[Exclusive] The Manna, Part 2

In this episode Rabbi Fohrman puts the bitter herbs - maror - under a microscope. Why do we need to hold onto a reminder of our slavery, during a Passover seder that represents freedom? Drawing from a principle of teshuvah - repentance, our hosts carve out an incredible principle in human psychology and what it takes to heal from trauma.

Can't Skip the Bitter (to Get to the Sweet)

(Verse 1) In Egypt the bread held the taste of our tears 

Sourdough—you couldn't tell where it stopped 

The sourness baked into four hundred years 

Until the whole batch was bitter and locked

But God didn't hand us the honey that night

 Didn't say: forget it, here's something new 

He gave us flat bread with bitter alongside— 

Separated. Still there. Still true.

(Chorus) You can't skip the bitter to get to the sweet

 You can't leave the sorrow behind 

The only way forward is going back through it 

One morning at a time

(Verse 2) The manna came later, the honey came slow 

Forty years of daily bread 

Each day God was asking: do you believe now 

that you’re more than the tears that you’ve shed?

And every spring we sit down at the table 

Flat bread and bitter, side by side 

Not because we're still slaves—because we remember 

What it took to come back alive

(Chorus) You can't skip the bitter to get to the sweet 

You can't leave the sorrow behind 

The only way forward is going back through it

One morning at a time

(Bridge) Each day the same question falling

Like bread upon the ground:

Are you more than what was done to you?

Are you more than what you've done?

(Verse 3) Two families broken, made into one 

He said: leave the past where it lies

Build something new now, the future's begun 

But nobody asked who we were before the goodbyes

And forty years later I knocked on her door 

I said there's something I never did right

 I never once asked you to tell me the story 

Of who held your hand through the long, long night

(Chorus) Tell me about your mother 

What was it like when she was yours? 

Tell me about your mother I should have asked you this before

You can't skip the bitter to get to the sweet 

You can't leave the sorrow behind

 The only way forward is going back through it 

And that's what I'm doing this time

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Transcript

Rabbi David Fohrman: Hey, Imu, nice to see you again. When we're recording this, it's actually right around the time of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkos. And I wanted to share with you, Imu, something that I noticed on Yom Kippur Day that resonates, I think, pretty deeply with the work that we've been doing about the manna and Korban Pesach.

Imu Shalev: Welcome back, everybody. I gotta say, that was not what I expected to hear when I sat down with Rabbi Foreman. Yom Kippur. What could that possibly have to do with the season on the manna, Korban Pesach and matzah? We ended our last session saying that we were going to go deeper into the strange culinary progression that we were seeing in the Exodus story about what it means for the Israelites to go from eating chametz or sourdough of Egypt, to the neutral matzah with bitter herbs on Pesach night, to plain matzah when we first enter the desert, and finally to the sweet manna that eventually sustains us on the way to the land of Israel. So I was genuinely suspect of how anything that popped up in Rabbi Fohrman's mind on Yom Kippur, a day of teshuvah, repentance and forgiveness of our sins, could possibly be relevant here. But I consider myself an open minded guy and I was willing to hear him out. So to begin our journey, he took me to a verse quoted in the Yom Kippur prayers about God removing our sins. Let's head over to that verse along with Rabbi Fohrman and see what he found. I'm Imu Shalev and this is Aleph Beta's, a book like no other, generously sponsored by Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum.

Rabbi David Fohrman: So if I could bring you into the machzor. There we quote a verse, and the verse is from Isaiah. אָנֹכִי אָנֹכִי הוּא מֹחֶה פְשָׁעֶיךָ לְמַעֲנִי – "I, I am the one who blots out and erases your sins for my own sake, and your sins I will not remember." So the little game I was playing with myself is, is Isaiah's calling back from some earlier point in Tanach, playing off of an earlier verse, an earlier idea. Is there a time when God himself is speaking? God specifically uses the words mocheh. And we also have sin in the foreground. It's a very big issue. And there's this notion of God blotting out, erasing, or completely rubbing out. And God is the one who's talking in first person about the whole thing. When would those three elements come together for you?

Imu Shalev: This is flood language.

