Complaints and Cover-Ups: Blaming the Leader as a Smokescreen

How Desert Grievances Became a Smokescreen for Blaming the Leader

Parashat Beha’alotcha shows us a deep human riddle that helps us understand people in every generation. The People of Israel had just left Mount Sinai—the place where they saw open miracles and heard *Kol Hashem* (the voice of G-d) standing together as one—and they finally started their march to the Promised Land. Everything was going smoothly: G-d’s presence was undeniably among them, resting over the Mishkan (the Tabernacle), and the future looked bright.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere and without any real crisis, everything flips: *”And the people were as murmurers.”* The nation breaks down in tears. With a totally twisted memory of the past, they start crying for the *”fish we ate in Egypt for free,”* and complain that they are sick and tired of the Manna—the bread coming down from heaven.

Rashi explains that the word *mit’onanim* (murmurers) comes from the word *to’anah*—which means looking for an excuse. In other words, they were simply looking for a pretext to distance themselves from G-d. The Children of Israel were not actually hungry, and they weren’t lacking anything; the Manna took care of all their needs perfectly. They were just looking for a convenient excuse—a smokescreen to hide a much deeper, scarier truth.

Why would people who lived with G-d’s presence undeniably among them look for reasons to be bitter? To understand this, we have to look at the psychology of displacement. Displacement is a mental trick where our minds take big, scary feelings like fear, anxiety, or frustration, and dump them onto something smaller and much easier to complain about.
This is exactly how the *Yetzer Hara* (the Evil Inclination) works. The Manna wasn’t just physical food; it was spiritual bread. The way it fell, and the rules that came with it, demanded intense self-discipline, personal responsibility, and accepting the yoke of Torah and Mitzvot.

The *Yetzer Hara* hates rules and responsibility. The people were simply panicking because of the massive spiritual demands placed on them after leaving Sinai. But it is hard and embarrassing to look in the mirror and admit, “I am afraid to change,” or “I am too lazy to work on my *middot* (character traits).” So, the mind uses displacement to protect its pride. It swaps the big, scary fear of serving G-d for a minor, everyday complaint about the quality of the food.

Crucially, this bitterness quickly found a target. The complainers did not just whine about the food in the abstract; they immediately directed their focus toward the leadership, surrounding Moshe Rabbeinu with weeping and demands. They transformed the leader into a scapegoat for their own internal distress, overwhelming him to the point where he cried out to G-d under the weight of their collective panic and projection.

This exact same displacement is alive and kicking today in modern Israeli society, especially when it comes to the Prime Minister. Right now, the State of Israel is facing enormous, heavy questions: military service burdens, deep splits in society, constant security threats, and the struggle to figure out who we are as a people. Facing these issues is exhausting, frightening, and requires painful soul-searching.

The point here is not to compare the character or stature of modern politicians to Moshe Rabbeinu, but rather to recognize the identical psychological trap: the instinct of a crowd to use the leader as a scapegoat for their own fears.

In all this confusion, the political leader has become the modern “Manna”—no matter which side of politics you are on. Just like the complainers in the desert took their own fears and displaced them onto the food and the leadership, huge parts of the public today take all their anxiety and confusion about the country and project it onto a single person.

It makes a perfect smokescreen. It is much easier, more comforting, and simpler to aim all our anger and disappointment at one leader and blame him for everything wrong with the country. Turning the leader into the ultimate scapegoat allows Israeli society—both right and left—to skip the hard work of mending our own internal rifts. It is a neat mental trick: we convince ourselves that if we just swap out one person at the top, everything will magically fix itself. That way, we don’t have to take any personal responsibility for the situation.

The Torah is teaching us a fundamental lesson in *Mussar* (ethics): constant complaining and permanent bitterness are almost always a sign that a person is running away from their duty because they are afraid to step up. This is a vital warning sign for all of us in our daily lives. The next time we find ourselves furious about politics and screaming at the TV, or snapping at our family at home over tiny things like a messy living room or a late supper, we need to stop.

We have to look past our own smokescreen of complaints and realize that when we blow up over these small things, our intense anger is almost never actually about the mess or the food. The daily irritation is just a convenient, safe target—it is much easier to focus our energy on something we can see and yell about, rather than facing the invisible, heavy anxieties weighing on our own souls.

The moment we feel that sudden surge of irritation—whether we are reading the news or standing in our own hallways—we must hit the pause button and force an honest *Cheshbon Nefesh* (soul-reckoning). Instead of letting the anger stream outward, we must turn the spotlight inward and ask ourselves honestly: what real difficulty or responsibility am I trying to dodge right now by getting angry at someone else? Are we screaming about a politician because we feel powerless about our own future? Are we snapping at our family because we feel out of control elsewhere? The anger is real, but the reason we give for it is usually a fiction.

As long as we are blaming an external target, we remain completely stuck. Blame feels comforting because it leaves us off the hook—if it is their fault, we do not have to do the hard work of changing ourselves. But true spiritual growth only begins when we strip away this displacement and courageously admit what we are actually running from. Once we do that, the fake problem vanishes, the smokescreen clears, and we are finally left face-to-face with our true responsibility. Only then can we start to actually deal with it, grow from it, and fix it.