Sermon: B’ha’alotcha – Food and Love

Written by Rabbi Hannah Kingston — 5 June 2023

Over the past couple of weeks, it has been reported that food prices are 19% higher than a year ago, meaning that the average household will have seen an increase in their food bills of around £1000 since 2020.

The cost of living crisis means that people are looking for ways to cut back on every aspect of their spending, with their weekly shops being no different. The first thing to go, fresh fruit and vegetables, now viewed as a luxury with the price of cooking a meal from scratch far higher than hitting the freezer section or the produce marked for clearance.

Food banks are becoming overrun, with more people becoming reliant on their provisions. And food banks are struggling to provide, as they rely on cut price, yellow ticketed fruit and veg, now a commodity for shoppers who are in desperate need of reduced produce.

So, when we are faced with anyone complaining about the easily accessible food they have, it feels hard to meet their grievances with sympathy, even when they are found in text which is thousands of years old.  As Hayden said earlier, the Israelites spend a lot of time in this Torah portion complaining, and as he rightly concluded their complaints seem to be very unreasonable.

Their main complaint is about the food that they don’t want to eat, the food that God readily provided for them, that they did not have to save money to buy or sacrifice buying something else to enjoy.

Psychologist Wendy Mogel in her book ‘The Blessing of a B Minus’ describes the time of the Israelites in the wilderness as the ‘adolescence of the Jewish people, the time between their ‘childhood’ in slavery and their maturity as governors of the Promised Land’. She writes:

‘Moses had to put up with forty years of directing a flock of whiners and complainers. Whenever he turned his back, even for a minute, they made the kind of trouble that is familiar to parents of teenagers: overstuffing themselves on manna, worshipping a glittering false idol….When he tried to reason with the people, they were sarcastic… They moaned and cried that they wished they could be slaves again…The adolescence of the Jewish people had to be long and difficult enough…for them to develop hard won wisdom and, at last, grow up.’

When we see Israel in this adolescent state, their complaints become a scene that is familiar to tables across the world. For we all recognize the disgruntled teenager who is unhappy with their lot, despite the fact that it is readily available for them when they need it, and they are often not the ones grafting to provide.

For our Israelite ancestors, just when it feels as if they are acting well, their mood swings and they once again become rude, disrespectful and ungrateful. And so they lash out at the sources of stability in their life, Moses and God. One of the ways they enact this is by rebelling against the gifts that they are given, and specifically through the rejection of the food that God is giving them to eat.

This tumultuous relationship between Israel and God is further demonstrated by the metaphor of God as Israel’s mother. When Moses reaches a point of despair in our narrative, he turns to God and asks: Did I produce all these people,

Moses continues by referring to God as conceiving, being pregnant with and birthing Israel. We all know that food is an integral dimension of a child’s first relationship with its caregiver. Food therefore is an offering of love and a reflection of the mother’s ability to care for their child well.

As they cry out ‘who will give us meat to eat’, the Israelites come across as ungrateful and demonstrate a lack of faith in God to continue to provide for them, as God has been doing for them in the past months. Their lusting after things they could have in Egypt, the cucumbers and leeks, could be portrayed as a rejection of the Eternal and a lust for the foreign gods they had in Egypt, the gods they perceived supplied these foods for them.

Their rejection of the manna sent by God, becomes a rejection of God’s love.

So why are our rebellious teenage ancestors so caught up on the merits of the food of Egypt, versus the manna that they are given in the wilderness.

They refer to their memories ‘the fish we used to eat free’, conveniently forgetting that of course they were not free in Egypt, painting with rose coloured glasses the hardships of slavery.

A Halakhic Midrash from the 3^rd century, Sifrei B’midbar, deduces that the Israelites in Egypt were free of the mitzvot, free to live without responsibility to be better people, to function as society under a set of rules.

And again, if we see Israel as an adolescent, this is something we can empathise with. The rules and regimes that help us to function when we are children, are what we rebel against as we grow up, and then adopt for comfort when we are adults. So the rejection of the manna, becomes a rejection of the life the Israelites are living at the moment.

So much seems to be loaded onto this food. It becomes not just a means of sustenance, but an emotional outlet, a way of communicating loaded feelings, and a vehicle of expression. And this is not something that has changed since biblical times. Still there is a centrality of food in Judaism.

This combined with its significance in family and community, means that eating in a Jewish setting is rarely just a means to satiate hunger.

Lori Hope Lefkovitz, founding director of the Kolot Centre for Jewish Women and Gender studies, notes “Saturated with cultural connotations, even a chicken is not just a chicken. For that chicken soup is a symbol of therapeutic Judaism: maternal love; the kitchen’s warmth; a broth with infinite potential to cure whatever ails your body, spirit or psyche.”

Food is a way for us to assert control over our lives, we can be empowered to choose what we eat, how much of it, and when we eat it. But food can also be used as a method to control others. In the wilderness, the manna and the subsequent food after became a way to control the Israelites.

And still today, rules around Kashrut control how many Jews interact with food and with society as a whole. The laws of Kashrut help to keep the community together, for wherever there are Jews, there are Kosher shops.

But, it becomes no wonder that for Israel this might have felt particularly challenging. In the desert, when the Israelites were helpless, they had control over nothing. Even control of their own diet was taken away, as manna was given by God and portion sizes were controlled by divine law – even if they gathered too much, they ended up with the amount they were meant to have.

When there are so many other points of pressure in our lives, food becomes an easy place for us to act out against, and to assert our own control or our own rebellion, just as the Israelites did in this weeks parasha. We often push against the points of least resistance, the points where we may be able to get an easy reaction or easy gratification for what we need.

This was seen particularly in Holocaust survivors, who were often seen to reject ritual rules around food, for they felt they had restricted their diets enough. This defiance of fast days and kashrut became a way of punishing God for allowing the events of the Holocaust to occur, an act of revolt.

So when dissected, the struggles of our ancient ancestors in the wilderness do not seem so far removed from us after all. Their need to reject the food of God, their complaints, may also be ways that we, or the ones we love, act out when under particular amounts of pressure.

Because, when food and love remain tangled in the way they are in society, and especially in our Jewish lives, food becomes a tangible thing we can control, a vehicle that we can use to get what we want and a way for us to express the emotions that we so often keep hidden.

And this entangling of food and love means that we remain at a risk of wounding those we love when sticking to our own dietary preferences. And we risk hurting those who struggle with food when we try to cater for them in the way that we need, rather than the ways that they need.

The current crisis that we are seeing around food in the UK and further afield,  should teach us that we are in need of a societal overhaul. We need to separate the necessity of providing for ourselves, and for those around us, from the emotion that is so often entangled with food. We need to eat for hunger and not for love. Knowing that the emotion we pile onto the food we so lovingly make, could feel loaded to the person receiving it.

May we, unlike our Israelite ancestors, feel grateful for what we have. May we feel the needs of our bodies and satiate them. May food be nutritious, never used as a weapon or punishment, and so may we all eat and be satisfied.