Bamidbar - Finding the Wilderness

Lawrence Kushner: 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.

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.

Eitan Fishbane: R. Bahya asks: Why does the Torah emphasize God’s speech to Moshe in the wilderness of Sinai (בְּמִדְבַּר סִינַי)? It was to teach that “a person does not attain the Torah until they have made themselves empty and abandoned like the wilderness” To receive the revelation of Torah—or perhaps a bit less grandly, to let Torah take root in one’s heart—a person must first make themselves into a midbar, an inner empty wilderness that is cleared of all the weeds and brush that obstruct true perception and feeling.

In this transformed reading, the midbar may be said to embody a pure state of emptiness—an inner cleansing that allows us to go deeper into the spiritual path. Becoming hefker kemidbar is a process of letting go of our imprisonment in materiality, in ephemeral and finite desires—to be liberated into the vastness of an inner wilderness. As R. Nahman of Bratzlav taught (Likutei Moharan I:52), the most profound opening of the heart to God takes place in the physical space of darkness and wilderness, the frightening ground of loneliness and alienation. It is in hitbodedut (solitude) that we are able to empty our minds and hearts of society’s overwhelming drumbeat, where the ultimate bitul hayeish (erasure of superficial, mundane consciousness) becomes possible, and we are truly opened in all of our vulnerability before Divinity. In that place of midbar, we are able to break open the heart in ways we didn’t know were possible, to cry out to God from a place of the deepest emotional honesty. The midbar is an inner place of psyche as much as it is a terrestrial location. It is our spiritual work to let that divine solitude refine the openness and gentleness with which we treat our fellow human beings.

How to Get Unstuck, by Rabbi Evan J. Krame

Zohar Va’era, 2:25b asserts that when we were in Egypt, we lost the ability to express our own stories. During that time, we were literally slaves to another person’s narrative. When we left Egypt, we spent forty years in the midbar – the wilderness. It was there that we began our national story telling and created our own identity. The midbar is a wilderness, but there is also a second meaning from the same word root — to speak — דבר. We went into the midbar to find our own voice and to write a new narrative as a people.