Parshas Behaloscha

This week’s Torah portion, Parshas Behaloscha, contains a short story that upon further analysis seems rather odd. “The `rira’ (the Eruv Rav) in their midst desired a desiring, and then the Israelites wept and said, if only we had meat to eat.” Numbers 11:4. The double language in the original Hebrew, hithavu ta’avah, literally desired a desiring seems o. Why the double language?

The answer is that the Torah is telling us something precise and uncomfortable. The Ramban explains that there was genuinely nothing lacking. The manna was extraordinary, producing distinguished flavors and every kind of delicacy. The people were not hungry. They were not suering. And yet they manufactured within themselves an overwhelming, consuming desire for something they did not actually need. The Ramban’s word is remarkable. The desire itself was entirely artificial. They didn’t desire meat. Rather they desired to complain.

Something this odd seems unrelatable and not relevant to us `normal people’ at all. But how many times do we do the same thing in a smaller way? We see something we perceive as an injustice and the anger rises inside us. We tell ourselves it is about principle. We tell ourselves we have been wronged, that something needs to be fixed, that we have no choice but to fight. And maybe sometimes that is true. But the Ramban is warning us about something far more subtle and far more dangerous. The yetzer hara does not always come at us directly. Often it works by manufacturing the feeling first, creating the sense of grievance, the sense of lack, the sense of being wronged, and then letting us run with it while we convince ourselves the whole time that we are acting from integrity and principle.

The craving comes first. The justification follows. And by the time we are weeping and demanding meat, we have completely forgotten that we were never actually hungry.

The test is not whether the feeling feels real. The rira’s craving felt completely real to them. The test is whether we are willing to stop and ask honestly, is this something I truly want and need, or have I goaded myself into this? Am I fighting for a principle or am I dressing up a desire in respectable clothing?

May Hashem give us the clarity to see our own desires honestly, the courage to distinguish between genuine principle and manufactured craving, and dig down to find the root of our motivations and through that reach our ultimate potential.