Rabbi David Fohrman: It's the flood. Turn back to Genesis right before the flood. Let's look at God's words. Genesis 6.

Imu Shalev: I don't remember. Oh, here we go. Genesis 6, verse 7. I'm about to say I don't remember erasing, but here we go. וַיֹּאמֶר יְקוָה אֶמְחֶה אֶת הָאָדָם אֲשֶׁר בָּרָאתִי מֵעַל פְּנֵי הָאֲדָמָה מֵאָדָם עַד בְּהֵמָה עַד רֶמֶשׂ וְעַד עוֹף הַשָּׁמָיִם כִּי נִחַמְתִּי כִּי עֲשִׂיתִם – "God says, I shall erase humanity that I've created from before the face of the earth, from man to animal, from creeping things and to bird of the heavens, because I have regretted making them."

Rabbi David Fohrman: So God is going to blot out, erase, rub out man from upon the face of the earth. So here you have Isaiah, years later, coming back and has another first verse of God speaking. אָנֹכִי אָנֹכִי הוּא מֹחֶה. Again, the word is mocheh to erase. And sin is once again in the foreground. But astonishingly, something different happens, right? God says, what am I going to erase? I'm not going to erase man. What am I going to erase instead?

Imu Shalev: Man's sin.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Man's sin. God says, all right, here's what I'm gonna do. Instead of destroying man because of his sins, instead of rubbing out man, why don't I rub out the sins and preserve man? Now that sounds like a good plan. But like, if you were one of the ministering angels of God with your little skeptical cap on, and God says, I have a new plan, I think I'm going to just rub out the sins instead of rub out man, right? Your little cynical, ministering angel Imu might come along and say, hold on, God, I have a little objection here. What would you say?

Imu Shalev: I would say, like, what do you mean you're going to rub out sin? Are we just going to pretend it didn't happen? It's what they did.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Exactly. How exactly are you going to do that? How are you going to come along and magically just wipe away the sin? It has become part and parcel of humanity. Their identity is enmeshed and tied up in sin. How are you possibly going to do this? Enter the role of teshuvah. That's the whole point of teshuvah, to separate you and sin. That's why we call it azivat hachet. The whole point of teshuvah is we withdraw yourself when sin has started to become part of your identity, part of who you are. That's really the problem with sin. It's not just that you've done something bad. It's that your identity starts to suffer. You start to become enmeshed in these deeds. But God says it is possible for you to change. And what you need to do in change is like, don't worry about the dirtiness of sin. That's not your job. That's my job. I'll deal with that. Your job is to separate yourself from the sin. To simply say, there is me and there is this thing that I've done. The Rambam is very interesting, the way the Rambam talks about it. It's that part of teshuvah is not just stopping the sin behaviorally, but cognitively stopping to obsess about it.

Because that's how we separate our identity from sin. We say, okay, I'm sort of shutting down the fantasy machine of, like, when am I going to get back and do this? So all of a sudden, there's a separation between myself and my sin. Now you can come back, cynical angel, and you could say, oh, but he's still sinful. He did this terrible thing. He's living with it. It's right alongside of him. And for that, God comes along and says, no, no, no, I have a plan now. I'm going to come, I'm going to wash away the sin. The sin is now separate from man, and that can go. It strikes me that something very similar to this process is going on in the manna and Korban Pesach material.

Imu Shalev: I'm sort of shocked right now. I don't see how that would be true, but curious to see where you're going.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Okay, so let me take you there. I was quite captivated with the way that the connections between Exodus 16 and Exodus 12 shed light on one particular idea, that is the meaning of Passover as a chag matzah. Because, frankly, it's always been strange. Thinking about Passover matzah seems like such an ancillary part of the day, right? The notion that, okay, so we were redeemed very quickly, we didn't have enough time for our bread to rise. And so forevermore we all have to have unleavened bread. And even if there is this mitzvah to eat unleavened bread, matzah. Why is it so terrible to have chametz? I mean, look, if it's just a little symbolic thing, so, fine, we'll eat our matzah. We'll remember. Yes, came out very quickly. We eat our matzah. But I literally cannot have any chametz anywhere in my house. Such a strange thing. But the lens that the manna points on it, it was very fascinating. What you showed was that among the manifold connections between the story of manna and the story of Korban Pesach, you showed that basically the manna seems to be a new kind of retelling of Korban Pesach, some other version of the Korban Pesach event.

