Dry sere lan
where you cry to the sky
for bread,
Trial by ordeal
What is your hunger?
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This chapter is built
around the poles of "remember" (z'kh'r) and "forget" (sh'k'kh);
"coming" into the Land, and the wandering through the desert, and the
definitive relationship to food. Do you hunger or are you satiated, and from
whence does your food come:
"Remember the way
which God your Lord led you through the way of the wilderness these forty
years," says Moses. Yet in defining what must not be forgotten, Moses also
presents a new vision of the desert experience: "to afflict and to test
you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his
commands. He afflicted you and starved you, feeding you with manna,
which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not
live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God."
For the first time, albeit
only in implicit backhand, and we get Israel's experience of the desert
experience. If in the Books of Numbers and Exodus, the nation seemed like
ungrateful "complainers," here we are told that the desert wandering
was not the protective cocoon of the "pillar of fire" we might have thought.
It was an "affliction" (a'n'a--the same root used for modern
Hebrew "torture" and for "poverty"); a scrambling for
existence on the edge of hunger, a long and wear way through "the great and dreadful wilderness, wherein were
serpents, fiery serpents, and scorpions, and thirsty ground where was no
water". The desert journey was a protracted trial by ordeal, stripping the nation
down to bedrock, until God is engraved in their bones.
Not for
nothing did they complain again and again, begging for death and peace.
It is this
experience strung between "hunger" and "thirst" that must
define the relationship to the "good land" flowing with water. The
edge must always remain below the plenty, so the nation is always aware
that this "power" can disappear as easily as it comes, and they once
more can slip into oblivion].
