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Manna
North Miami Beach, Florida 1-21-2000 Aaron H. Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on issues, ideas and reflections on the times. Published now and
then. Opinions pro or con are welcome.
MANNA AND OTHER FREE THINGS
If you think about it you could conceive of our world as a cornucopia. Out
of the cornucopia comes all the good things we find to delight us and all of
these good things are free. Well, at least some of them are free. We soon
discover that there are dibs on many of them and the owners feel we should
pay to enjoy the goodies.
Manna, if you have forgotten, was the food the Israelites found in the
mornings of their sojourn in the desert after their escape from Egypt. The
miracles of the ten plagues visited upon the Egyptians and the parting of
the sea to allow them to pass from slavery into freedom were pretty good but
the "manna" thing in the desert was perhaps the greatest.
You have to think about the things that are free. We are so involved with
payments for things that we want which are not free. We have forgotten the
air we breath, the oceans we bathe in (if there are no little ticket kiosks
up on the boardwalk), and true friendship. If I have left any freedoms out,
please insert them here.
Going into negotiations with God makes for problems right away. The former
slaves had to go into a bargaining session through the intermediary of
Moses. He gave them Tablets of the Law and organized them into a semblance
of a self-regulating group of marchers with a goal rather than a mob
stumbling aimlessly in a hot dry and empty place. God freed them, sent them
to the desert past walls of water and made them eat unleavened bread.
Killing the first born of the Egyptians and sparing the homes of the
Israelites smeared with the blood of lambs was a truly great engineering
job. But this was given to the Hebrew Children for free. Now they had to
obey God's Commandments.
That is the rub, you know. You can have this, but first you must do that.
"That" is always the catch that annoys and causes us to forget or try to
avoid obeying those commandments. The moral is that very few things are
free. Carol's Evaluation: 10 out of 10.
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