ויסעו מהר ההר לסבוב את ארץ אדום וגו'. וכתיב ותקצר נפש העם כיון שראו שחזרו לאחוריהם אל הדרך המדבר היה קשה בעיניהם כמות כי היו סבורין ליכנס מיד לארץ ישראל ולאכול מתבואת הארץ ועכשיו חוזרין למקום שאין מים ומזון מצויין שם. וכי תימא מה קפידא יש כאן הרי היה להם מן לכך כתיב ונפשנו קצה בלחם הקלקל אינו דומה רואה וטועם לטועם בלא ראיה שלפי שאינו רואה ממשות הדבר שאינו (שהוא) טועם ואינו נחשב בעיניו לכלום אי נמי שלא היו טועמין הטעם הטוב ההוא עד שהיו טורחין בו וטחנו בריחים או דכו במדוכה וכן משמע קרא דפרשת בהעלותך דכתיב ביה והיה טעמו כטעם לשד השמן: ויסעו מהר ההר דרך ים סוף, “they journeyed from Hor Hahar in the direction of the sea of reeds, ...making a long detour around the Land of Edom, and the people’s state of mind became very short tempered.” Their dissatisfaction was not caused by the journey, but by the fact that they traveled in the opposite direction of their objective, i.e. crossing the river Jordan. This was as hard for them to swallow as if they had been sentenced to death. They had felt until recently that they were close to their objective and would soon taste the fruit of the Holy Land and they now saw all their hopes as dissolving like an illusion. To the question what they had to complain about as long as they had manna and water, the answer is that once one has set one’s sights on something that can be enjoyed by the senses, eyes, ears, taste buds, feeling it with one’s hands and one’s sense of smell, the sameness and predictability of the manna, instead of being a sign of how G–d provided for them, became something of insignificance, קלקל, “lightweight” for them. The Torah therefore told us already in Numbers 11,8 that the manna, far from being so insubstantial, lightweight, insignificant, lent itself to grinding between stones, pounding, in a mortar, boiling in a pot, making into cakes. Moreover, it tasted like cream. [It is human nature that familiarity breeds contempt. After forty years of the same diet without getting to the destination they were seeking, the people’s reaction is understandable, although it had been due to their having displayed themselves as not yet worthy to dislodge the Canaanites from their homeland. Ed.] The pleasant taste of treated manna is also described in Numbers 11,8.