But one of the ways that this is true is in the quality of the bread that we eat. You showed that we're eating sweet bread. We're eating bread that reminds us of the future, rather than bread that reminds us of the past. It's specifically bread that reminds us of honey. טַעְמוֹ כְּצַפִּיחִת בִּדְבָשׁ – "It tastes like a wafer dipped in honey" (Exodus 16:31). And of course, we're on the way to a land of milk and honey. And God seems to be saying, look, I can provide you bread, but it's sweet bread. Right? And then what we began to see was there's this three stage process. And the three stage process has to do with the nature of bread. Bread can either be sour bread, bread can be neutral, or bread can be sweet.

Imu Shalev: Ah, okay, got it. I see where you're going.

Rabbi David Fohrman: See where we're going.

Imu Shalev: Okay, right.

Rabbi David Fohrman: And what happened was that in Egypt, our experience was that of bitterness. And it's almost as if the bitterness that they experience manifests itself in the bread that they eat. We talked about that Egypt is the inventor of sourdough bread. For us, the sour bread became emblematic of our sour experience. And somehow that begins to change the night that we leave. So let's go back and read that one more time. Here's this night, and it's the night that the nation of Israel is born. And that new birth is accompanied by a feast. And in that feast, there's bread to eat. But וַאֲכָלוּ אֶת הַבָּשָׂר בַּלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה צְלִי אֵשׁ וּמַצּוֹת עַל מְרֹרִים יֹאכְלֻהוּ – "There are two interesting qualities about the bread" (Exodus 12:8). Instead of regular sourdough bread, which is known as se'or or chametz – in other words, the idea is that dough that rises, rises because of this vinegary sour taste within it. If you ever taste sourdough bread, the reason why it tastes good is because the same reason bittersweet chocolate tastes good, there's something bitter actually about the bread. It is sour dough. And the sourness of the dough, the fermented quality of the dough is something which you actually taste.

So there are two innovations that have to do with this bread. Innovation number one of the bread that we eat in Exodus 12 is, it is no longer sourdough. It is matzah. So there is no sourness at all in the bread. It's not sweet, but it's completely neutral. It tastes like nothing. But fascinatingly, what do we do? We eat it עַל מְרֹרִים – צְלִי אֵשׁ וּמַצּוֹת עַל מְרֹרִים יֹאכְלֻהוּ. So I would stop and say, Imu, if the whole point is God, on this night that we're born, doesn't want us to have a sour experience with bread, then why is he commanding us to eat it al m'rorim, to eat bitter herbs right along with our bread? What's the point of doing it this way, where the dough is not sour, but I'm eating it with m'rorim?

Imu Shalev: It feels like a lab experiment, a safe experience. Like you're still replaying the experience of the bitterness without the actual bitter bread. You're making fake bitter bread.

Rabbi David Fohrman: I've separated the bitterness from the bread. The first stage in rehabilitation is separate the problem. Keep the problem there, but just separate it. The same way that teshuvah separates sin from person, but the sin is still there. Pesach separates sourness from bread, but the sourness is still there.

Imu Shalev: So that's why we got into a whole mechanics of sin conversation. You need some neutral territory. You need some ability to actually leave the sin behind before you could even change, which I think the Rambam's formulation before you can actually just magically transform into another person. You can actually distinguish between who you are and the sin, which will allow you to then go on and change. So that is really, really cool. And now I could see how this applies really nicely to the matzah situation as well, which is that there was trauma associated with the bread. The bread was quite bitter. And so let's stop right there.

Rabbi David Fohrman: If I interview you, you're a traumatized Israelite, right?

Imu Shalev: Yeah.

Rabbi David Fohrman: And I say, hey, I'm God. It's all going to be better now. Here's your manna. Here's your sweet bread. The land of milk and honey. It's waiting over the corner. Why is that not going to work so well for you?

