, nor did your feet swell these forty years” (v. 4) – and goes on to extol the glorious bounty awaiting them in the Land of Israel (vv. 7–9).
Yet all of a sudden, after discussing the need to be faithful to God (vv. 11–15) – again, a classic theme of Moshe’s final speech – Moshe returns to the subject of manna, only here he frames it far more negatively:
[God] fed you in the wilderness with manna – which your fathers had never known – lĕ-ma‘an ‘annotĕkha u-lĕma‘an nassotekha, to bring upon you suffering and trial, only to benefit you in the end. (Deut. 8:16)
I’d wager here that if I had simply started this with the claim that the manna brought suffering upon the people, you would have taken that for a rather Qontroversial opinion.
Yet Moshe himself argues so before the people – framing the manna in a manner2 far more consistent with the complainers of Be-Ha‘alotekha and Ḥukkat than the Torah’s positive exultation of its miraculous wonder.
Here, I’d like to share three different approaches from commentators – be they ancient, medieval, or modern; traditional or scholarly – to better understand why Moshe shifts his framing of manna into such a negative perspective.
II. We’re Just Reading it Wrong
In his commentary to Sefer Devarim, the renowned professor Jeffrey H. Tigay suggests an alternative way to read this verse. Rather than get distracted by reading it as a critique of the manna, we should recognize it, instead, for its literary symmetry with the rest of Moshe’s speech here.
As I’ve mentioned before,3 one of the major literary devices employed by the Torah is known as a “chiasmus.” Named for the Greek letter chi – which basically looks like the letter x – a chiasmus is a literary structure in which words within verses, verses within sections, or even entire narrative arcs are reflected.4
Typically, the structure is either ABBA5 or ABCBA – though it can be much larger.
Here, Tigay offers a simple chiastic structure of chapter 8 (The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, p. 92).
A. Observe the commandments and prosper (v. 1)
B. The wilderness and the manna (vv. 2–4)
C. Observe the commandments in prosperity (vv. 6–10)
C′. Do not forget the Lord in prosperity (vv. 11–14)
B′. The wilderness and the manna (vv. 15–16)
A′. Remember and do not forget the Lord or you will perish (vv. 17–20)
Read this way, then, Moshe isn’t criticizing the manna; he’s just riffing off his earlier comments about God testing them in the wilderness (pp 95–96).
Alternatively, Tigay suggests that Moshe’s framing is less about specifically the manna and more about the general difficulty with the wilderness. The verse shouldn’t be read like this:
[God] fed you in the wilderness with manna – which your fathers had never known – to bring upon you suffering and trial, only to benefit you in the end. (Deut. 8:16)
But instead:
[God] led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna – which your fathers had never known – to bring upon you suffering and trial, only to benefit you in the end. (Deut. 8:15–16)
Or to make it a little clearer, we can take out the reference to manna, and it still scans:
[God] led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; … to bring upon you suffering and trial, only to benefit you in the end. (Deut. 8:15–16)
This perspective, I think, is a strong peshaṭ-based approach that neutralizes any potential negativity in Moshe’s perspective on the manna.
III. Yes, it was terrible
There is an alternative perspective, however, that embraces Moshe’s negative framing of manna – to boot, it’s one with the most traditional interpretations supporting it.
In a nutshell, Moshe is validating that for the Jewish people, however miraculous the manna was – and however much appreciation to God was obviously necessary – exclusively subsisting off it was still a psychologically fraught experience.
Here, there are two dimensions to what would’ve made the eating of manna difficult. First, despite the repeated references to its delicious taste – “it tasted like wafers in honey” (Ex. 16:31); “it tasted like rich cream” (Num. 11:8) – it was still the same food over and over again.
Now, you might instinctively think of a classic midrash that you were taught as a child, stated by Ḥazal (Yoma 75a), that the manna could taste like anything you wanted it to taste like. It’s clear, however, that not only does this go against what the Torah itself says, but even the gemara concedes that it couldn’t taste like anything.
After all, the source of this statement is not to declare that the manna could taste like anything but to explain why the Jewish people complain and yearn for specifically “cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic” (Numbers 11:5) – because manna could not taste like these things.
