Daily Bread, Daily Dread: When Manna Meets Anxiety

In our Gemara on Amud Aleph we find Rav Bevai excusing himself from a particular Torah analytic discussion due to his stress over his basic food security. He drew reference to a Biblical prophetic curse, “And you shall have no assurance of your life”; this is referring to one who relies on the baker [hapalter] to give him bread because he has no grain of his own. (Devarim 28:66.)

Rav Yisrael Salanter (Ohr Yisroel, Kochvei Ohr, 11) raised a contradiction from a Gemara Yoma (76a) which states:

“The students of Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai asked him: Why didn’t the manna fall for the Jewish people just once a year to take care of all their needs, instead of coming down every day?

He said to them: I will give you a parable: To what does this matter compare? To a king of flesh and blood who has only one son. He granted him an allowance for food once a year and the son greeted his father only once a year, when it was time for him to receive his allowance. So he arose and granted him his food every day, and his son visited him every day.”

“So too, in the case of the Jewish people, someone who had four or five children would be worried and say: Perhaps the manna will not fall tomorrow and we will all die of starvation. Consequently, everyone directed their hearts to their Father in heaven every day. The manna that fell each day was sufficient only for that day, so that all of the Jewish people would pray to God for food for the next day.”

According to our Gemara and the Biblical prophecies, the inability to know from one day to the next is a curse, yet according to the Gemara Yoma, that very same scarcity was a blessing! How is this possible?”

Rav Salanter explains that it is all a matter of how you take it. When a person is suffering from lack of faith, the lack of food security will distract and disturb him. If he has faith it will cause him to rely even more on God and his faith will be strengthened as he receives divine sustenance. The same experience can be a curse or a blessing.

(Rav Salanter does not mention our Gemara and I wonder how he would interpret Rav Bevai’s attitude. Possibly he felt Rav Bevai, on his level, was indeed being honest and self-rebuking for his anxiety.)

This idea that blessing and curse are from the same source is consistent with the following Gemara Succah (52a) about the end times:

“In the future, at the end of days, God will bring the evil inclination and slaughter it in the presence of the righteous and in the presence of the wicked. For the righteous the evil inclination appears to them as a high mountain, and for the wicked it appears to them as a mere strand of hair. These weep and those weep. The righteous weep and say: How were we able to overcome so high a mountain? And the wicked weep and say: How were we unable to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)