What are we really hungry for?

As a Jewish mindfulness meditation teacher, I often see Torah as shining a light on my own inner landscape. It helps me navigate my own habits of heart and mind, and see how I might cultivate them to serve life better. An early meditation lesson is to notice how often our thoughts are filled with wanting something, with cravings — large and small. This week’s parsha gets right to the heart of that lesson.

Parshat Beha’alotecha takes place in the wilderness — by definition, a place without a map. It is, in the most literal sense, the middle of nowhere — nothing familiar, nothing to hold onto. Again and again, the Israelites are called to pay close attention to what is right in front of them: to travel or camp depending on whether they saw a pillar of cloud or fire, to carefully listen for short or long blasts of silver trumpets in order to know which group of their whole assembly should move first. Each signal carries a specific instruction that you wouldn’t want to get wrong — move, camp, wait, gather. But they are people in an extraordinary time of upheaval, of uncertainty about what comes next. They have seen and survived plagues in Egypt, seen a sea split just for them to cross, and experienced the sights and sounds as they stood at Sinai. They have been recipients of miracles so overwhelming that the mind can barely hold them. And now they are wandering in the wilderness, in the in-between, the not-yet. Their entire world had been upended — turned upside down, or perhaps right side up for the first time. In the midst of it, theycouldn’t tell the difference.

That is a lot for a human nervous system to process — without the familiarity of routine that even the most mind-numbing work provides. Do you remember moments of sensory overload like the first time you drove on a busy freeway, or navigated the confusing terrain of a new job?

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It is hard to stay on an even keel, to just feel OK, when so much is new. The discomfort is real and we do all kinds of things in order not to feel it.

So one might understand when the Israelites begin to complain. But we’re told it’s an “evil” complaining. Rather than naming their fear or perhaps their feeling of powerlessness, they find something to complain about. In a feat of selective memory, forgetting about being freed from slavery, the “riffraff” had an intense craving and whined about missing the “free” fish they had back in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons. They see nothing to eat but manna (as if manna is nothing).

Uncertainty is really uncomfortable. From the time we are children, we learn to soothe ourselves with something familiar — a blanket, a snack, a routine. The Israelites turned unthinkingly toward a selectively remembered “known” rather than sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty, even when that “known” was food eaten while in literal slavery.

We do the same. In times of uncertainty and confusion we might find ourselves bound in a kind of slavery to our phones, to stress-eating, doom-scrolling, complaining and fault- finding — unable to tolerate even a few minutes of uncertainty or boredom. We pick fights with the people closest to us when what we’re actually feeling is uneasy or scared.

In the end, the Divine gives them what they thought they craved by providing meat for the Israelites to gorge themselves. They got what they thought they wanted. And it made many sick, killing them. The place where they are buried is known as Kivrot HaTa’avah — the burials of ta’avah, craving — the same word that set the whole story in motion.

And if we read closely, we can see that the craving alone is not the problem. It’s not a problem to miss good food, or to want nice things, or to wish things were different. The problem is when we don’t know what that craving is attached to — when we act on it unthinkingly, unaware that the reason we’re picking up the phone or heading back to the pantry is because we’re anxious, worried, or afraid. The Israelites didn’t recognize their fear for what it was, so it became a story: Oo second thought, maybe Egypt was pretty great. When we can recognize discomfort for what it is, we have a chance to make a different choice — to sit with the wanting without being driven by it, to reach for something other than our most familiar bad habits. That is the beginning of freedom. PJC

Cantor Julie Newman is the founder of Tiferet Project, and a fellow of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s Marbeh Fellowship, Cultivating Senior Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teachers. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.