I ask that question whenever I encounter something I don’t quite recognize in my garden. I know what I’ve planted, and where I’ve planted it, so when seed turns to seedling, or seedling matures, I’m ready for that growth. I also recognize the plants I explicitly don’t want, the fast growing invasive bermuda grasses and the stabby-stabby thistles and snaking vines that will smother or strangle my beans and ‘maters and herbs.
But when I go in a-weeding, I’m aware that every plant that rises unexpected from the soil of my raised beds isn’t an undesirable one. From prior years, squirrels and chipmunks have planted many a tomato seed, and my composted kitchen leavings are equally fecund. This year, three of my seven tomato plants were volunteers, all teeny tiny pop-in-your-mouth multicolored cherry tomatoes that were sweet as could be. I know and welcome those tomatoes, in the same way that I welcomed the volunteer cantaloupe that came up two seasons ago, and provided the seed stock for the ‘lopes I grew last year and this year.
Just because I don’t know what something is yet doesn’t mean I’ll just destroy it or reject it out of hand.
A month and a half ago, I was doing a deep weeding in one of my green bean plots. They’ve struggled a bit in the dryness early this season, yielding mostly seedstock for next year, along with a reminder that I need to be more aggressive in watering them if I want them to be less seedy. In among the beans were two plants I didn’t recognize. Deep green, with single lobed ovoid leaves, with a darker pigmentation at the branches. They weren’t weeds I knew, nor did I recognize their leafing as any of my more familiar volunteers. I could, I suppose, have just taken a picture of them and let the machine-mind tell me what they were, but where’s the fun in that?
I just let them be, because why not?
In their Exodus journey, the Hebrew people encountered all manner of new things, which one would think would have been a good thing, given their flight from enslavement. But faced with unexpected challenges and wilderness wanderings, people often look back to the imagined past and pine for it.
Through the sepia haze of hangry remembering, they thought back to their time in Egypt, which became in their imaginations a paradise of bread and meat. “If only we had died,” they complained. “Everything then was so great, and the portion sizes were huge.”
The word we hear as “complain” is a peculiar one in Hebrew.
Way-yil-lō-w-nū (וַיִּלֹּ֧נוּ) means “and they grumbled,” or to use the Yiddish equivalent, to kvetch. Like most Yiddish (which is a blend of Hebrew and Old German) kvetch is just such an emotionally onomatopoeic way to understand endlessly picking at something. It comes from an old German word meaning to press, or to squeeze. In the Hebrew, though? The root word of Way-yil-loh-nu is three letters: Lamed, Vav, and Nun (loon), which two thirds of the time means to stay, to remain, to lodge, or to reside. One third of the time, depending on the context and the word construction, that same root word can mean to complain and to grumble.
The relationship between those two concepts in the language is a little hazy. Why does staying in a place also mean to complain? It’s not clear. Maybe it has to do with ruminating or refusing to let something go. Think, for example, of the difference between “dwelling in a place” and “dwelling on something.” As someone who dislikes change, I know being obstinate doesn’t lend itself to cheeriness. But that that’s just speculation.
But in response to their kvetching, God promises that they’ll be fed, with bread coming from heaven. Moses conveys that message, and tells them to be prepared to receive meat in the evening and carbs for breakfast. So that evening, their encampment is filled with quail, which provides for the meat. Then, at morning dewfall, the ground is covered with a peculiar frost-like substance, one that remains on the earth after the dew evaporates.
We hear that the people looked at this strange substance and looked at each other in bafflement. In the Hebrew, the text tells us they pointed at the strange stuff on the ground and said two words: Man'hu (מן הוא), which means, in English “What is it?” So from that, we get the word manna. Manna means...literally..."What is it?"
“What it is is the bread from heaven,” says Moses in reply. “The stuff you were promised.”
We tend to think of manna as a gift and as a blessing, which it most certainly is. “Like manna from heaven,” or so the saying goes. But how do we encounter that which is strange or unknown to us? Are we always and invariably cynical, rejecting every new taste and every new grace with the same fervor as a five year old presented with something for dinner that is not three chicken nuggets neatly separated from precisely one dozen steamed peas?
Do we let our anxiety and our fear weed out the first growth of a new and gracious path in our lives?
If we know, with certainty, that a new path is pure poison, rejecting it is fine. We know the taste of greed and lust, domination and envy, lies and brutality and resentment. Sin is an old and familiar poison, and if we are not fools, we’ve learned to avoid it.
But if it’s something we’ve hoped for, it will always be a little unfamiliar, because we hope for things unseen. “What is this,” we ask ourselves, as we encounter it.
Like, say, those two odd little plants coming up in my green bean bed. I let them go, watched them go to flower, and then completely forgot about them for a while. When I was plucking some of my tomatoes for another batch of pico de gallo a few weeks ago, I glanced down, blinked, and saw what those plants were.
“What is it?”
What it was was jalapeno peppers, which I’d intended to plant at the beginning of the season and hadn’t gotten around to. Some of the seed from last year’s store-bought’n peppers must have made its way into the compost, and all of a sudden and in an unexpected way I had precisely the splash of caliente I needed for that evening.
When something promising appears unexpectedly before you, give it a little time.
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