Shabbat BaMidbar: Into the Wilderness

Necessary Chaos

In the wilderness your possessions cannot surround you. Your preconceptions cannot protect you. Your logic cannot promise you the future. Your guilt can no longer place you safely in the past. You are left alone each day with an immediacy that astonishes, chastens, and exults. You see the world as if for the first time. – Lawrence Kushner, Honey From the Rock

This week we begin the book BaMidbar, “in the wilderness” – a name coincidentally far more descriptive of the contents of the book than that of the one we just finished reading. With this week’s parashah, we are leaving the shadow of Mt. Sinai and heading into untracked territory, in order to pursue our dream of home.

Anyone who has immersed in Torah study knows that this is the condition in which we will spend the rest of the narrative, not only of BaMidbar but of the following book, Devarim, as well. This is no temporary condition but a forty-year reality – more than that, it is lifelong, since “forty” is used in ancient Israel to mean “a lot” more than an actual number.

That is how our lives feel now, no? We may not be experiencing a geographic wilderness, but the word bamidbar, read without the vowels that were added later in any case, can also be understood to mean in the words or in the speaking. Truly, we wander in a wilderness of words (and images): social media, word of mouth, and so many news outlets. 

It’s no consolation to consider the possibility that this may be a lifelong condition for us, from now on. What may be some consolation is to note that, as we will celebrate on Shavuot, this coming Sunday night June 1 and Monday morning June 2, is that it is in the wilderness, unsettled and frightening as it is, that we receive Torah. Mt. Sinai is not in the land of Israel; it is somewhere, on a peak unidentified until this day, that we had our most profound experience of Eternity.

Our reading for Shavuot is the Aseret haDibrot, the Ten Utterances. They begin with the naming of the holiness the Israelites are meeting: 

אָֽנֹכִ֖י֙ ה’ אֱלֹהֶ֑֔-ךָ אֲשֶׁ֧ר הוֹצֵאתִ֛יךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם מִבֵּ֣֥ית עֲבָדִ֑͏ֽים

I ‘ה am your G!d who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage (Ex.20.2)

When Moshe first meets this holiness, this rupture in normality, he asks further, but what is Your Name? The answer is in itself a form of wilderness:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר אֱלֹהִ-ם֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה וַיֹּ֗אמֶר כֹּ֤ה תֹאמַר֙ לִבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה שְׁלָחַ֥נִי אֲלֵיכֶֽם

G!d said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh: thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3.14)

Ehyeh is not easily defined; it may mean “that which will be” or it may mean “that which is,” which is why one good expression of HaShem’s Name is Eternity. This name of HaShem which we meet in the wilderness is not static, nor defined; it is in process of becoming, without a foothold in the past known or in the future unknown. So is our experience with HaShem, as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner suggests in his Honey From the Rock: 

The wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. A place that demands being open to the flow of life around you. A place that demands being honest with yourself without regard to the cost in personal anxiety; a place that demands being present with all of yourself….

Now you might say that the promise of such spirited awareness could only keep one with the greatest determination in the wilderness but for a moment or so. That such a way of being would be like breathing pure oxygen. We would live our lives in but a few hours and die of old age. As our ancestors complained, “it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness” (Exodus 14.12).  And indeed, that is your choice.

We might call it the “necessary chaos” which, just like in Genesis, is the precondition for creation. Whatever comes next, for you and for me and for us, cannot be summoned from pre-existing settled definitions and realities, but only from the chaos that ensues when all we thought we knew is challenged.

It’s not comfortable and it’s not sustainable, which is why we are given Shabbat, for rest,  and each other, for reassurance. Torah teaches us that these are the two necessary conditions for surviving the wilderness of words and of geography. We need each other, because this is too much for any one person to cope with. And we need times of rest, like Shabbat and Shavuot, to enter a different mode of living, where we remember what it is  like to be in the Presence of Eternity, and review the lessons for living in adversity that we learn in those moments.