Gabriel Sebban – Year 12

This week’s parashah, BeHa’alotcha, is packed with drama. It’s like those really intense episodes of Bachelor in Paradise but way more stressful and not featuring as many love stories. Okay, maybe it’s not like Bachelor in Paradise, but it’s still an extremely interesting and stressful parashah full of plot twists that will have you on the edge of your seat.

Let’s get into the story-telling. Throughout BeHa’alotcha, Moses faces several challenges to his leadership. The people have been camped at Mount Sinai for a long time, and everyone’s getting a bit sick of it. God finally tells Moshe after a long spell of not doing much, to set out from Mount Sinai and to start heading to the Holy Land (spoiler alert, none of these people end up making it to Israel). Before they get very far though, everyone complains about everything.

The Israelites have been living off bread that falls from the sky for the past year, called manna, but they are a bit tired of that now. They kvetch and kvetch and kvetch: “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”

What is manna exactly, you might ask, and why is everyone complaining about having to eat it? Well, manna is described to be something that looked like bread, tasted like wafers, and fell from the sky every night so people could eat it the next day. It’s actually been presented as the reason for using 2 challot on Friday nights. The Torah says that twice as much manna fell on Friday, and that none could be found on Saturday. Moses instructed the Israelites to collect twice as much on Friday so that no one had to leave home on Saturday and everyone could rest and relax.

Sorry, back to the story. The Israelites didn’t only complain about the food, but also about how hard the journey was and how they just wanted to go back to Egypt. Well, God heard the Israelites cries for something other than flying bread, and so at the end of the parashah, made the wind throw huge numbers of birds from sea for the people to enjoy the meat. But, in true prank patrol fashion, God made those who ate more than their fair share of food die in a plague. The moral of that story? Don’t be selfish and care about others – pretty self-explanatory.

If the people complaining wasn’t enough for Moses, his sister, Miriam, starts to complain about Moses to other people, and so she gets a skin disease, but don’t worry, she heals when Moshe prays for her.

Now that’s a lot to take in, so what can we learn from this dramatic tale? Well, complaining is a big part of this parashah, and it seems that all the issues that arise in the parashah come from people complaining. Yes, in our modern society of minimal hardship, we all love to have a little grumble, but this obviously didn’t end up too well for the Israelites in this week’s parashah.

Let’s think about it. Complaining. Yes, it can be nice to get something off your chest, but it does nothing to fix your problem. If you’re going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk as well. Well that’s what Moses did, at least, after some of his own complaining about the people’s complaining. With everyone around him complaining, he joined in but then acted and attempted to fix the problems at hand. For the Israelites, it wasn’t as simple. It’s really easy to put blame on things that are external to you, as it avoids personal responsibility and allows you to refuse the possibility that you may have things that can be changed. So, what to do?

Being a leader takes courage and requires the willingness to face your fears, experience failure, and take complete personal responsibility of everything that happens to you. It will break down your ego yet build a new one, one of strength of character, humility, and humbleness. You have no one else but you to respond to your own complaints, so take the leap.