Appetites or Aspirations: Parashat Beha'alotekha 5785

This week, I’ve been mourning the death of a great scholar, preacher, and teacher – the Reverend Doctor Walter Brueggemann. Professor Brueggemann was a prolific author, and a leading voice in the field of biblical studies – particularly of the Hebrew prophets. His book, The Prophetic Imagination, first published over 40 years ago, is considered a timeless classic in the field. Yet I imagine many of you have never heard of him. That’s understandable. He wasn’t well-known to those of us who don’t spend the bulk of our time studying biblical criticism or Christian theology. 

Full disclosure: I had never heard of, or read anything by, him until I began my doctoral studies at Union Presbyterian Seminary. But once I encountered his scholarship, I instantly began regarding him as one of my rebbes, my spiritual mentors. His insights have helped shape mine in countless ways, and if you were to ever read my thesis – not something I wish upon you, but still – you’ll find his work cited throughout, his influence palpable and ever-present. I never met him personally – although I did nervously send him an early draft of my thesis, unsure whether this towering figure would have the time or interest to read the reflections of a rabbi he’d never met. Yet less than a few weeks later, I received a gracious, thoughtful, and affirming reply from him – a message I will cherish forever.

More than anyone else – except, perhaps, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – Professor Brueggemann taught me that the prophet’s role is not to predict the future, but to call our attention to the chasm between the world as it is and the world as God insists it ought to be – to “nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us…[to] engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things…[and] to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move” (Brueggemann 3). 

But playing this role is invariably to court controversy. The powerful only ever put forth a vision of the future that allows them to remain in power, even when their position is secured through oppression, reinforcing complacency with the status quo by satisfying some with comfort, and by making the rest of us fearful that any alternative would be worse – numbing us to accept stability even when it is at the cost of justice. 

Prophets, Brueggemann taught, disturb this false peace, refusing to tolerate the way things are, piercing our complacency with the status quo, rejecting calls to desist from divisiveness (Brueggemann 16). 

I’ve been thinking about Brueggemann a lot this past week, as I’ve followed the news coming out of California – where people largely peacefully protesting unjust, inhumane, and illegal policies targeting and terrifying immigrants were met with military force, deployed under the pretext of keeping the peace and maintaining order and stability – obscuring the fact that this so-called peace is conditioned upon cruelty, and the so-called order being maintained through extralegal and unaccountable force is inherently and flagrantly oppressive. We are being told that the government is protecting the people from the protesters, obfuscating the fact that it is the protesters who are trying to protect people from the abuse and overreach of their own power-mad government. And, as columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote this week, the government is betting on our indifference and silence, our preference for the absence of tension over the presence of justice.

This week’s parashah has something to say about all this. 

We’ve been studying the Book of Numbers for a few weeks now, but it is really this week’s parashah that situates us in the wilderness — a place of loss and longing, wandering and weariness, tension and tragedy. In the eleventh chapter, we encounter a people who have just set out from Sinai toward the Promised Land, but who are already beginning to tire of the journey.

A group described as ha-asafsuf asher b’kirbo — literally, “the riffraff that was among them” — is seized by craving, and demands meat. Their longing infects the rest of the Israelites, who begin weeping at the entrances of their tents, lamenting their current diet of manna and waxing nostalgic about Egypt: “We remember the fish we ate freely in Egypt — and the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic.”

Moses, caught between a desperate people and an angry God, calls upon God to either help him with the crisis, or else to kill him and put him out of his misery. God responds with a curious double answer:

First, God promises to send quail — not for a day or two, but for an entire month. Enough to make the people sick. “It will come out of your nostrils and become loathsome to you, because you rejected the Infinite who is among you, and cried before God saying, ‘Why did we ever leave Egypt?’”

Second, God tells Moses to gather seventy elders at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. There, God will take from Moses’ spirit and bestow a share upon each of them. When the spirit rests upon them, they begin to prophesy.

But two men — one named Eldad and the other named Medad — who were registered among the seventy but, for unspecified reasons, didn’t show up at the Tent of Meeting along with their colleagues, also receive the spirit and begin to prophesy. Joshua, Moses’ disciple, reports this breach of protocol and calls for Moses to stop them. But Moses replies: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Infinite’s people were prophets, that the Infinite would place His spirit upon them!”

