Monday Torah Tweet (B’midbar)

Monday Torah Tweet (B’midbar): When we feel like a wilderness may be an opportune time to connect with G‑d.

Back-story: The first verse of the book of Numbers reads, “And the lord spoke (vayidabeir) to Moses in the wilderness (midbar) of Sinai.” The word “wilderness” is used in the Bible for vast, uninhabited tracts of land good only for nomadic pasturage. Midbar is also used figuratively: “Have I been a wilderness toIsrael?” (Jeremiah2:31); “Lest I make her like a wilderness and set her like a dry land” (Hosea 2:5). Similarly, we all go through difficult periods when we feel figuratively like a wilderness—isolated by the loss of a loved one, alone from guilt, devastated and ashamed by failure, trampled upon by someone from whom we expected better, wandering we know not wither. At such times, the tendency is to want to cocoon. We feel embarrassed to be with others; we feel especially unfit for shul.

Midbar (wilderness) seems to be of the same root as vayidabeir (and [the L‑rd] spoke). Torah teaches us that we can hear HaShem’s voice in the wilderness of our lives.

Most of Torah happens in the Wilderness. The book of Genesis takes us from creation to the time we enterEgypt. The first half of Exodus takes us out ofEgypt. The rest of the book of Exodus, the whole of Leviticus, the whole of Numbers and the whole of Deuteronomy occur in the wilderness. Our ancestors used the wilderness experience to receive the laws and build the institutions that forged them into a people able to enter the promised land. When we feel like a wilderness is just the time we should be in shul, alert for HaShem’s word.

Classic Judaism teaches that even if we are not a wilderness, there are times when we should make ourselves humble like a wilderness, for in doing so, we can hear the word of HaShem over the cacophony that sometimes rules our lives, and suddenly Torah comes to us like a gift (Eiruvin 54a; N’darim 55a; and see also B’midbar Raba 19:26). We read in Par’shat Hukat that the journey of the Israelites took them “from Midbar to Mattanah” (Numbers21:18), as the sages understand it, “From wilderness to the gift of the Torah.”

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