Complaints and Cover-Ups: Blaming the Leader as a Smokescreen |
How Desert Grievances Became a Smokescreen for Blaming the Leader
Parashat Beha’alotcha shows us a deep human riddle that helps us understand people in every generation. The People of Israel had just left Mount Sinai—the place where they saw open miracles and heard *Kol Hashem* (the voice of G-d) standing together as one—and they finally started their march to the Promised Land. Everything was going smoothly: G-d’s presence was undeniably among them, resting over the Mishkan (the Tabernacle), and the future looked bright.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere and without any real crisis, everything flips: *”And the people were as murmurers.”* The nation breaks down in tears. With a totally twisted memory of the past, they start crying for the *”fish we ate in Egypt for free,”* and complain that they are sick and tired of the Manna—the bread coming down from heaven.
Rashi explains that the word *mit’onanim* (murmurers) comes from the word *to’anah*—which means looking for an excuse. In other words, they were simply looking for a pretext to distance themselves from G-d. The Children of Israel were not actually hungry, and they weren’t lacking anything; the Manna took care of all their needs perfectly. They were just looking for a convenient excuse—a smokescreen to hide a much deeper, scarier truth.
Why would people who lived with G-d’s presence undeniably among them look for reasons to be bitter? To understand this, we have to look at the psychology of displacement. Displacement is a mental trick where our minds take big, scary feelings like fear, anxiety, or frustration, and........