We read in parshas Beshalach about the manna from heaven:
I will rain bread from heaven for you, and the people will go out every day to collect it, in order to test them: will they keep my Torah or not?
The Ramban connects this to the test that God gave to Avraham, where He asked him to bind and sacrifice his son. There he explains the whole idea of God testing people, which is a strange thing, since God doesn't exactly need to see the results!
Says the Ramban: We are free agents and have the absolute power to decide whether to do something or not. So something that's hard for a person to do is called a nisayon, which has to be understood as a sort of trial run, so to speak. It's something he's never done before and he's not sure if he'll make it so it's a trial for him: will he succeed or not?
God gives these kinds of trials so that the person being tested can bring out some potential talent, some latent energy and materialise it by doing something tangible and lasting.
Until he faced the trial he had potential. But potential isn't good enough in this world, a world of maaseh - too many people have enormous potential and end up not making much out of it.
So that's a kindness that God extends to people, the trials through which they fulfill their potential through action and tangible creation.
How does that then apply to the Manna eaters in the desert? In what sense was the falling of bread from the heavens a trial? What potential were they actualising by collecting that bread daily?
The Gemara Yoma makes this observation about the Manna eaters: imagine two people sitting down to eat a lovely meal. The menu is exactly the same for each but they have a very different state of mind while eating. You see, one of them eats with the satisfaction of knowing that he has a whole store full of food right behind him, while the other hasn't a single morsel to eat other than this meal - he doesn't know where his next meal is coming from. This fellow may enjoy the sensation of eating but he is clearly miserable, if not terrified of what the future holds.
This feeling of misery and fear is exactly what the Jewish people would have felt on a daily basis. God gave them their "daily" bread in such a way that they could not save for the next day even if they tried. No matter what they did, the fact remained that they ate today without having anything set aside for tomorrow.
Based on that, the Ramban explains that through the nisayon of this suffering, the people activated within them a degree of faith in God that went well beyond what they had experienced until then. Here again the idea is that they had potential to achieve this kind of real trust in God but until they had faced the fact and the feeling of extreme dependence they didn't actually trust God to the fullest extent.
As the Ramban points out, God only tests you if He knows you'll pass. That means that if you find yourself with a struggle on your hands, you can be assured that it's an opportunity to convert some potential within you into achievement. What you need to do is figure out with clarity what's expected of you and then make the right decision. The moment of decision is the point at which the test is passed or failed.
Potential is great when you're young, but with each passing day it becomes less great if you don't turn it into achievement.
I'll leave off here with a question that I want to come back to: The mishna in Avos ch.5 states that Avraham was tested with 10 trials, and the Jewish people were also tested 10 times in the desert. In both cases the language used is nisayon but the fact that the mishna points out these parallel 10 tests suggests to me that maybe we need to look out for two types of nisayon - trials and tribulations comes to mind as a way of dividing them up. Keep your eyes open because I'll try to expand on this shortly!
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