Parashat Beha'alotekha: Not Looking Back

The mind is a tricky place. The Israelites in their complaint for meat this week claim that in Egypt they ate fish “for free,” as well as cucumbers, melon, leeks, onions and garlic. How is this possible? As Rashi points out, if the Egyptians wouldn’t even give them straw to make their bricks, how were they giving them fish for free?

Whether or not the Israelites in fact did eat these foods in Egypt, they have constructed for themselves a memory of the past which is all golden, leaving out the whips and the harsh labor conditions. Why have they done this? As a way to devalue the present, as a way not to inhabit the present, but to look longingly backward.

This is what we humans do. What we have right now is never just right. We are always looking to some other time that was or will be more brilliant, more tasty, more satisfying. Sometimes, we look backward and sometimes we look forward. Most often, as here, we look both directions at once – we remember how good it was then (even when it wasn’t), complain about now, and in the same breath look to the future for something better – feed us meat tomorrow! The Torah calls this feeling here a ta’avah – a craving; it is a desire for something not attainable in the present, a restlessness with what is right now.

This “now is terrible” feeling is encapsulated by the complainers’ choice of words: eyn kol – “there is nothing.” There is nothing in right now, they say. Now feels empty to us. Or maybe they are commenting on their own state of mind – eyn kol – there is no sense of kol – of “everythingness” or “wholeness.” They have diagnosed their own problem here, an emotional, not a physical one; they have no ability to feel kol, “everything,” full and satisfied with the gifts from above, a sense that life is perfect just as it is at this very moment.

Feeling kol or “full” is an ability we celebrate in our foreparents – concerning all the word kol is used. Did Abraham (or Sarah or Isaac or Jacob) always have “everything?” No, but they had a key spiritual/religious capacity – the capacity to feel that right now is kol. This very moment, this simple drink of water, contains inside it the fullness of the entire universe.

Contentment with the present does not preclude change. Change is part of the nature of things, as is expressed in this parsha by the description of the people’s constant movement in the desert – they would travel and encamp, travel and encamp. Change, movement is a part of the reality of the present, part of what needs to be accepted as itself a kind of kol. The Israelites are discontented precisely with the reality of this change in the world– what did you have to go messing up our perfect situation in Egypt for? We didn’t want this change in the first place. Resistance to change is also a form of not accepting the present reality, of not being able to feel a sense of kol or fullness within the swirling winds around us.

Last week’s parsha included the blessing of the priests, which ends with Vaseym Lekha Shalom. May He grant you peace. What is peace other than this sense of kol, this ability to be in the present and feel its fullness, without looking longingly backward or forward? This moment – with all its transitions and transience – this moment is perfect and complete as it is. May we feel this peace.