Desire and Gratitude

Beha’alotkha 5778 / 2 June 2018

In the ten years that Rebecca and I struggled through infertility, the hardest part for me came shortly after we moved to Chicago, when Odelia was about three years old and we were going through cycles of IVF in order to grow our family. Doctors use the term “secondary infertility” to describe this scenario, when the couple undergoing treatment already have one or more children in the family.

I found secondary infertility to be its own distinct experience. The painful longing of infertility was familiar – we had been through this once before – but now my yearning was complicated by the constant presence of our daughter. Activities that previously brought joy were now tinged with sadness, envy, resentment, and fear. I struggled each time work called me to a bris or baby naming. I took Odelia to the playground after school, only to find the fun of playing with her dampened by the sight of expectant mothers all around the park.

On top of all the other feelings, I felt tremendous guilt: I already had one kid, when many people I knew, facing the same fertility challenges, were not so blessed. Why wasn’t that good enough for me? Why couldn’t I just be happy with all that I had? Why did I need to want more?

There’s a curious episode, right in the middle of parashat Beha’alotkha, where the Israelites complain about not having meat.^[1] Already they’re off to a bad start, since God has provided them with a steady supply of manna – a miracle food that the parshah feels deserves a three-verse digression on its many wondrous qualities.^[2] It’s hard to miss the Israelites’ tone-deaf ingratitude, but Rashi, in his commentary, points out an even more glaring problem: we already saw that the Israelites, when leaving Egypt, took large flocks;^[3] and later on in the book of Numbers, as the Israelites prepare for their conquest of the Land of Israel, we hear again of their many cattle.^[4] It stands to reason that, here in the middle of the story, they also would have had plenty of animals. Why, then, all the fuss about meat? Why not just grab one of your lambs and have a barbecue?^[5] 

Ramban, writing 150 years later, picks up Rashi’s question and offers a potential answer. Sure, they had meat sometimes, but they didn’t have enough to eat it daily like the manna.^[6] I get where the Israelites are coming from. Manna sounds great – according to midrash, the manna would taste like whatever food you had in mind while eating it^[7] – but sometimes you want the real thing, not just the taste.

Our parshah points us toward a basic, and probably insoluble, life problem. No matter what we do, we can’t help but desire more. אֵין אָדָם יוֹצֵא מִן הָעוֹלָם וַחֲצִי תַּאֲוָתוֹ בְּיָדוֹ, our Sages tell us, “No man leaves the world with even half of his desires fulfilled.”^[8] This is fundamental to the human condition: no matter how much we have, it will never feel like enough. Moreover, in many ways our insatiable desire is a good thing. Properly oriented, our restless yearnings drive innovation and creativity; they are the engine of progress in the world. And yet even the purest, most refined desires necessarily bring with them a sense of dissatisfaction with the present, often mild but sometimes quite intense.

How do we reconcile our inevitable desire for more with our need to find contentment in the present, with what we already have? In the end, I don’t believe there is a “solution” for this problem. God has granted us two essential but conflicting urges: a driving desire for “more” and “better,” and a spiritual need for gratitude and contentment. Too little gratitude, and our lives feel thin and hollow; too little desire, and the fire within us goes cold. The Torah challenges us to hold our conflicting nature together as one, to cultivate deep and abiding gratitude within our experience of desire.

Indeed, that is precisely how our Rabbis frame prayer: נותן הודאה על שעבר וצועק על העתיד, “Give thanks for what is past and cry out for what is yet to come.”^[9] I love that they say nothing about the present, only past and future. For me, it’s a message that the immediate moment exists suspended between the ultimate permanence of the past and the mysteries of the future. Understood in this way, prayer is a spiritual practice that helps us strike a balance between gratitude and longing, past and future, however tentative that balance might be. It means that the present is always a moment of prayer.

Moreover, our tradition pushes us to recognize the truth of both of these feelings. We do want more than what we have, even as we are grateful for what we already enjoy. Without accepting both emotions, we set ourselves up for pain, crisis, and disappointment. Parashat Beha’alotkha asks each of us to consider how we hold the tension between these two essential human qualities: desire and gratitude. Our ancestors’ complaints serve as a cautionary tale lest we slip too far out of balance. The challenge before each of us, day by day, is to find a balance that allows us to embrace both feelings.

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