It’s a strange story on a number of levels: Why is God so angry about the people’s complaint? And what does the commissioning of additional prophets have to do with anything? 

Let’s start with the first question. On the surface, the people’s longing for meat seems innocuous — even reasonable. Yet the full expression of their complaint, which contrasts their claim of hunger with a strange recollection of their experience in Egypt, belies something more pernicious and destructive at play. 

The great 20th century commentator Nechama Leibowitz points out that this “idyllic picture of their stay in Egypt” is striking, especially considering that it was uttered “by the generation…[that] had gone forth from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from bondage to redemption. Yet this was how they pictured their experiences in Egypt, only just over a year after that crowning act of liberation from a nightmare of persecution, hard labour and the casting of their children into the river.” The ancient rabbis were similarly astonished reading these words, particularly the phrase, “We remember the fish we ate freely in Egypt.” It strains credulity, they objected, that the same regime that made the Israelites procure their own straw to make bricks to use in their own forced labor would have provided them with free food (Leibovitz, 97)!

Therefore, the Sages deduce, that “free” here doesn’t refer to the cheap price of Egyptian fish, but rather, as Leibovitz argues, to the fact that, in Egypt, they were free “from the irksome demands of civilization and standards of self-discipline…The Talmud,” Leibovitz continues, “observes that ‘a slave enjoys his license.’ The master does not interfere in the private lives of his slaves, does not bother about their moral and educational training. On the contrary the more the slave is ruled by his senses, the better for the master. Let him get drunk, fight, indulge in promiscuity and expend his superfluous energies on such outlets rather than ‘listen to words of falsehood’ – of freedom, liberation from the toils of his bondage. Let him not think of his self-respect, of man created in the image of God daily trodden underfoot by his persecutors. It is not the master’s business to teach him ethics and conduct.” (Leibovitz, 101-102).

Recall, for example, that, back in the book of Exodus, after Moses kills the Egyptian taskmaster, he sees two Israelites fighting. When he tries to intervene, they say, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?” The problem of Egypt wasn’t just Pharaoh — it was a mentality that resisted moral accountability. Better to be left alone, even in degradation, than to be responsible for the wellbeing of others.

“But when the Israelites went forth from slavery to freedom, another bondage was imposed on them, more difficult and majestic in its awesomeness – the yoke of Torah and mitzvot imposed on them at Sinai – self-discipline in the life of community and individual, in family life and relations with neighbours, on workdays and restdays, in matters of food and drink and clothing,” and even in matters of physical intimacy. “This, in the view of our Sages, was the cause of all the grumblings about…the fish they ate for nothing in Egyptian bondage.” Free? Of course. Yonder, we ate fish free – free from mitzvot, free from the yoke of Torah…” (Leibovitz, 101-102). In Egypt, the people were, in a sense, free — free from purpose, free from obligation, free from conscience. 

When the Israelites cry out for meat, they aren’t nostalgic for nourishment, but for numbness. They would rather be satiated slaves than free people responsible for their neighbor’s wellbeing. They would rather be oppressed and indifferent than free and caring. And that is what provokes such divine anger.. The issue is not a lack of material comfort; the issue is a lack of moral conscience. 

Appetites have eclipsed aspirations. What the people crave is not quail flesh — it’s the license to stop caring, to cast off the burden of accountability and the inconvenience of moral responsibility. To ignore the sometimes difficult call to love thy neighbor, to protect the vulnerable, to build a just society.

This is why God responds not only with meat, but with moral leadership. God says, in effect, if the problem here is a failure of moral imagination, then the answer is to multiply those who can imagine a different way. If the people have become too exhausted to sustain a communal ethic, then it’s time to raise up a new cadre of conscience-bearers. The solution to a community overcome by craving is not to feed it more — but to fill it with prophets. So God works to resolve the crisis by raising up more prophets. First the seventy elders receive the spirit and begin to prophesy. And then Eldad and Medad, too —  those who didn’t make it to the official ceremony at the Tent of Meeting. The spirit finds them anyway, and they start speaking out. 

