In this week’s torah portion, Ekev, Moshe reviews some of the people’s time in the desert over the last 40 years and speaks several times about the mannah they ate in the desert.  When Moshe speaks about the mannah though, he connects it in our parsha, more than once to pain.

“Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that He might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep His commandments or not. He subjected you to the hardship of hunger and gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on what comes from the mouth of God….Who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, in order to test you and pain you….”

The Talmud says that we learn from these verses several things.  From the hunger the Jews face before the mannah descends we learn that one of the afflictions on Yom Kippur is fasting, from the latter verse which call the manna itself a source of pain and hardship we learn that (Yoma 74b) “One can not compare someone who has bread in their basket to one who does not…”  Meaning that the affliction of the mannah itself was complete reliance on God for one’s sustenance.   In Moshe’s eyes, the Jewish people are trapped between a rock and a hard place.  Between the pain of not having bread, i.e. hunger, and the pain of having mannah, the pain of being reliant on God for their food.

Is the Jews painful reliance on mannah really any different than our own lives?  True, mannah comes from heaven and is given to us as a gift, and for food we must till the ground.   But we do not make the rain fall or create the miracle of the food emerging from the ground.   Aren’t we always like the person who, in the Talmud’s words,  “does not have bread in their basket”?   Aren’t we as humans always ignorant of what is around the corner, at the behest of God, and ultimately not in control?

Perhaps this is part of the lesson of the Jewish people’s 40 years in the desert.   They were afraid to enter the land, they were used to God providing for them and rescuing them and so they did not see themselves as independent and capable.  Only now, after traveling through the desert are they ready to enter the land as an independent nation.  Perhaps it is not just exile that teaches them to become themselves but the experience of the manna.   Though we are always reliant on God, always like one who “does not have bread in their basket” we must live our lives “as if”.   As if we are independent, as if we have a modicum of control, as if we can plan for the future.  Without that we can accomplish nothing, we would be as terrified as the jewish people 40 years earlier, “like grasshoppers in their eyes”.   Like the Jewish people we are always trapped between the pain of hunger and the pain of eating manna.  But nevertheless, God grants us the miraculous, and incredibly dangerous, ability to see ourselves “as if” we are Gods.  Making the food grow from the ground and planning for a future which we might control.   Having only to bless God and be grateful for the bounty.