B’midbar
Numbers 1:1 – 4:20
A midrash relating to the opening of Parashat B’midbar (“In the wilderness”) asks, “Why was the Torah given in the wilderness?” Why not present the Torah in a more spiritually elevated place—say, for example, atop Mount Moriah in Jerusalem? Besides, why give the Torah to a generation of stiff-necked people whose spirit had been crushed by years of enslavement? The first generation of free-born Israelites surely would receive the Torah with greater spiritual readiness.
The answer to these questions has to do with purpose. On one hand, Torah is akin to a spiritual conveyer belt whose purpose is to support anyone interested in personal growth and insight into Truth. To help expand one’s consciousness, it offers laws, guidelines, and paths to follow, all of which are universally available. Torah doesn’t discriminate as to where one finds oneself when embarking on one’s spiritual journey. We don’t need to be at a specific level of consciousness, to be spiritually “ready,” to have reached a “Promised Land” in order to step onto the path of Torah; it is available to all of us, stiff-necked or not. Often, we are in a personal desert—what the Chasidic masters call “the most miserable of all places”—when we take those first steps of our spiritual journey. “Having received the Torah there,” the masters explain, “Israel could take its Torah to the deprived of the earth, and from lowliness ascend to the heights.”
The fact that Torah was given in the desert also teaches us about the purpose of the path itself. The questions asked by the rabbis in Midrash reflect our own reluctance to embark on any kind of spiritual journey. We are the ones endlessly postponing our commitment to the path, waiting for the “right time” or the “right conditions.” We wait for our Jerusalem, for our life to be in that “Promised Land” where we’ll finally have the time, resources, and support to really do it. Once life is no longer chaotic and unpredictable, once we have open-ended time—the very definition of wilderness—then we will be able to receive Torah, to engage fully in our spiritual practice. If we really believe that, we are fools destined to fail. Not only will that day never come, we will take steps to avoid it altogether.
Torah was given in the desert because that’s exactly where we can unfold spiritually and become available to hear her teachings at a deep, personal level; that’s where she is inviting us to meet her. Awakening to the empty Truth of who we are can be attained only by emptying ourselves of all that we believe is our self. The process is one of deconstruction, of unknowing, of embracing uncertainty, unpredictability, and open-endedness. In other words, the desert is where we lose our self in order to find our Self. As the midrash ultimately answers: “Who knows Torah? Those who make themselves like the wilderness.”
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