Talking Torah - Revelation in the Reruns

Parshat Bamidbar and meeting Ben Bag Bag's challenge to keep turning it over

Over the past few months we’ve made our way through the Priest’s Handbook, Leviticus. This week, we resume the narrative of the journey to the Promised Land, which left off at the end of the Book of Exodus with the raising of the Mishkan. Let’s go to the very beginning of the book known in Hebrew as Bamidbar (“in the wilderness”):

YHWH spoke to Moses in the Wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Appointment,
on the first day of the second month, in the second year after their going-out from the land of Egypt, saying:

Take up the head-count of the entire community of the Children of Israel,
by their clans, by their Fathers’ Houses,
according to the number of names, every male per capita;

from the age of twenty years and upward,
everyone going out to the armed-forces in Israel:

Bamidbar’s opening situates us specifically in place and time. We are in Midbar Sinai, the wilderness of Sinai. The Israelites camped here, after escaping Egypt, to receive the Torah. It is almost a year later and it’s time to move forward to the next phase - conquest. In preparation, Moses is commanded to count the men of fighting age. Their sheer number, over 600,000, is intended to boost their confidence for the battle ahead.

But we know that this ambitious beginning will quickly go sideways. The trauma of hundreds of years of enslavement is too much to overcome. This generation is not ready for freedom and soon will be sentenced to die in the desert. Their children will cross the Jordan.

Imagine this as a miniseries. Five seasons, around 10 episodes a season. Cliff hanger after cliff hanger. Hero dies on cliff. Got it. Great the first time. Even the second. But the fortieth?

The task of keeping Torah fresh and meaningful is particularly relevant now, on the eve of Shavuot, as we prepare to celebrate the gift of this book. The Torah was revealed at Sinai with thunder and lightning thousands of years ago. How do we rekindle the rush of revelation in our day?

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The phrase Midbar Sinai suggests a pathway.

It is an odd phrase, a mashup of two opposites. Sinai signifies revelation, the awesome experience of hearing all the words of the Torah in one blast, like the last chord to A Day in the Life. A single voice with each individual note distinct, in the way that each soul who stood at Sinai was touched where they stood. Sinai is fullness.

Midbar is barren and wild. Following the word root, Midbar, is the place so still that the word (Davar) can be heard. Or using the other meaning of Davar, “thing”, the emptiness of the Midbar is so vast that it is an almost tangible thing. Midbar is emptiness.

The fullness and emptiness entwined in Midbar Sinai, though opposites, share a sense of awe. Their combination suggests a paradoxical path to revelation - that we can fill up by emptying out. The Midrash makes this connection:

Anyone who does not make themselves ownerless like the wilderness, Hefker, cannot acquire the wisdom and the Torah. Therefore it says, “Midbar Sinai” (the Sinai Wilderness).¹

Hefker is a Jewish legal concept denoting property found in a public place that can be treated as ownerless. The finder may keep it, free of obligation. What does it mean to make oneself “hefker” and how does it bear on our question of revelation in our time?

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk put it this way:

Only when you are "like a wilderness" are you ready to have God's presence rest upon you and merit the light of Torah. "Like a wilderness" means that you have not yet been touched by human hands, that you have never been cultivated or planted, that you must rely on your own strength, as in the teaching, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" (Mishnah Avot 1:14).

This concept of openness to spiritual experience, of not being owned by pre-conceived notions, echoes through many spiritual traditions. Japanese Zen doctrine speaks of cultivating “beginner’s mind” (Shoshin). In the words of Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” With beginner’s mind we are free to approach the Torah yet again and find new meaning.

This excerpt from an essay posted on the website Psyche links beginner’s mind to awe (what we imagine our ancestors felt at the revelation):

A final, more pleasurable step you can take to increase your [beginner’s mind] comes in the form of deliberately invoking in oneself the emotion of awe. Several studies have shown that awe quiets the ego and prompts epistemological openness – that is, a greater willingness to look at things differently and to recognize the gaps in one’s knowledge. The emotion also seems to reduce people’s need to be satisfied by definite, closed arguments.

In a similar vein, the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, translated as “non-self”, says that no separate self exists. Self is a construct of mind, and therefor an illusion. We are transparent vessels of consciousness through which experience flows. There’s no you to own anything.

Brene Brown sees the Wilderness as the place where you stand alone, as your true self:

You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.....True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.....

And, finally, Jonathan Sacks, in a D’var on Bamidbar, notes that receiving the Torah in the Wilderness, not in the Promised Land, has helped us survive a life in exile:

It is thus no accident that the Israelites received their greatest revelation … outside the land, bamidbar, ‘in the wilderness’, the place that is not a place, just as Jacob received his two great revelations in the midst of journeys, in places that were between: neither starting point nor destination.… That is why the Jewish people survived dispersion. Only the God of everywhere can be found and worshipped anywhere.

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Midbar Sinai reminds us that by approaching the Torah with emptiness waiting to be filled, Hefker, we create the space to rewatch the series with fresh eyes. As the Rabbi with the best name in the Talmud, Ben Bag Bag, says of the Torah in Pirkei Avot:

Turn it over and turn it over again, for all is therein.

This year we journey from the high hopes of B’midbar’s opening, knowing that it will end tragically. How will we read it this year? As a narrative of resilience? A warning to be faithful? A sober acknowledgment of the limits of our causes and conditions? An inspiration to stop repeating the same old mistakes? By making ourselves hefker we open up to hear the voice with which the Torah speaks to us today, that meets us where we are. We take our rightful place with the generations in creating the oral Torah, the perpetual gift from Sinai. We remain open to what the text has to tell us, to hear what the Midbar (wilderness) has to Midaber (say), as we turn it over once again.

Chag Shavuot Sameach,
Rich

Davar Acher (Musical Coda)

A musical cover can make the familiar sparkle anew. Here’s a great example:

Guy Van Duser: The Stars and Stripes Forever

1. Bamidbar Rabbah, 1:7.