Parashat Beha’alotcha (Numbers 11:4–6)
“We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free—the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” (Numbers 11:5)
One of the most perplexing and emotionally charged moments in the Torah unfolds in Parashat Beha’alotcha. The Israelites, sustained daily by a miracle—manna from Heaven—suddenly cry out, not in gratitude, but in complaint. They long, with startling intensity, for Egypt: “We remember the fish we ate there—for free!” It is a grotesque revision of history. Were they not enslaved in Egypt? Were they not brutalized, exploited, dehumanized? And yet in their collective memory, Egypt becomes a place of abundance and ease, while the wilderness—a landscape of divine revelation—becomes a site of deprivation and fear.
The rabbis of the Midrash are unsettled by this. How could they describe the food of Egypt as free? “Was it really given to them for free?” asks Sifrei Bamidbar. “Didn’t they labor day and night under the whip?” The Midrash answers: it was free of mitzvot. In Egypt, they were not burdened by covenant. They were not commanded. No moral obligations. No sacred responsibilities. The food came at the cost of their dignity, but not at the cost of their agency—because they had none. To be a slave, paradoxically, is to be unburdened by the weight of freedom.
This is not a superficial complaint about flavor. It is a deeper crisis—a spiritual panic. The people are afraid. Terrified, in fact. The world they once knew—however cruel—was ordered. Predictable. Egypt was oppressive, but it made sense. In the wilderness, everything is fluid. The cloud lifts without warning. The direction changes without explanation. Moses vanishes for forty days at a time. And God’s voice, while majestic, is also destabilizing. The people do not know how to live without a master. They are afraid to live with a partner.
The human psyche is wired for familiarity, even when that familiarity is painful. As psychologists have long noted, trauma survivors often recreate the dynamics of their trauma—not because they enjoy it, but because it is known. There is comfort in the predictable, even when it hurts. What the Israelites experience here is not simply nostalgia—it is the trauma response of a people who do not yet know how to be free. Freedom demands an internal architecture they do not yet possess. It requires the capacity to tolerate ambiguity, to live with responsibility, to act without coercion. And that is terrifying.
This moment, then, is not about food—it is about fear. The people are afraid of becoming. Of changing. Of stepping into the open space of covenantal life. They are afraid of God not because God is cruel, but because God gives them choices. And choice, in the aftermath of slavery, can feel like chaos. In Egypt, you knew who you were: a slave. Now, you must become something more—and you don’t yet know how.
Rashi notes that the people cried bocheh l’mishp’chotav—they cried “each man by his family.” But the Talmud (Yoma 75a) offers a subversive interpretation: they were crying over the sexual restrictions introduced by Torah. In other words, they were mourning the loss of an unbound self. They no longer belonged to Pharaoh, but neither did they belong entirely to their own appetites. Covenant imposes boundaries—not to oppress, but to elevate. And boundaries, especially after a life without dignity, can feel like loss.
The Torah does not judge this fear with cruelty. It names it. It reveals it. And in God’s response—appointing seventy elders to help Moses bear the burden—we see divine compassion for human frailty. God does not tell them to stop being afraid. God makes space for their fear and builds new structures to hold it.
But the Torah also warns us. There is a way in which fear, when left unchecked, can become idolatrous. When we mythologize the past to avoid confronting the demands of the present, we risk forfeiting our future. Egypt becomes seductive when we stop believing that freedom is worth its cost. The garlic of the past can drown out the call of Sinai.
This dynamic is not ancient history. It lives in us. We, too, are tempted to return to our own Egypts—to the habits, ideologies, or identities that once gave us structure, even if they kept us small. We romanticize “how things used to be,” not because they were better, but because we are afraid of the uncertainty ahead. We see it in communities that long to assimilate into a society that no longer makes room for Jewish particularity. We see it in the fatigue of moral complexity, the yearning for clarity at the cost of integrity. We see it in ourselves—when we know we must grow, but growth means entering the wilderness.
The Baal Shem Tov taught: It is easier to take the Jew out of Egypt than to take Egypt out of the Jew. That is not a condemnation—it is a tender truth. Egypt leaves fingerprints on the soul. It takes time, courage, and covenant to unlearn its grip.
Parashat Beha’alotcha calls us to do that work. It invites us to recognize the fear that accompanies freedom, and to honor it—but not to be ruled by it. It challenges us to name our Egypts honestly, to refuse the seduction of false memory, and to step with trembling hearts into the unknown spaces of becoming. The wilderness is not easy. But it is where we meet God. It is where we build covenant. And it is where we become a people—not because we are safe, but because we are free.
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