nacham- led them
yinachem- will change their minds/ heart nechama- comfort
What might the connection be between leading, change of mind/ heart, and comfort?
How does your understanding change if pen yinachem is translated as “lest they be comforted (and return to Egypt)” instead of “lest they change their minds/ hearts” ? What do you think of this divine leadership strategy?
How might the wilderness be understood as the place of discomfort?
In your own experience, in what ways does discomfort facilitate, or impede, change/ transformation? How does comfort facilitate, or impede, change/ transformation?
Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
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Transformations come only as we go the long way round, only as we’re willing to walk a different, longer, more arduous, more inward, more prayerful route. When you wait, you’re deliberately choosing to take the long way, to go eight blocks instead of four, trusting that there’s a transforming discovery lying pooled along the way. |
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How does this resonate (or not) with your experience of the last year? Of other moments of change and transformation? What’s been useful about “going the long way” in this past year? What’s been difficult? What unexpected discoveries have you found? What do you wish you could go back to? How do you stay with the unfamiliar/uncomfortable?
Aviva Zornberg, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers
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The forty-year midbar journey was intended as a difficult odyssey of self-understanding, a reconnaissance mission into the human heart... What is it that can sustain human life? |
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What have you found in your own heart in the “wilderness”? What sustains you?
Alan Alda
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Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful: Yourself |