Avot290

נושא: Avot

BET MIDRASH VIRTUALI

Ten miracles were performed for our ancestors in Egypt and ten at the [Red] Sea. In the desert, ten times did our ancestors try the Omnipresent, blessed be He; as it is said [Numbers 14:22] These ten times have they tried me and not listened to my voice.

6:
The last item in our present mishnah refers to the ten times that the Israelites tried God during their wandering through the wilderness of Sinai. The biblical verse which is quoted [Numbers 14:22] seems to state quite categorically that our ungrateful and quarrelsome ancestors tried God's patience exactly ten times:

These ten times have they tried me and not listened to my voice.

However, a phrase such as this occurs elsewhere in the bible, and most modern translations take the idiom to mean something like "many times" or "dozens of times". The latest JPS version translates our verse as follows:

None of the men who have seen My Presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried Me these many times and have disobeyed Me, shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers.

And when Job rages against God [Job 19:2-3] the JPS renders his complaint thus:

How long will You grieve my spirit,and crush me with words? Time and again You humiliate me, and are not ashamed to abuse me.

7:
However, none of this was of any concern to the sages who, of course, understood the biblical text literally. If God says that the Israelites tried His patience "these ten times" it behoves them to ascertain which those ten times were and in what manner God's patience was tried in each one of them.

8:
The first trial of God's patience was at the Red Sea itself [Exodus 14:11-12]. With the sea before them and the Egyptians closing in behind the Israelites, who scarcely a week before had beheld God's majestic power at the event of the exodus, starting moaning:

And they said to Moses, "Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness’?"

9:
The next trial was very soon after, at Marah [Exodus 15:23-24]. After successfully navigating the Red Sea and witnessing the final debacle of the Egyptian forces the people move into the wilderness of Sinai and for three days they found no water.

They came to Marah, but they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter; that is why it was named Marah. And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, "What shall we drink?"

10:
After water had been supplied to them miraculously the people started complaining that they had no food. Once again they rounded on Moses, God's representative [Exodus 16:3]:

The Israelites said … "If only we had died by the hand of God in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death."

11:
Now we come to the fourth test of God's patience. God's response to the moaning just mentioned was to send down the manna. Together with the manna came the instruction that all the manna collected each day was to be consumed that same day and not left over until the morrow [Exodus 16:20].

But they paid no attention to Moses; some of them left of it until morning, and it became infested with maggots and stank.

But this was not the only act of disobedience in connection with the manna.

To be continued.

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