Bemidbar 5780: No Direction Home

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.

Henry David Thoreau: In wildness is the preservation of the world.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "East Coker":
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know

Bamidbar Wilderness Therapy website: In Hebrew, BaMidbar means “in the wilderness,” or “in the desert.” There is a Jewish text (Zohar Va’era, 2:25b) that tells us 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 — to speak — דבר. We went into the midbar to find our own voice and to write a new narrative as a people.

Bob Marshall: Anyone who has stood upon a lofty summit and gazed over an inchoate tangle of deep canyons and cragged mountains, of sunlit lakelets and black expanses of forest, has become aware of a certain giddy sensation that there are no distances, no measures, simply unrelated matter rising and falling without any analogy to the banal geometry of breadth, thickness, and height.

Elie Wiesel: When the Holy Seer of Lublin was a little boy, he was known to skip school for hours or even days. Once, his teacher followed the young boy to see what became of these free moments. The Seer walked to the edge of the town, then deep into the woods, and there, in a small green circle of trees, he began to pray. The next day the teacher asked the boy what drew him to those woods. The Seer of Lublin replied, I can find God there.
"But," said the teacher, "surely God is the same in the town as in the wilderness."
That is true, replied the Seer, but I am not the same.