Parashat Beha'alotekha: The Israelites as Whiny Children

The Israelites behave in this week’s parsha like whiny children. Anyone who has (or has had or has been anywhere near) young children knows how irritating whining can be. How does our experience of whining children shed light on the parsha and how does the parsha shed light on our experience?

First, note that in many ways the Israelites are young children. The crossing of the Red Sea has often been compared to the experience of coming through the birth canal, so that here, in Numbers, in their second year after leaving Egypt, the people may be considered toddlers. Experts say that whining peaks from about 2-4 years of age.

Their whining begins here (Numbers 11) after a journey of three days from Mount Sinai. The Rashbam suggests that the people started complaining as a result of the difficulties of travel. Note that a parallel complaining incident takes place immediately after a similar three day journey from Egypt to Sinai (Exodus 15-16). Traveling with young children is indeed trying. Their sleep and eating cycles are disturbed and they become fragile emotionally. “Are we there yet?” and “I want to go home” are common refrains.

In Numbers, though, there may have been an added reason for their troubled emotional state. Children often start to whine after spending a particularly close period of time with their parents. It comes from a feeling of let-down after a good time, and the fear of distance and loneliness after intimacy. The people have just moved away from Mount Sinai, from the closest experience of God they have ever had. No wonder the move away from that place causes some emotional distress.

There are two stories of complaint in Numbers 11; the first is without a specific point of reference and the second complaint concerns food, namely meat. The doubling up of complaints rings true emotionally. Once the whining begins, it often comes in a series before it is over. And it often starts as a generalized feeling of discontent before it settles on some specific unsatisfactory item. As Rashi points out, the complaint about food was an alilah, an excuse. The Torah text in fact follows their complaints about the manna with a description of its look and taste, as if to show that there was no real reason for complaining other than a generalized bad feeling. When your toddler whines “I wanna coooookie,” it’s usually not about the cookie; he feels bad, and he’s expressing it through food.

The emotional tone is indeed quite low here. The “riffraff” may have had a genuine craving for meat, but the people are simply crying all the time. They cry in verse 4 and again, quite pitifully, in verse 10, “Moses heard the people weeping, every clan apart, each person at the entrance of his tent.” That last line, “each person at the entrance of his tent,” makes it seem like part of what they are looking for is individual attention. Note also that the initial complaint was done specifically “in the ears of the Lord” (11:1). The midrash points out that the people were not hiding their complaints but very much wanted to be heard by God. Maybe that was the whole point, divine (parental) attention. That’s why they say, not “We want meat!” but “Mi ya’akhilenu basar” (11:5), “Who’s going to feed his meat?” We feel scared and alone; who’s going to take care of us?


From the parental point of view, we can easily relate to Moshe’s response, too. Whining can really wear you down. He says he feels like a mother; “Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant?’” (11:12). How does a mother (or a father, or any caretaker) feel after an episode (or two) or whining? Like she wants to die; “If You would deal thus with me, kill me rather, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness!” (11:15).

What about God? What is God’s response? First, anger, like any parent. Note that it is hot anger, the ultimate hot anger, fire. My therapist says that if you’re going to get angry at your kids, it should be hot, not cold, meaning it should be the kind of anger that is warm and present, not cold and calculating and distancing. God may be angry and hurtful, but at least He is not turning away from the people.

Moreover, there is a certain subtlety and complexity to His response which makes it clear that He understands the issue is not just one of food. Meat is only one of the issues to be dealt with, the presenting symptom. To be sure, He does deal with the meat issue; He deals with it in true Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle fashion, by giving them so much meat that they themselves will get tired of it, “until it comes out of your noses” (11:20). (Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle employs this trick regularly; the kids who won’t go to bed at bedtime are allowed to stay up as late as they want for nights on end until they beg for a bedtime; the kid who won’t pick up toys is allowed to not pick up toys in his room for so long that he ends up unable to move; the point is always to let the child experience for himself the problems which arise from the extreme of whatever behavior he considers desirable. This way they teach themselves the lesson.)

So God does deal with meat, but He also deals with the real underlying problem, the people’s feeling of distance from His Presence, their need for more of His and Moshe’s attention. (What else do children really want from us other than our attention?) He deals with that problem through the establishment of the institution of the 70 elders as Moshe’s assistants. Moshe and God both understand that with toddlers around, there is a great need for parental attention and that one Moshe and one God simply cannot satisfy that need.

The solution is not to simply appoint the elders as Moshe’s helpers. No. The people want a piece of Moshe and a piece of God; they don’t just want babysitters. So what God does is He takes a little piece of the stuff that makes Moshe special, a little of the stuff that really makes Moshe God’s representative, his ruah, his spirit, and He transfers some of it onto the elders. Now the elders can carry the spirit of God and Moshe with them through the camp as they deal with the people. Now maybe the people won’t feel so alone and distant. They will have 71 representatives of God to give them hugs instead of just one.

The Torah itself emphasizes God’s ruah (spirit) as the solution. Indeed, it is this word which joins the two sections of the chapter into one piece. It is the ruah which is transferred from Moshe to the 70 elders, and it is also the ruah (meaning “wind,” 11:31) which brings forth the quail for the people to eat. The whole point of both solutions is to bring God’s ruah back into the camp, so that the people feel loved and cared for. Perhaps that is part of the point of the story of Eldad and Medad as well, two men who prophesied inside the camp while the 70 elders were receiving Moshe’s spirit outside the camp. The point is that God’s ruah is overflowing everywhere. It encircles the camp from the outside through the 70 elders and the quail and it overflows into the camp through Eldad and Medad.

Here’s where our experience of young children helps shed light on the Torah. Chapter 11 is a very complicated chapter. There are really two stories woven together, one about the people’s complaint about meat and the other about the 70 elders. Understanding that the people’s real problem was an emotional one and not just a physical one explains why the solutions also needed to be on both planes, both in terms of the physical wind of the quail and the spiritual wind of God’s presence in the elders.

Note that in the parallel quail story in Exodus (16), the solution offered by God is only physical. The people complain about lack of water and food, and God simply gives them water and food, without anger and without offering any extra helpers to deal with the emotional fallout. Perhaps the difference is that in Exodus the people are still babies. Their crying is the real cry of thirst and hunger; there really is no food or water at the time, and their crying is their only mode of communication, their way of asking for these essentials. By contrast, in Numbers, the people already have manna. Their cry is more complicated, no longer merely a sign of a physical need, but also a sign of an emotional one. God therefore offers them an emotional as well as a physical response.

The other part of the response, of course, is anger and punishment. Whining is not a good way of asking for something (either physical or emotional) and the people need to learn to ask in a nicer way. When they do ask nicely, without crying, as earlier in the parsha (Num 9:1-14) in relation to those who have missed the Passover sacrifice, they get a calmer, more measured response. But learning to ask nicely, when one is upset, takes time. It takes a few years, and most of the book of Numbers. In the mean time, God and Moshe (and we parents of young children) just have to bear with them.