Imu Shalev: First of all, it's very jarring, but it also doesn't relate to who I've been my entire life and who my father has been and who my grandfather has been.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Feels like God. Do you even see me? Do you even get what's going on with me? Look at me. Do I look ready to go into the land of milk and honey singing the Munchkin song as we walk around the yellow brick road? Do I look like Dorothy is skipping along the path with Toto? No. I'm weighed down by pain, by suffering. I find a certain comfort in eating the sour bread because I feel like my food reflects my experience. The problem is, if that's your experience and that's endemic to your experience, and I can't tell where Imu ends and the bitterness begins, how am I ever going to redeem you? And yet you can't go to somebody who has PTSD and it's like, come on. Like, life is fine. Forget the past. If the past is part of me and you asked me to go forward without it, I feel like you're not even honoring me. Right. You don't see me. You don't care about me.

Imu Shalev: If I were in Egypt, I would want to be freed on a very base level. But if we're not going to relate to what just happened to us, that would be pretty devastating.

Rabbi David Fohrman: I don't know if this is going to make it end, but it reminds me of, you know, when I was a little kid. I lost my father when I was very young. I was 12, and my mom remarried two years later, and we joined a family in New York, and that family had also lost a parent. Both of our stories were terrible. We both lost parents to cancer. We were really two grieving families, and our parents married one another. And, you know, it was a different time. But you can imagine, if your parents marrying each other and you want to make sure all of your kids get along, what would be the strategy that you could employ? And the strategy that my stepfather kind of employed that he told his kids is like, look, the past is the past, but there's a bright future ahead. And this is this great family who's coming and merging with ours, and they're not going to dwell on their past, and you're not going to dwell on your past, and you're all going to go forward and build this happy future together and that's what you're supposed to do, right?

And this is what the kids thought they were supposed to do. When we came in the family now, there was this, I think, panic underneath the surface, which is like, you know, does each one see the other side? And everyone had the best of intentions, and these were wonderful people, and thank God, eventually the family came together beautifully. And to this day, I'm amazed at the way the other side of the family has accepted my mother and feels so close to her. But I'll tell you. I had an experience just last week. I knocked on the door of one of my stepsisters, and I said, you know, it's the teshuvah season, and it's the time when we look back with regret, and I have something that I regret, and I don't feel like it was a sin, and I don't feel like weighed down by it, but it is something I regret, but it's more than 40 years old, and I want to tell you about it. So I sat down with her at the table, and she said, what is it that you regret? And I said, you know, when I came into the family, I feel terrible that I never really sat you down and said, tell me about your mother, and tell me about what it was like to lose her.

And those were such important parts of your life. And I should have been curious about that, and I should have just sat down and asked you those questions, and I never did. And I feel terrible that I never asked you that. So I'm asking you that now. And it wasn't like I didn't know anything about her mother. Of course I did. But I wanted to hear from her the richness of her own experience with her. What was it like for her to be your mother? What was that relationship between you? What was it like for you to see her sick? What was it like for you to nurse her? What was it like to hear that she died? What was it like afterwards? And she told me, and she thanked me for that conversation, and she just said it was a different time, and we were supposed to create this beautiful new future without the past. But I said, but look how different it could have been. You know, if I could have asked you those questions and you could have asked me those questions, you would have felt comfortable that I wasn't coming to take those memories away.

I was coming to honor them. And you would have felt honored as a full person, and we all would have felt honored as full people. And interestingly enough, one of the things she became later on, just as a hobby, is actually a grief counselor, specifically to people in blended families. And she says, I'm going to take this conversation into my grief counseling work. And I don't think it's a coincidence that she's a grief counselor. I mean, she took all of those memories of her own life and eventually processed them as an adult and went back and did that kind of work. And this little conversation that we had was part of that work. But it all goes to show that there's no such thing as leaving the bitterness behind. God can't come and say, hey, this is the night of freedom and I've got news for you. And it's called manna. And it is this great, wondrous, beautiful bread. And it's perfect, right? Just have it and forget about the past. But on the other hand, he also can't keep you a sourdough because the sourdough was a kind of way that you were almost consoled for your bitterness.

