The dieting industry today is a multi-million dollar industry. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane who thinks they know a little something about nutrition has written a book about dieting. The Atkins diet, Jane Fonda diet, watermelon diet, seaweed diet, high-fiber diet, low-fiber diet, what-is-fiber diet, keto diet, two-day-a-week diet, one-second-a-week diet, Beverly Hills diet, cabbage soup diet…and if I continued, I would fill up the entire page for the column. Similarly with the so-called “diet food” products on the market today – that list could fill a book, not a page.
Why is it such a successful industry? Why do people go on diets in the first place?
Certain people go on special medical diets prescribed by their doctor because they are lacking something in their system. The vast (excuse the pun) majority of us, however, go on a diet to lose weight! If people in the world didn’t need to lose weight, the multi-million dollar dieting industry would…go on a diet. So why do so many people need to lose weight today?
Oy, that’s a long story – so long in fact it goes back 3,337 years, to the year of our parsha.
As slaves in Egypt, Am Yisrael ate regular food. Perhaps not the highest quality food – that is why we eat “poor man’s bread” on Pesach – but decent food nonetheless. Hashem was kind to us. Every time the women went to draw water for their husbands to drink, they found fish swimming in the water, which they fed their starving families (Bamidbar 11:5). The Erev Rav who were not enslaved were privileged to enjoy higher quality food in Egypt, meat, high quality bread, etc. (Shemot 16:3).
When Hashem freed Am Yisrael from Egypt, they ate the matzos they baked in Succot. When that ran out soon after, Hashem fed them mann, food that was ready to eat, no cooking or baking required. Food that had 120 million different flavors and textures. Food that had no waste products. You simply opened your door and there it was – an omer measure, per person, on the doormat. Welcome to the 100-star “Desert Inn” hotel! In-house laundry service, no dieticians in residence.
And that is how it was, for the tzaddikim in Am Yisrael. For the Erev Rav, things were slightly different. They had to go out of the camp to collect their mann, and although it was versatile, they still had to cook it and bake it before they had something ready to eat. But even for them, there were no dieticians and no “waist” (pun intended) products.
But human nature being what it is – beginning with the Erev Rav and then filtering down throughout Am Yisrael – they longed for that only thing NOT on the menu. Never mind that the menu had 120 million options.
Some of the mefarshim give Am Yisrael the benefit of the doubt that some were not born into a reality of slavery. They had eaten actual steak and Nile Perch fish before, and even though the mann could taste like steak and Nile Perch, it was not exactly the same eating experience. Also, Am Yisrael were alarmed that they were eating non-stop and never had to go to the bathroom. For someone who is born into the reality of having to go to the bathroom, you could easily, mistakenly, think that after a while, you will eventually explode. It took a while to understand that mann was perfectly absorbed in their bodies.
However, the hardest part of eating the mann was none of the above. For the Erev Rav, the hardest part was not having a spare loaf in your pocket (as the Ramban says, quoting Yoma 74a). To have to go to sleep at night with the uncertainty of what the next day would bring. The tzaddikim, who had unswerving trust in Hashem, did not have this problem, but the lesser in faith lived in perpetual uncertainty of their sustenance.
The true reality is that, like mann, our everyday food is totally dependent on Hashem, even today. Hashem makes it rain or not rain. He makes the crops grow, or not. We can try to control this as much as we like, with drip irrigation, with desalination, with genetic engineering, with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, etc., but at the end of the day, we cannot totally control our sustenance – not the food we eat, nor the money we earn.
The society such as the one we live in today is one where chickens are not born, they are manufactured, portioned out in plastic wrap on the supermarket shelf. Where the money we make is because of our “foresight” in putting away that savings scheme, or “wisely” investing in that hot stock option. It seems that Hashem has no part in it at all. It is all our advanced knowledge and technology, our skill, our intuition, our insight and talent, our planning for tomorrow, that we have a spare loaf in our pocket, just in case.
The lesson of the mann is to trust in Hashem and abide by his commandments. Those that did sleep well at night woke up the next day and never suffered from being overweight. The Erev Rav, however, were wiped out in kivrot hata’avah and were never heard of again.
Yes, we must do our hishtadlut. Save money for a rainy day. Invest wisely and work hard. But never, for one second, think that we are in control.
Parshat HaShavua Trivia Question: How much is an Omer measure?
Answer to Last Week’s Trivia Question: What color was the extra covering on the Shulchan only and not on the other vessels? Tola’at Shani – red (Bamidbar 4:8).