Joshua is scandalized by this unsanctioned proliferation of prophecy, but that’s really a literary device to reveal Moses’ delight at what witnesses: Would that all the Infinite’s people were prophets!” If only all the people would see beyond their own satiation and notice others’ suffering. If only all the people would be roused from their moral slumber to respond to the cries of the oppressed. If only all the people were more concerned with the presence of injustice than with the quiet of the status quo. If only everyone were a prophet! 

Indeed, the true battle in this story isn’t between the people and God. It’s among the people themselves. The story dramatizes this by dividing the people into three categories: the asafsuf, the am, and the nevi’im. The asafsuf — the riffraff or rabble — stir up dissatisfaction, sow [false] nostalgia, seed the dangerous idea that maybe Egypt wasn’t so bad. They whisper, “Wouldn’t it be easier to go back? Back to a time when no one cared what you ate, how you lived, or who got hurt along the way?” The prophets are the counterweight: The ones who call the people back to their better selves. The ones who resist the regression, who remind the people that their liberation was for a purpose, that their freedom is bound to responsibility. These two poles represent opposing forces in the struggle for the soul of the third category, the Israelite people – the am. The am is the so-called silent majority. They are the ones caught in the middle. They are vulnerable to being pulled — toward memory and away from mission, toward craving and away from covenant. God recognizes that, in this moment, the soul of the community is at stake. Will the am listen to the asafsuf, or to the nevi’im? Will they be lured by appetites or led by aspirations?

Moses knows what side he’s on. And he wants everyone else to get there, too. Would that all the Infinite’s people were prophets!

The hope that everyone should be a prophet is not just a fantasy of spiritual egalitarianism. It’s a call for each and every person to step up — an invitation to collective courage. The Torah is teaching us that a just and sustainable society depends not on a few exceptional leaders, but on the willingness of ordinary people to accept extraordinary responsibility. To speak out. To show up. Even — perhaps especially — when it costs us something.

And our parashah invites us to imagine what might be possible if everyone embraced that call – to name injustice when others would prefer quiet, to carry a burden that others would rather cast off, to care more about the suffering of their neighbors than the satisfaction of their own desires, to dream of a world that doesn’t yet exist and seems impossible — and to insist on bringing it about, anyway. That’s the vision embedded in Moses’s dream: If only all the Infinite’s people were prophets – if only a preponderance of people were to place moral responsibility above personal gain and concern themselves less with their own comfort and more with the dignity, safety, and flourishing of others – we would never again yearn to return to Egypt, for we would already be in the promised land.

This is not just ancient history. We are, once again, living in a moment of crisis – of a spiritual struggle between appetite and aspiration. Once again, we are being tempted to trade moral responsibility for personal ease, solidarity for security, justice for order, comfort for conscience, freedom for free fish. We are the am being presented with the choice – align with the asafsuf, those who regard responsibility for others’ well being as an unnecessary burden borne only by suckers and losers, or embrace the spirit of the prophets, those who cry out, resist, dream of a better future, and work to bring it into being. 

We see them already. In the streets of Los Angeles, and today – in cities all over the country, including here in Stamford. All who refuse to accept what is as what must be, all who refuse to forget who we are called to be. 

Will we join them? Can we make our sanctuaries sites of resistance? Can we turn our pulpits into platforms for prophecy? Can we long not for the license to consume unrestrained, but for the liberty to commit to justice, to truth, to the equal and infinite dignity of every human being?

My dear friends, I feel – and fear – that this moment is our test, just as the wilderness tested our ancient ancestors. Will we seek peace at the price of justice? Will we crave comfort more than we crave conscience? Will we remember Egypt — or will we remember the Exodus?

Walter Brueggemann, of blessed memory, taught that the task of the faith community is to nurture prophetic consciousness. Not just to raise up a Moses — but to become a people of prophets. To feel deeply. To speak the truth, even when it is difficult or dangerous. To dream of a world not yet realized, but desperately needed.

We honor his legacy by casting off numbness and calling for justice, committing to cultivate a community founded upon human dignity and focused on mutual care and collective responsibility. 

In our parashah, Moses dreams that all the Infinite’s people would be prophets, and it is a dream within our power to fulfill. Our homes, our sanctuaries, our hearts can be places where the spirit rests and justice rises. Our parashah reminds us – we can all be prophets.

May we all embrace the call, speedily and in our days. Amen.