Those nights that you cried into your bed when you thought no one was listening to you, God wasn't listening to you, no one was listening to your bitterness. You tasted your sourdough bread and you at least said, the bread understands my bitterness. And this bread is some sort of expression of what it is that I feel. And somehow it felt a little bit better to go to bed at night maybe knowing that you had that sour bread in your belly. And God says that has to change. But I can't take away the bitterness. What I have to do is I have to separate you from the bitterness. And that's kind of the first stage PTSD, right? I have to separate you from the bitterness. Those memories, you can honor them, but they're not the same thing as you. They're not ingrained in you. And so God says, I'm giving you the bitterness. You can have these bitter herbs that are separate from your bread, but separate the bread from the bitterness. If you see yourself reflected in the bread that you eat, then start by changing the bread. Start by saying, the bread is neutral bread, but there's bitterness that comes along with the bread.

And eat that and understand that your bitterness is there and it has to be honored. But it's not you, it's separate from you. And that's the first thing you need to learn that night. And therefore, the holiday is a holiday where we have neutral bread that the first night we eat it with bitterness, but then we don't eat it with bitterness anymore, then we just have neutral bread. And what don't we have? Sourdough. Because sourdough is the kind of bread which you can't tell where the sourness stops and the bread starts. So שִׁבְעַת יָמִים מַצּוֹת תֹּאכֵלוּ אַךְ בַּיּוֹם הָרִאשׁוֹן תַּשְׁבִּיתוּ שְּׂאֹר מִבָּתֵּיכֶם – "Eat neutral bread. But starting from the first day, there's no more sourdough" (Exodus 12:15). You've gotta take that break from sourdough. And once I have bread with separate bitterness, then I can let go of the bitterness. The bitterness has been heard as a separate part, but now that it's separate, it can slowly be dropped.

Imu Shalev: While I had been skeptical initially, I really appreciated how Rabbi Fohrman had linked together the need to separate ourselves from our sins with the need to slowly separate ourselves from our trauma. But taking a moment to really reflect on this connection, something felt a little bit off to me. Something about comparing the entire process of leaving behind sin and working through trauma just didn't feel right. And I shared that discomfort with Rabbi Forman.

Imu Shalev: I just want to ask, in your conception of things, the way you talked about sin and being able to leave sin behind, it made sense to me. Like, I want to change. We've got to go to, like, neutral ground and separate myself from the sin. But when you talk about trauma, it doesn't quite feel the same to me as, like, let's leave this behind. I like the part where you sort of have to honor it, and I can understand that you do have to let it go in order to go forward. The metaphors here are really interesting because they line up right, like Egypt is in our past, trauma's in our past, sweetness, land of milk and honey is in our future. All those metaphors work. And yet I wonder, once you compared personal pain to trauma and to sin, do you see those as different? As, like, no sin you leave behind, but you always have personal pain because it's all of you to some extent, and you take it forward with you.

Rabbi David Fohrman: So I see the process as almost exactly the same with sin. The first step with sin is that you have to separate yourself from the sin. But don't lie to yourself. Separating yourself from the sin does not mean that you have nothing to do with sin. It just means that sin does not suffuse you, so that you can't tell the difference between you and the sin. Because if I can't tell the difference between you and the sin, the only possibility is getting rid of you because you're so suffused with it.

Imu Shalev: So it's not so much separate yourself from the sin. It's actually like quarantine the sin within you or understand that the sin is not all of you and kind of remember who you are in the larger scheme of things.

Rabbi David Fohrman: It almost, in a deep way, suggests to me that the main work of teshuvah is really returning to who you are without sin, removing the sin from the identity of me. I accept that this is what I've done. I have responsibility that I've done. It feels almost like I'm walking with this chain and this ankle weight that I'm dragging around, these deeds that I'm not proud of, but they are separate from me, and I can see what I look like without them defining me. Once you've done that, teshuvah is complete. I would say so.

Imu Shalev: I think that that's very poignant. And you're comparing it again to trauma in your past. I think that there's something stunning to learn from that, because you really can't leave it in the past. If you think about it, this maror matzah ritual, it's done in every generation. And that actually, like, I'm getting the chills. But can you imagine that the generation that was in bondage is told that Imu Shalev, you know, thousands of years later, is gonna hold a Seder where he's going to remember your trauma despite the fact that he's been free. And, you know, your people have been free for thousands of years.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Yeah, beautiful.

