Eat and be satisfied- explorations on this weeks torah portion By Rabbi Jan Saltman
One of the young men with whom I am working will be chanting Deut. 11:13-21 for his Kabbalat Mitzvah. This is the text which is used as the 'second paragraph of the Shma', set there by our ancestors to convey how critical it is that we walk our talk. One of the verses addresses satiety:
וְנָתַתִּ֛י עֵ֥שֶׂב בְּשָׂדְךָ֖ לִבְהֶמְתֶּ֑ךָ וְאָכַלְתָּ֖ וְשָׂבָֽעְתָּ׃
I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle—and thus you shall eat your fill.
The standard translation is a little lame here. The text says more succinctly: you will eat and you will be satisfied. My student and I have been having some delightful conversations around the experience of being satisfied. What is the opposite state? Greed? Or perhaps just never knowing when you have enough, and don't need anymore. When is enough, enough?
In this week's Torah portion, we find the refugees complaining (one translation of the Hebrew is, whining) about how they miss eating meat. Oh, it was so much better back in Egypt! they lament. Moses goes to GD to do his own whining: Was it me that got us into this mess? How am I supposed to feed all these people? If you can't let me know what's going on, 'please kill me now'! (Numbers 11:15). And yet GD has provided manna for the people to eat, but they are still not satisfied, even though the midrash tells us that the manna tasted like whatever the eater wanted it to taste like, and filled their bellies with sustenance. The people want meat. And so GD, in a classic frustrated parental moment, declares that their wish will come true:
You shall eat not one day, not two, not even five days or ten or twenty, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you. For you have rejected יהוה who is among you, by whining before [God] and saying, ‘Oh, why did we ever leave Egypt!’” (Numbers 11:19-20)
Sure enough, there is a plague and many die. But all seem to suffer from getting more than they needed.
As I review this parasha, I am impressed with how many times the word, whine, appears. Long gone is the awareness that the people have escaped Egypt, or received Torah at Mt. Sinai. They are still thinking with their 'slave brains', waiting upon someone else to meet their needs. This state is one that marks the difference between a slave mentality and one based on volition and free agency. And this brings us back to the idea of eating and being satisfied.
At the core of satisfaction is a honed sense of gratitude. This is why most spiritual practices have some kind of a blessing before or after eating a meal. We have eaten, we are satisfied, we are grateful. Yes, there is always more that we can do, eat, or engage with to heal the brokenness of our world. Yet we are invited into the spiritual practice of being satisfied, in the moment, for all that sustains us.
Later on in Torah, in Duet. 8:10, we circle back to our text, but with an important difference:
וְאָכַלְתָּ֖ וְשָׂבָ֑עְתָּ וּבֵֽרַכְתָּ֙ אֶת־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ עַל־הָאָ֥רֶץ הַטֹּבָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר נָֽתַן־לָֽךְ׃
When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to your God יהוה for the good land given to you. Or, more succinctly translated, You ate. You were satisfied, [and now] You bless.
It is not enough to eat and feel that satiated. It becomes essential then, to bless. To raise our awareness that the food that we have just eaten came from a long line of resources: the land, the rain, the sunshine, the workers, the trucks bringing that food to market and finally to our bellies, with so many steps along the way. To bless is to complete the cycle, and gives us time at the end of a meal to really acknowledge our satiety.
We may think we don't have enough, but, my friends, we have more than enough. It is by honing this perspective that will go a long way towards healing ourselves and our planet. May it be so!
--- Rabbi Jan
