Parshat Chukat: Snakes on a Plain

ותקצר נפש העם בדרך AND THE SOUL OF THE PEOPLE WAS MUCH DISCOURAGED BECAUSE OF THE WAY — because of the difficulties of the journey which were so hard for them. They said: Now we are close enough to enter the land, and yet we have to turn back. Just so had our fathers to turn back and they stayed in the wilderness thirty eight years until this day. —Consequently their soul became discouraged because of the hardship of the journey. In Old French, "En cure del tour." For anything that is hard for a man to bear, the expression “the shortening of soul” (קצור נפש) is applicable - he is like a person upon whom trouble comes and his mind is not large enough to contain that matter and there is no room in his heart for that worry to abide there. Of the thing that causes the trouble the term “large” is used, denoting that it is too huge and heavy for a person... To sum up the explanation: the phrase “shortening of the soul through a thing” signifies that one cannot bear it — that the mind cannot bear it.

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.