BALOTACHA, loneliness and faith.

I've long been intrigued by one passage in this week's Parishar.

After a lengthy stay in the Sinai Desert, the people are about to begin the second part of their journey,

they're no longer traveling from, but traveling to, no longer escaping from Egypt,

they are journeying toward the promised land.

The Torah inserts a long preface to this story. It takes the first ten chapters of Bermidbo.

The people are counted, they're gathered tribe by tribe around the tabernacle,

in the order in which they're going to march. Preparations are made to purify the camp.

Silver trumpets are made to assemble the people and give them

the signal to move on then finally the journey begins what follows is a momentous anti-climax

first there's an unspecified complaint then we read the rabble with them began to crave other food

and again the israelites started wailing and said,

if only we had meat to eat, we remember the fish we had in Egypt at no cost. Also the cucumbers,

melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we've lost our appetite. We never see anything but this

manner. The people seem to have forgotten that not long before there had been slaves,

their male children were killed, they cried out to be freed by God,

the memory of Jewish tradition has preserved of the food they ate in Egypt

was the bread of affliction and the taste of bitterness, not the meat and fish. As for their

remark that they ate the food at no cost, it did cost them something. It cost them their liberty.

There was something monstrous about the behavior of the people, and it induced in Moses what

today we would call a breakdown. He asked the Lord, why have you brought

this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all

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