Imu Shalev: And it's like the gift you gave your sister. Right. Actually saying, tell me now. I couldn't do it then, but I can do it now. Tell me now. And it's funny, it's reminding me of a different story. I just listened to an episode of Heavyweight. Do you know the podcast Heavyweight?

Rabbi David Fohrman: I haven't heard it, but I know it exists.

Imu Shalev: So this is Jonathan Goldstein, and what he does is really stories of teshuvah, stories of people who've had some rupture in their past, where they come years later and they repair it. So the episode that I listened to is this guy who was a bank robber. He begins the story anonymous because he's so ashamed. He doesn't want to tell you his name, but he tells the story of how he robbed a bank when he was 14. He was bullied, and, you know, nobody thought that he would amount to anything. And he had this crazy idea and he couldn't get out of his head, and he, like, took his dad's shotgun, showed up to the bank, wasn't loaded or anything. He was a juvenile and he got sent to prison for, like 17 years. But good behavior and the fact that, like, he totally regretted. He was out in three, but he was terribly ashamed. And he was trying to contact the tellers that were there and the people in the bank, anybody he scared. He felt really regretful from what he did, and he wasn't able to contact the tellers. At the end of the day, he did send his letters and all that stuff.

But this is a man who's 40 something years old now as a whole different life. And what he was able to do at the end of the episode was to share his name. He was like, I realized I was seeking forgiveness from others when I couldn't really forgive myself. I'm not the bank robber. I'm actually more than that. And that counterintuitively allowed him to say, you know, my name is Jean Paul. That's actually who I am. And I did rob a bank when I was 14. And I've been.

Rabbi David Fohrman: I mean, now that I hear you speak, it almost makes me feel, you know, the weak link in my argument might be that this is all very nice, but, you know, sin is one thing and trauma is another thing. And you're seeing this process in sin and you're equating it with trauma. But trauma is different from sin. And what the Egyptians did for us was sinful, was just, like, painful. And now I'm listening to you, it's like, maybe they're not so different after all. Maybe they're actually one and the same. When you sin, do you know what you're doing? You're traumatizing yourself. That's what sin is doing. Because you're taking something toxic and you're mixing it in to your identity and dragging down who you are, which can be done from the outside or it can be done from the inside. It's just, sin is a little worse because you're the one doing it to you instead of someone else doing it to you. So trauma can be caused by the sins of others. If I'm beaten and I'm hurt, I am the insulted one. I am the coward. But it's even more effective at traumatizing me if I do it to myself.

Because then I really question my identity, like this bank robber. And it's like, is there really anything to me other than these terrible, outsized deeds? And I loathe myself for these things that I've done because they're me, right? And Imu, I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of teshuvah these days. And I have all these dreams of doing another whole season of BLNO with you on this. But without giving away too much, it feels to me like one of the things you gotta be really, really careful with in the process of teshuvah is not making it worse because you can actually make it worse. It's like when you do surgery on someone, there's this tumor that's grafted into a person's body, and you try to extract the tumor from the organ. And if you're not a skilled surgeon, you can make it worse. And if you're not a skilled teshuvah person, you can actually make it worse. Like what? If you decide to dive into the process of teshuvah with I feel so terrible, can you imagine? I'm a bank robber, right? And then you fill yourself with guilt. That becomes self loathing.

Imu Shalev: You actually fill yourself up with sin.

Rabbi David Fohrman: You become the one who can't stop thinking about this. And you reinforce your identity as the bank robber. But this time you feel holy about it because you think you're so disgusted with yourself. But you have reaffirmed this identity. And what you actually have to do is stop it. Just stop looking at yourself like this. The first part of teshuvah is rehabilitating yourself. You did this, but that's not you.

Imu Shalev: There's two elements that are coming up for me. One is thinking about it a lot. But also it's that identity point. It's if I've sinned and I want to really be serious about my teshuvah, I sinned. I am a sinner, right? And then that's who you are. But I'm telling the truth and I'm very pious, right? No, it's not the whole truth of things. The whole of who you are is not a sinner. The whole of who you are is not a bank robber, right?

