Parshah Commentary

Toward the end of this week’s parshah, Beshalach, the Israelites, newly liberated from Egypt and just starting their journey in the desert, become agitated. Complaining of hunger, they announce to Moses and Aaron that they regret leaving Egypt: “If only we had died by the hand of God in Egypt,” they lament, “when we sat by the meat pots, when we ate our fill of bread.” In response, God announces, “I shall rain down for you bread from heaven.” Notably, the collection of this celestial sustenance is governed by several rules: that it not be gathered on Shabbat, that one may gather only a single day’s worth at a time (except on Friday, when a double portion is provided in preparation for Shabbat), and that it be eaten in the morning (heavenly quail was provided for the evening meal). Commenting on this last stipulation, the Talmud quips, “Initially, the Israelites were like chickens pecking at the garbage”—they would eat any time they came upon available food—“until Moses came and set a specific time to eat.” The 16th-century commentator Sforno interprets this episode as initiating a transition from the norms governing the Israelites’ behavior in Egypt to a more ideal, yet in some ways more restrictive, set of norms dictated by the Torah’s commandments. In Egypt they were enslaved laborers, yet they ate freely. Now they are emancipated from slave labor, yet their consumption is subject to constraint.

According to the 15th-century commentator Abarbanel, liberation was bound up with regulation to prevent the Israelites from falling prey to commodification and consumerism. Perhaps counterintuitively, only by following these rules could true freedom be attained: “An excess of material things is a constraint and great burden on attaining completeness for the soul,” he explained; therefore, God “prepared their provisions such that they would lack nothing . . . and also wouldn’t have surplus to hoard and turn into commodities, as do those who warehouse grain, oil, and wine in order to become wealthy.” Indeed, the Torah tells us, any stockpiled manna became wormy and rotten. Abarbanel argues that such limitations were designed to quell the Isrealites’ anxiety and help them place their faith in God: “Leaving manna over for the next day,” he writes, “displays a lack of faith that God will provide on the following day.” This cultivation of faith through economic regulation is accompanied by what we might describe as a proto-socialist miracle: Irrespective of how much manna a person gathered, it was always distributed equitably—“the one who gathered much had no extra, and the one who gathered little lacked nothing.”

Building on the idea that faith in God’s provision can serve as a bulwark against commodification and excess, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, argued that these rules prepared the Israelites for their future agricultural life in Canaan. Amid the natural cycle of plowing, sowing, and harvesting, their prior experience with the miraculous “bread from heaven” would remind them that, now too, their success would not be determined by simply accumulating as much wealth as possible. Their earlier schooling in the freedom provided by a faith-based approach to consumption would serve as an enduring check against excessive production and acquisition.

This principle, according to the Lubavitcher rebbe, can also explain why it is in the context of stipulating how the manna is to be collected that the Torah first introduces the laws of Shabbat. Indeed, before the Sabbath is mentioned as one of the Ten Commandments—which are given in next week’s parshah—it is presented in relation to the need for sustenance. “See,” says Moses, “God has given you Shabbat. Therefore, on the sixth day He gives you two days’ worth of bread,” so that on the seventh day, “each person shall remain in their place.” These words, originally referring to the heavenly manna, followed the Jewish people long after they left the desert. As Avi Garelick wrote in a piece for the Rest issue of Jewish Currents, Jewish immigrants to the US in the late 19th century encountered an environment “singularly inhospitable” to Shabbat observance. “Amidst the fast pace of modern industry,” Garelick explained, “taking time to observe Shabbos or learn Torah was a sign of indolence, clogging the engine of production with the residues of culture and religion.” For the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Torah introduces Shabbat in the context of the manna because, to this day, Shabbat provides the same sort of liberating restrictions. Rupturing the cycles of economic anxiety that turn breadwinning labor into an insatiable quest for wealth aggregation, such constraints free us to turn upward, inward, toward one another—and toward the emancipatory horizon of a future in which no body or soul goes hungry.

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.