Looking Back in Fear & Why Our Generation Chose Differently: Behaalotacha

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The Crisis: Looking Back

When life breaks apart, we rarely look forward. We look back.

Back to the relationship we knew was wrong. Back to the job that hollowed us out. Back to the pattern that nearly destroyed us. When the future feels terrifying, even a painful past begins to look appealing. Fear paints the narrow place gold. The Torah warns against this impulse again and again — most famously in Lot’s wife, who looks back against God’s command and becomes a pillar of salt – focusing only on the past has the potential to embitter us.

This week the warning is written into the scroll itself. In the middle of the narrative two nuns are turned backward, bracketing a single couplet: vayehi binsoa ha’aron — “When the Ark journeyed, Moshe would say: Arise, O Lord, and may Your enemies be scattered” (Numbers 10:35–36). The rabbis call them a book within a book, but we might read them as the life that was meant to be: an ideal that never occurred — the Ark scattering their enemies as the people marched into the land. In reality the second generation will have to fight its own battles. Between the ideal and the real opens a gap — and it is in that gap that life is lived, it is in this gap we choose whether to turn back to slavery or to travel forward to the promised land.

The choice made by the Israelites is clear: They complain and fall into craving the past: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers and the melons, the leeks and the onions and the garlic; but now… there is nothing but this manna” (11:4–6). Egypt — the house of slavery, of brutality, of drowned children — remembered now as a place of plenty. The moment the future asks something of them, they reach back for the narrow place that enslaved them. It is no accident that Mitzrayim shares its root with meitzar, a narrow strait. They do not want the manna, the food of spirit; they want meat, the food of immediacy and of the quick fix for fear.

And then Moshe, in an unprecedented move, himself breaks down: “Why have You dealt ill with Your servant?… I am not able to carry this people alone, for it is too heavy for me” (11:11–14). It is a cry of failure but more than anything it is a cry of mourning — for a lost vision: bringing this people into the land triumphant and transformed. But the crisis also signals a people that were mourning. Rabbi David Fohrman notes that mitonenim, the word for their complaint, shares a root with aninut, the language of grief. They were not hungry; they were grieving. The text says hitavu ta’ava (11:4), “they desired a desire.” With manna falling each morning and every need met, they lacked nothing — and in lacking nothing had lost the one thing that tells a self it is alive: the capacity to want. They wanted contradictory things at once: to be grown and to have desires of their own, yet also to remain dependent and fed. Finding no true lack to fill, they manufactured one, and fed it with the wrong substance — meat rather than meaning.

Change as Loss: Meat or Spirit?

What they were resisting was never the manna but the change itself. Stephen Grosz, in The Examined Life, catalogues this resistance: committing to a small change, even one unmistakably in our interest, is often more frightening than enduring a dangerous situation, because the familiar story — even an oppressive one — is easier than the unknown. “We hesitate in the face of change, because change is loss. But if we don’t accept some loss, we can lose everything.” The people are asked to accept exactly such a cascade of losses — of slave-status, of dependence, of a simple freedom traded for a difficult one — and cannot pay it. And this is what makes the moment grave: the conviction that human beings can change, that we are not fixed by our past. This is the anthropological revolution of the Bible. But the people do not believe themselves capable of it. Their turn backward is, at root, a refusal of a new story.

It is no surprise that the two words echoing through the narrative are basar and ruach, meat and spirit. They frame the two ways of responding to this crisis of growth and change: The text sets them like a split screen. Inside the camp, the people gather quail, the meat to feed their imagined desire; in the same hour, just outside it, God tells Moshe to gather seventy elders: “I will take of the spirit that is upon you, and place it upon them” (11:17). One gathers meat to soothe fear; the other gathers spirit to carry a burden. Meat satisfies an individual craving and is eaten alone, whereas spirit sustains a collective building and can only be shared. This is the apprenticeship of freedom: to gather ruach over basar, to choose the slow work of becoming over the relief that asks nothing and builds nothing. To grow up is to learn to want what cannot be swallowed in a single bite.

And this is the answer to the crisis of growing up: not the false independence the people demanded — I need no one — nor the endless dependence they were fleeing; the harder thing called interdependence, which the Torah names covenant: that we were never meant to be self-sufficient, that to be free is to be bound to one another. Surviving the wilderness was never about becoming invulnerable, but about learning that no one survives it alone.

Moshe and the people are wrestling with the same crisis, and Brené Brown, in Atlas of the Heart, names the terrain they both enter when things do not go as planned — disappointment, regret, discouragement, resignation, frustration. The difference lies not in what they feel but in the direction they turn: the people’s fear turns them backward, toward Egypt and the narrow place; Moshe turns outward. This is not new to him. At the burning bush he too resisted — “I am not a man of words… I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exodus 4:10) — and God answered that He would be with his mouth. Moshe knows from the inside what it is to face a future impossibly larger than oneself; he was carried through it once, and that is what equips him to carry others.

God gives Moshe seventy others to carry his burden and share his spirit, so that they might teach the people that to face a crisis, to walk into a new story, need not narrow us with fear but widen us in spirit. Transformation — the biblical paradigm of what it is to be human — remains possible, if we know what to choose. Change is not a thing to fear but the thing that elevates us, summoning us to grow larger than we were.

This Generation: The subversive sequel

Maybe that is why our own generation feels like the sequel to the wilderness generation — a sequel that, this time, so many have chosen to write differently. After rupture. After fear. After October 7th.

So many could have retreated into despair, into cynicism, into the gold-painted illusion of a safer past. And instead they stepped forward. Reservists leaving home again and again. Families rebuilding shattered lives. Strangers carrying strangers. Choosing responsibility over certainty, future over fear. Terrified, and still walking.

There was a proposal, in those first stunned weeks, to call this war Milchemet Mashiv HaRuach, the War of the Returning Spirit, after the prayer we begin on Simchat Torah, the day the rupture came: mashiv haruach u’morid hageshem, the One who returns the wind and brings the rain. Whether or not the name endures, the instinct was right. The choice this generation faces is the wilderness choice in its oldest form: the basar the temporary substance fix, or the ruach the sustaining meaning; the gathering done alone, or done together.

And this is the deepest meaning of those two backward letters. The ideal exists, but it comes bracketed. Redemption is rarely linear; human beings fail, history breaks, even leaders fall to their knees. Faith was never the certainty that the smooth journey awaits us; it is the refusal to let fear decide the direction of the story — the courage to keep gathering ruach, and to keep walking through the wilderness toward a land we have not yet seen.

Shabbat Shalom.

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