NOTES for Exo 16:1-36
The wilderness is not Egypt, and the people understood that very quickly. Their first reaction was disappointment: better to return to Egypt, where they could die, but where, at least, there was a normal, more or less well-fed life. Better to die beside pots of meat than in a waterless wilderness; at least it would not feel so bitter after the life they had lived. This, however, was not yet the most serious problem. The first reaction to unfamiliar and extreme conditions is rarely adequate, especially in a large mass of people.
God's answer to this reaction of the people was a series of miracles. A person who wanted to could write them off as coincidence, yet everyone understood that this was precisely a miracle, God's intervention, even if everything looked quite natural. The people had to be shown that God was not abandoning them, that He accompanied those whom He had brought out of Egypt, even if the people walking through the wilderness thought they had been left completely alone and had no one to rely on except their leaders. These lessons were not all that difficult, although the people's distrust of God persisted for a long time. On the one hand, every time God intervened, the people did seem to become convinced: God was truly with them; He was not abandoning them.
On the other hand, as soon as a critical situation arose again, they acted as if they had forgotten what they knew and what they had already had the chance to confirm. They again fell into panic and demanded immediate help from Moses or Aaron. What was needed here was simple training that would form in the people the proper response to a crisis, a response that meant not panic, but each person's immediate turning to God. Something else was more difficult: teaching the people to follow God, literally step by step, carrying out exactly what had been commanded. The story of the meat left until the next day, or of the manna that some went out to gather on Shabbat, speaks for itself.
The will of God, in this case voiced through the prophet of God, through Moses, had been stated with complete clarity, and all the previous events should have made it clear that God simply had to be listened to and that what was said had to be done, instead of trying to show initiative where it was needed least of all. Yet for a person in a fallen state, this is exactly the hardest thing, because here one must simply trust God, and trust Him unconditionally, completely giving up control over what a human being cannot control anyway.
It is useless to try to model tomorrow, and even more pointless to try to prevent problems that exist only within an invented model and not in reality at all. It was much harder to unlearn that kind of "planning" than to give up the habit of panicking over every crisis. Yet God still tries to wean the people from it; otherwise it will be hard for them to reach the land promised to them, conquer it, and live on it.