Even more so, even if you want to insist that manna tasted like anything you wanted it to taste like, that doesn’t change the texture: It’s clear that the manna never transformed into other foods. So, even if you could have manna-Cheerios for breakfast, manna-salmon for lunch, and manna-steak-and-potatoes for dinner, it’s still all the texture of coriander seed.6
Hence the first psychological challenge: There’s no variety, there’s no enjoyment or experience in eating the food. And while there might be some ascetics who think that’s the whole point, it’s not hard to see why that would be frustrating.
But there’s a much more fraught element to the manna than this: You could never store it, save on Friday for Shabbat (Ex. 16:16–25). Practically, this would have meant a tremendous uncertainty over food – sure, you ate your fill today, but you’re depending on it miraculously appearing again tomorrow.
Indeed, the great mid-13th-century French Torah commentator Rabbi Ḥizkiyahu ben Manoaḥ writes as such in his commentary to Moshe’s original statement that God subjected the people to hunger:
By not giving you more manna than enough for one day at a time. We have a principle that it is not possible to compare the state of mind of people who have a supply of food in their travel bag with those who, even though not hungry, do not have such a supply to fall back on. (Ḥizkuni, Deut. 8:3)
Indeed, here Ḥizkuni quotes the gemara (Yoma 74b) to prove his point. But that gemara actually reinforces both issues with the manna, quoting a debate between R. Ami and R. Asi: Both understood that the manna brought suffering, but one believed it was the food scarcity that brought suffering while the other believed it was the lack of variety in the food that brought the suffering.
What I particularly like about this understanding is that it complicates our understanding of life in the wilderness. Typically, we think of life there as a rarefied spiritual state – and attribute all the complaints to bad-faith actors – but this understanding allows a better insight into the difficulties of the Jewish people’s lives.
IV. It’s all a prophetic metaphor for exile
Given we are just out of the period of the Three Weeks – and I’m actually writing this during the Nine Days – I’ll share one more opinion by the great 18th-century rosh yeshiva of Volozhin, R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, the Netziv.
In his Torah commentary, Ha-Emek Davar – a commentary replete with fascinating understanding of so many different things – he suggests a radically different interpretation of Moshe’s words.
Here, he is sensitive to Moshe’s stated reason why God gave the people manna: “in order to teach you that man does not live by bread alone” (Deut. 8:3). But rather than reading this as a generic reference to bread, Netziv connects the term to a specific usage the Torah has for it.
For in Parashat Pinḥas, the Torah refers to the sacrifices as korbani laḥmi (Num. 28:2), which would literally translate as “my sacrifices of my bread.” Now here leḥem doesn’t literally mean bread – in many places in the Torah it simply means “food” – hence Netziv’s reinterpretation of Moshe’s statement.
God gave the Jewish people manna to teach them that they weren’t depending solely on the leḥem, the sacrificial order. In times of exile, when there was no Temple and thus no sacrifices, the Jewish people need not fear that their religion was over. Instead, the focus was God Himself: Torah and mitzvot existed to guide the people.
And perhaps, it’s this idea that captures the wider point. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the manna was – what mattered was the wider experience of redemption and becoming God’s people.
At this point in the Torah, Moshe has only been leading the Jewish people for a couple of years, yet he’s already losing it. There’s a low-hanging-fruit joke here now that I’ve concluded a decade as a pulpit rabbi that I’m not going to make.
Yes, I am way too proud of this.
Don’t ask me where, but I can’t imagine I’ve never touched on this before.
My favorite example of this is Jon D. Levenson’s observation that the entire story of Esther is a giant chiasmus, reinforcing the key theme of ve-nahafokh hu, “everything was upturned.”
If your first instinct upon seeing “ABBA” was to miss my point and start singing Dancing Queen or Mamma Mia, I apologize.
Nowadays, we’re all familiar with “astronaut food,” which basically grasps the inherent challenge here. Sure, you can tell yourself you’re having a nice steak-and-potatoes meal, but it’s still some powdery stuff out of a packet.