April 30, 2008 - BAMIDBAR: THE ALLURE OF THE DESERT - (25th of Iyyar, 5768)

There are a number of themes we encounter in these first chapters of the Book of Numbers, Bamidbar. The first is the very meaning of the name of the book, *BaMidbar*, literally is: ‘in the Wilderness.’ Harvey Fields in his commentary on the desert experience spends many paragraphs on the starkness of the Sinai desert. It is a triangular and vast region which separates the land of Israel from the Red Sea and Egypt. It is replete with granite, craggy mountains and plateaus of rock and sand. It is brutally hot during daylight hours and cold at night, like any desert region. I remember riding…or should I say, bouncing my way through this waste land, traveling the way the Israelites did, from oasis to distant oasis, looking for familiar human figures in the rock formations and wondering why anyone would want to march around in this barren, lifeless land.

Interestingly enough, the rabbis lionized the desert experience, saying that it was an idyllic time in the life of the Israelite/Jewish people. The reason for this characterization was that in no time since has the people ever been closer to God. Remember that the Eternal led the Israelites by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. But much more importantly, God gave the people the Ten Commandments in the desert. It was here that the people became unified around the law and were taught by Moses the rules of getting along and living in a society. The rabbis maintained that the desert experience toughened up this slave people who, at their coming out of Egypt, could not fend for themselves and were clearly beyond their own survival abilities as they entered the Wilderness of Zin, another name for the southern most region of the Sinai. It was here that they began to heal their riven souls. It was here that they learned to be independent and interdependent, being able to fend both for themselves as individuals and to know the value of operating as a unit, tribe or force.

Yes, the rabbis idealized this time in our people’s history, as though underscoring that what didn’t destroy them, made them stronger. But, in fact, we realize that for that first generation which exited from Egypt, it did ultimately destroy them.

We can and have explicated this notion. Indeed, Moses and God found the actual first generation that came forth from Egypt incapable of rising to the challenges that they would have otherwise encountered in actually taking the land from the Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines and other indigenous people that inhabited the Promised Land when the Israelites were emerging from Egypt. It would not be this generation that would take the land but, rather, their children, the desert hardened, desert wise offspring who would be able to summon the courage and skills to take what God had promised them.

The rabbis claimed that the desert, the wilderness, was the ideal place for God’s giving of the Torah. For, had God waited until the people had settled in the land, the tribe on whose territory the Torah was revealed would have had claim to a special status. Instead, since the Law was given in the desert, a land belonging to no one and everyone at once, each could assert his/her claim to Torah equally. This is an argument, parenthetically; whose message we first heard back in the Book of Genesis when we learned why God had created one progenitor for the human race from whom we all spring. Yes, Adam’s creation enables each of us to claim no special lineage because we all come from that one individual. In the same way, Torah was given to each and every Israelite who was in the wilderness. It belongs to the entire Jewish people due to this egalitarian revelation.

And there is the fact that the desert was a land devoid of diversions, pure in its ability to inspire freedom. Just as the desert was depicted as a place of openness and purity, so, too, could the people also therefore be open to the variegated messages of Torah and all of its nuances.

The English name for the Book BaMidbar, *Numbers*, reveals yet another theme found in these first chapters of the Book. For, Moses is commanded to conduct yet another census. This is actually the fourth instance of Moses’ census taking. The first was just after the people left Egypt, the second was following the Golden Calf incident, another was to protect the people from the spread of a Plague (Exodus 30:11), and now, one year following the departure from Egypt.

Why, we ask, is there this penchant to count the Israelites? One answer comes in the form of a lovely Midrash. It is to demonstrate how very dear the Israelite people were to God. Just as a miser counts and recounts his money, so God loved to count the Israelites, declaring: “I have created all the magnificent stars of the universe, yet it is Israel who will do my will.” (Numbers Rabbah as found in Fields p. 12)

There is, of course, a more practical reason that Moses needed to know just how many people there were. In the coming campaigns to take the land, he needed to be certain about the numbers of men he could put into the field and be confident about dividing up the tribes properly and with sufficient numbers so that they might be able to engage in battle, and secure the land successfully.

One other consideration was that by having to count every single soul, Moses and God gave to each individual a certain sense of his own value, his own personal worth, and the need that God’s enterprise had of each person’s skills, talents and energy.

Now one could certainly argue that the desert experience was formative. The people, unhampered and not weighed down with a lot of stuff, could concentrate on what was truly important and meaningful in life. While traipsing through this rugged wilderness was certainly no picnic, it was nonetheless devoid of the many diversions we have in our lives. Bruce Feiler puts it this way in his wonderful book, "Walking the Bible":

Spend enough time in the desert, and you begin to see that nothing is quite what it seems to be. Water becomes wisdom. Food becomes salvation. And sandstorms become poetry. Everything, in other words becomes grist for allegory. As Moses tells the Israelites near the end of their journey: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past 40 years, that he might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts.” Today, almost three thousand years since those words were written, the appeal of the desert remains the same. By its sheer demands---thirst, hunger, misery---it asks a simple question: “What is in your heart?” Or, put another way, “In what do you believe?”

Perhaps this is the appeal of modern camping programs like Outward Bound which put people in more natural circumstances and tests their metal. Perhaps this is the reason that we Coloradans are drawn to climb the fourteen-ers that challenge us. There is surely no gold at the tops of these peaks, just as there is nothing essentially valuable in the desert except the experience and what the struggle of being there tells us about ourselves. I believe that this is the reason that the rabbis idealized the desert experience. It is because it taught the Israelites what was in their hearts and it forced them, given their constant battle with the loneliness and the starkness of the desert, to come to know themselves…away from all of civilization’s distractions and allurements.

They met themselves and their God in the desert, and it changed them forever in ways that we can barely guess at, but which have become our legacy.