Shabbos Parashas Beha'aloscha - 5776
Shabbos Parashas Beha'aloscha - 5776
Rabbi Hal Miller
The rabble that was among them cultivated a craving, and the children of Israel also
turned and wept, and said, Who will feed us meat? [Bamidbar 11:4]
Who was this rabble, this erev rav? What were they trying to accomplish? On the first
question, commentators tend to fall into one of two camps. Either the rabble were non-Jews
who wanted to get out of Egypt, and just hooked up with Israel, or they were Jews who were
grumbling about everything going on around them.
If they were non-Jews, what was their purpose here? Why were they with Israel in the
first place? When G-d brought His strength against Egypt, all those living there were witness
to that strength. All of them were afraid, yet most of them stayed in Egypt when Israel left.
Who, then, went along? The lowest of Egyptian society, prisoners, slaves, outcasts, or as Rashi
says, "those shunted aside among them because of their lowliness, these are the erev
rav." What they wanted was a chance to raise their status and increase their own material
wealth. They were not interested in G-d, Torah, morals, nor values.
If they were Jews, what was their purpose? Nechama Leibowitz and others refer to them as
the "grumblers". These are people who complain about everything, whether they have a
valid reason or not. If they are given exactly what they ask for, they will complain that they
now want something different. They want to raise their status, increase their material
wealth, increase their power, etc. They are not interested in G-d, Torah, morals, nor values.
In other words, who made up the erev rav isn't important. What they represent is. These
people were all about materialsm or about power. They wanted to take, to kill, to destroy.
Nobody argues that Korach was trying to better the Jewish people or improve humanity's
relationship with G-d. Nobody argues that going back to Egypt for free fish would do either
of those.
The people that declared na'aseh v'nishmah, we will do and we will hear, promising to
follow G-d and His Torah, were not looking for personal gain. They were interested in
improving their spiritual status. They knew that their material wealth was at risk, leaving
for an unknown land. The grumblers were at the spiritual "edge of the camp" in this respect.
This is not an Orthodox-versus-Reform situation. Those are disagreements about how
best to serve G-d. Such disagreements may at times be divisive, and need to be
resolved, but that's for another time.
Here, we are dealing with people who have no wish to be divisive. They are instead
looking to be destructive. They are out to destroy the new nation, to end its quest to
improve its relationship with G-d, and in the end, to end that relationship entirely.
Jews may differ with each other, regularly. The erev rav were people who did not
want to differ, they just wanted to destroy. It sounds exactly like the menace the
world is facing today. We must stand together, despite differences, to end this
menace, and keep on our mission.