Israel Lacked Nothing in the Desert. Then Children Begged for Bread

The cruelest pairing in the Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval compilation of rabbinic material assembled by Rabbi Shimon HaDarshan in thirteenth-century Germany from earlier Talmudic and midrashic sources, is not about a big theological concept. It is about a piece of bread.

At Yalkut Shimoni on the Prophets 1026:10, the rabbis place one of Moses's most tender lines from the book of Deuteronomy directly beside one of the most wretched lines from the book of Lamentations. The Moses line is a boast of divine care. The Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hand. He has known your walking through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing (Deuteronomy 2:7).

You have lacked nothing. The Hebrew is almost embarrassed by its own completeness. Lo chasarta davar. You have not been short of a single thing.

Moses is speaking in the last year of his life, on the plain of Moab, to a generation born in the desert. He wants them to know, before he dies, how completely God has been carrying them. The previous generation had eaten manna every morning for forty years. Their clothes had not worn out (Deuteronomy 8:4). Their feet had not blistered. The Mekhilta, the tannaitic midrash on Exodus compiled in second-century Palestine, collects traditions in which the cloud of glory itself laundered their garments and the sandals of children grew in pace with the children's feet. Moses is not exaggerating. He is reminding them. You have lacked nothing. Say the word nothing out loud and let the sound of it sit in the mouth, he is telling them. That is what forty years under the hand of God looks like.

Now turn the page. Turn eight centuries forward to the ruins of the Jerusalem these same people eventually built and failed. Jeremiah is inside the burning city, or just outside of it, watching what comes after a two-year Babylonian siege finally breaks the walls. He opens his mouth to describe what he sees and writes one of the shortest, ugliest verses in the Hebrew Bible. The tongue of the suckling cleaves to the roof of its mouth for thirst. The young children ask for bread, and no one breaks it for them (Lamentations 4:4).

The young children ask for bread. The verb is shaal, to ask, to request. A small word. A child's word. The image is a line of children standing in the rubble of a city that had once boasted of lacking nothing, holding out their cupped hands, asking, and no one breaking it for them. Ein porais lahem. No one breaks it. The Hebrew makes it worse. It is not that nobody had food. It is that nobody had any reason to share a piece of it anymore. The bond between mother and child that even animals honor has broken in the siege. Lamentations 4:10, two verses later, makes the horror explicit. The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children. The rabbis who read that verse out loud in synagogue on Tisha B'Av every year have always stumbled at it. Some traditions allow the reader to drop his voice to a whisper for that line alone.

The Yalkut puts Moses and Jeremiah side by side and says nothing. It just lets the reader hold the two sentences in the same hand. Forty years without lacking anything. Two years of siege without enough bread to break.

Lamentations Rabbah, the Palestinian midrash on the book of Lamentations probably compiled in the fifth century, pushes on the verse until it nearly bleeds. One passage imagines a mother in the last days of the siege, crouched in a courtyard with her last handful of flour, counting it grain by grain. She makes a small cake. She is about to feed it to her child. A neighbor leans in through the doorway and asks for a taste. The mother refuses. The neighbor stumbles away. An hour later, the neighbor's child has already died of hunger, and then the mother's own child has died, and the mother is left holding the cake she would not share, in a city where every mouth has closed for the last time.

The rabbis' grief on this verse is a grief about memory. They cannot stop remembering Moses's boast. You have lacked nothing. They repeat it to themselves in the middle of the catastrophe. The midrash imagines the old rabbis of the first generation of exile walking out of the city in chains, muttering the Deuteronomy line under their breath as a private accusation against themselves. For forty years we lacked nothing. We became a people who took bread for granted. We forgot what the hand looked like when it was held out empty. And now our grandchildren are dying holding out empty hands in our own streets.

The theological weight of the pairing is heavier than the weight of either verse on its own. The Torah does not give you abundance without also reminding you what the opposite of abundance looks like when it comes. The rabbis noticed that Moses's speech in Deuteronomy 2 is not simply a comfort. It is also a warning. You have lacked nothing. Do not become the people who forget what nothing is.

Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, his seven-volume synthesis of rabbinic tradition published between 1909 and 1938, preserves a rabbinic tradition that on the night the First Temple burned in 586 BCE, Moses was called out of his unmarked grave in Moab by the angels of the patriarchs. The patriarchs wanted a witness. They wanted Moses to see what the grandchildren of the people he had led out of Egypt had become. In Ginzberg's compilation Moses goes down to the city and walks among the children who are dying of thirst and hunger on the steps of their own houses, and he puts his face in his hands and says, in the same breath in which he had once said You have lacked nothing, How could I have lacked such a thing as this? The phrase is the same phrase. The grammar has been broken in half. Moses is using his own word against himself.

That is the reading the Yalkut wants. Not that God lied to Moses. Not that the provision of the wilderness was false. But that the memory of provision can become unbearable when you are standing in the ruin. The rabbis put the two verses side by side so that every Jewish reader who has ever celebrated a Passover meal remembering how God fed them manna will also remember, in the same mouthful, that there were Jewish children who died on Jerusalem streets with their hands cupped for bread that no one would give.

The Yalkut closes the entry with the silence the rabbis always leave for the hardest verses. No commentary. No softening. Just two sentences written by two prophets in the same language, in the same covenant, about the same people, eight centuries apart. The second one cancels nothing the first one said. That is the worst part. Both are true.