Rabbi David Fohrman: Which is why you got to be really, really careful with one of those elements of teshuvah called charatah, regret. Because if you don't handle regret properly, regret can infect you.

Imu Shalev: You could destroy your whole identity.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Destroy your whole identity. Your regret becomes I regret who I am. And if you do that, all you've done is solidified a mistaken self impression. And what God is saying is, no, you are precious. I don't care what you've done. And you can separate yourself, which doesn't mean not taking responsibility for it. Understand that you did it. But there's a difference between what you did and who you are. It's what Bruria said to Rabbi Meir, יִתַּמּוּ חַטָּאִים וְלֹא חוֹטְאִים – "We don't pray that sinners aren't existing in the world. We pray that sins don't exist" (Psalms 104:35). But there's a delicate process of extracting self from sin. And there's a delicate process of extracting self from trauma that other people have imposed upon me. And in both cases, it's the same process.

Imu Shalev: Having brought it back from the trauma that we inflict upon ourselves through sin to the trauma that can be imposed on us by others. A light bulb went off in Rabbi Foreman's head. He remembered the verse of Israel's complaint that instigated God bringing them manna in the first place. And in light of our conversation about the nature of processing trauma, the wording there resonated with him in a new way.

Rabbi David Fohrman: And by the way, look at Exodus 16. So here the people are, and they're hungry. So you think, all right, hunger, no big deal. Just solve the hunger problem. Just, you know, make a magical refrigerator God. But you begin to see in verse 3 that the issue was larger than hunger. מִי־יִתֵּן מוּתֵנוּ בְיַד־יְקוָה בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם בְּשִׁבְתֵּנוּ עַל־סִיר הַבָּשָׂר בְּאׇכְלֵנוּ לֶחֶם לָשֹׂבַע – "If only we had died at the hands of God in Egypt, when we sat by the pot with the meat, when we had that bread to eat, you took us into this desert to kill us all with hunger." What's going on in the people's heads? Right there was this moment, this moment of rebirth. And what the moment of rebirth is supposed to do is it's supposed to be this cleansing moment. If I can separate the trauma from the person, then they can be reborn. They can look to the future. What's happening is the people are coming, and there's like, maybe it was fake. I don't think this rebirth process can do the whole thing. You know, we should have just died there. We didn't deserve to be reborn. We should have just died along with the Egyptians. If the Egyptians died and they were our taskmasters and they were the one beating us, then for sure, kal vachomer, we deserve to have died.

Imu Shalev: That's fascinating. You can read their complaint as really a feeling of being undeserving.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Yes, right. I am just a slave. I am beaten all the time. I must have done something to deserve being beaten all the time. That is my identity. That is who I am. It's like, yeah, there was this moment of rebirth. Yeah, you separated us from our bitterness. But we don't really believe that. And God is like, relax. The process isn't quite over yet. First, I separated you from your sorrow. You felt that, with the m'rorim? And now, gently, I need to tell you that I have another kind of bread for you to experience. Look towards the future. There's a new kind of flavor you could experience. It's honey. Because honey is where the future is. Come with me, because that's where I'm taking you. And then the process continues year after year. We're in the land of milk and honey. But in the land of milk and honey, go back to Exodus and separate the sour experience, the neutrality. Let go of the bitterness and then taste the honey in a whole new way as a gift of the God that is a redeeming God that understands the sorrow and the pain and gently lifts you out of it year after year.

It's almost like what you said before, that the tricky thing with trauma is it's not a one time and done thing. It's not like you go and you're reborn and now we can sing happily ever after. Isn't it fascinating? You said, and I really felt it when you said it, that year after year after year we do this. Why it should have been one thing we did once and we have our manna and we move on. That's not the way trauma works. Trauma needs to be constantly revisited and constantly redeemed. It doesn't just go away. That conversation I had with my sister, it's a nice conversation, but it's a conversation that needs to be revisited now and then. Tell me more about your mother.

