One morning when our baby was about four weeks old, I had one of those sleep-deprived spiritual insights.
I had been up most of the night, feeding, changing, rocking, and praying I wouldn’t drift off with him in my arms. At some point before dawn I found myself changing him yet again. He was lying there content and comfortable when he made the most adorable cooing sound. I smiled, bent my face close to his, and cooed right back.
He was startled.
I laughed out loud. And then I whispered to him, sweetly: What did you think? That you’ve been here alone all this time? Who do you think has been feeding you and changing you and holding you?
He had no idea.
The psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote about what he called the “holding environment,” the way a mother holds an infant before the infant has any awareness that there is a mother.
The baby experiences warmth, comfort, nourishment, but has no sense of the person behind those gifts. Maturity is learning to see the other, not just what they give you.
This is the central drama of our Torah portion, Beha’alotcha.
The Israelites in this portion are wholly taken care of. They have Manna every morning, a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, and Moses is available for every dispute. And what do they do?
At the first sign of discomfort, they cry for cucumbers.
“We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic. And now our souls are dried up, there is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes.” (Numbers 11:5)
What begins here as a cry of hunger becomes, over the next forty years, the defining trait of a generation. They don’t pray. They complain.
No one feels this more acutely than Moses. He cries out to God:
“Why have You placed the burden of this entire people upon me? Did I conceive this people? Did I give birth to them, that You should say to me, carry them in your bosom as a nursing mother carries an infant?” (Numbers 11:12)
This is the outcry of a mother exhausted by a baby who only ever cries. The people relate to God (and Moses) the way a newborn relates to its mother: as a source of provision, invisible as a person, noticed only in the moment of need or its absence.
God has become a vending machine. When it dispenses what they want, they are quiet. When it doesn’t, they wail.
The reason is not ingratitude exactly. It is spiritual immaturity. They cannot see the gift because they cannot see the Giver. All they can register is what is missing.
But the Torah does not leave us without a vision of something better.
God responds to Moses’s collapse by instructing him to gather seventy elders and endow them with prophecy. One reason is practical: to distribute the burden of leadership. But there is something else here too.
Maimonides understood prophecy not as a supernatural interruption but as the summit of spiritual development. Prophecy, he writes in the Guide for the Perplexed, is “the highest degree and greatest perfection [one] can attain.” (II:36)
Most of us will not be prophets. But I think most of us, if we have been blessed, have had moments of grace: saying you to God in prayer and tasting what it means to actually stand before our creator. Those who have felt even the edge of that encounter know it bears no resemblance to the vending machine. It is a different relationship entirely.
We are all somewhere on this spectrum between the complaining Israelites and the prophesying elders.
Infant faith is not shameful, it is human.
Most of us discover or rediscover God in the moments that undo us, when we are in desperate need of help. We cry out, and that cry is real and God receives it.
But infant faith is a beginning, not a destination.
Heschel wrote that real religious life begins not with belief but with wonder, the capacity to be astonished that anything exists at all. The complaining generation has lost that capacity. The elders have begun to recover it. They are no longer relating to God only through what He provides, but through His presence.
My baby is now nearly ten weeks old and no longer startles when I coo at him. One day he will look up and smile and call my name. Over time, God willing, he will grow to know me as my own person, and perhaps even begin, consciously, to give something back.
That is what God is waiting for.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
The Winnicott frame is doing real work here. But I want to push on something.
The complaining generation doesn’t just want cucumbers. They want Egypt. The whole package: the predictability, the identity defined by what holds you down rather than what calls you forward. Slavery at least told them who they were. The wilderness doesn’t. That’s a harder ask than manna.
What I see in American Jewish life right now, especially post-October 7, is a generation discovering that infant faith cannot hold the weight of what history is placing on us. The vending machine stopped working and the wail went up. But underneath the wail is something more interesting: the first uncomfortable recognition that God is not a service provider. That encounter costs something. It requires you to become someone.
Your son cooing back at you is not just sweet. It is the whole theological drama. The moment he smiles and reaches for your face, he has crossed from need to knowing. That crossing is what Beha’alotcha is waiting for.
Shabbat Shalom.
What a glorious description of how God cradles us throughout our lives as we grow. The startled look on your son's face will stay with me. What an apt metaphor for recognizing Sacred Presence and Sacred Challenge.
And I have to laugh a little at your euphemism "vending machine". We all know what that really means for infants! I never thought of vending machines as immature extensions of our first vending machine. Lol!