Imu Shalev: You're holding part of the pain also, like you get to bring that into the present when the worst thing for her is to leave it in the past. And somehow bringing it into the present heals the past.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Yeah, it does. There's something incredibly healing about bringing into the present and acknowledging it was there and then letting go of it and then saying, and we can build this future that's sweet together. It's almost like the cyclical process of remembering the pain, separating yourself from the pain. And there's a future and you just gotta keep on doing that and that's how you go forward. And there is no happy ending to trauma. Once and for all, there's a series of happy endings.

Imu Shalev: It's stunning. And one of the words that is coming to mind for me in hearing this has to do with worthiness because I think that's one of the difficulties in dealing with trauma. But I wonder if that's also true with sin. Is the great question might be, am I really worthy or am I more than just this? In the story right after the manna where the people again complain that they have no water, the coda to that incident is הֲיֵשׁ יְקוָה בְּקִרְבֵּנוּ אִם אָיִן – "Is yud-kei-vav-kei really amongst us?" (Exodus 17:7). And again, at first glance, it might seem that they have difficulty believing in God or believing that God is there, but it really has to do with them. Are we worthy to have God be amongst little old us?

Rabbi David Fohrman: Exactly. And think about it. So beautiful. הֲיֵשׁ יְקוָה בְּקִרְבֵּנוּ. Because if God is b'kirbenu, do you know what the delirious beauty of that is? You can't even tell where God stops and me starts, because God is coming inside of us as a nation and infusing himself in our national life. And the beauty of that is that somehow there's a kind of fusion which is so fascinating and so beautiful that God feels like he's really here in our lives. So instead of my life being infected by trauma, my life is enlivened by the presence of God here. And so the fear is, no, I'm sinful, or no, I'm traumatized, no, I'm a terrible, unworthy person. I'm just a slave. I'm awful. And therefore I can't even believe that the Master of the universe would come and be a part of a nation that has such a sordid past. And God is like, no, no, I get it. That's a sordid past. But there's a separation process there. There's a cleansing process there. And specifically me being among you is a part of the cleansing. I wonder if the same way that on Yom Kippur God comes and encounters us and cleanses us of our sins, if we're willing to let go of them as part of our identity, that on Pesach and on the Omer period, when we remember the manna going into Shavuos, that the same process is happening, right?

Except not with respect to sin, but with respect to the trauma of slavery, that God is saying, first let go, right, and separate yourself from this trauma. Eat the neutral bread. But then start to commemorate and understand. There was this manna that I gave you, and I gave you this manna that was sweet. And then I was actually here and I was alongside of you, and I was with you because you are worthwhile, because you are worthy. And it's that experience that we replay on the way to Sinai that allows us to accept God's law and say we are the worthy ones that can keep this. God is actually among us.

Imu Shalev: It's remarkable. It's very, very bitter and then sweet picture.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Yeah. Anyway, so that's kind of how I see Exodus 16. That's what I've been meditating about. Actually, a lot of this is just talking to you in the moment, but this is sort of what I see.

Imu Shalev: Well, thank you for sharing that with me. And I had no idea where you were going with it. And you'd think if I learn with you for 13 years, I should trust, trust the Master, that he's going to take me to the place of trust.

Rabbi David Fohrman: What did you do? I did lead you through a long path, I will grant you that. So I would have been skeptical, too. All right. Thank you, Imu, for doing this with me.

Imu Shalev: Thank you, Rabbi. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hey, take it easy with the book like no other theme music. Come on. I didn't even start my outro yet. Sorry, Hilary, our audio engineer has an itchy music finger sometimes. We are not done with this season yet. To be fair, it did sound like we were wrapping up. We had taken a journey that started with parallels between the manna and the matzah, but turned into a meditation on sin, trauma, and what the exodus can teach us about slowly navigating meaningful change in our own lives. But towards the end of this episode, Rabbi Fohrman had brought in a verse, the verse of Israel's complaint which caused God to rain down the manna from heaven. And upon reflection, there was a lot more going on in that verse than I first realized. When I looked back on it more carefully, the wording was actually very strange, even perhaps a little disturbing on the surface. And when I pointed that out to Rabbi Fohrman, it set off a whole other really fascinating discussion that we just have to share with you. What wording is so strange in that verse? What did Rabbi Fohrman come back with?

Well, you're gonna have to come back next time to find out.