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<\/a>\nShabbat Shalom.<\/p>\n
Today we begin reading from the Book of Numbers, or in Hebrew, Sefer BeMidbar, which means \u201cIn the Wilderness.\u201d The book begins, \u201cNow THE LORD spoke to Moshe in the Wilderness of Sinai\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m going to actually end the quotation right there, because the subject of my d\u2019var is precisely the meaning, or meanings, of Wilderness in Torah. We are going to take a journey that explores the idea of Wilderness itself, and our complicated and evolving relationship with Wilderness from the beginning, and in the present day.<\/p>\n
The Hebrew word that we translate as \u201cWilderness\u201d is Midbar. The root is Dalet Bet Resh. These are the root letters of the word \u201cd\u2019var,\u201d which means \u201ca word or a thing.\u201d The prefix \u201cmi\u201d is actually a contraction of the proposition \u201cmin,\u201d which means \u201cout from.\u201d I think of Midbar as therefore meaning: \u201cthe place where the Word comes out from.\u201d And in case you think I am going too far with that interpretation, the first definition of Midbar in the standard lexicon of Biblical Hebrew, is \u201cmouth;\u201d which is, literally, the place where the word comes out from. (This meaning is found in the Song of Songs.)<\/p>\n
So, Wilderness is a place that speaks. And it is often, as in this morning\u2019s Parsha, the place from which God speaks.<\/p>\n
What is it about Wilderness that extends itself toward the human being; that reaches out to us, that takes hold of our attention; that makes the first move to engage us in communication and relationship?<\/p>\n
David Abram wrote an incandescently insightful book on the subject, called The Spell of the Sensuous<\/em>, in which he explains that \u201call phenomena\u2026actively solicit the participation of our senses. The sensing body is a kind of open circuit that completes itself only in the world.\u201d He describes \u201can expressive, gesturing, landscape\u2026a world that speaks<\/em>.\u201d (paraphrased pp. 81-82 DA SOS) We are beings destined for relationship. In Wilderness, we complete the circuit in a world untouched by the work of our own hands; a world uniquely the unedited and expressive handiwork of God.<\/p>\n In Torah, Wilderness brings sacred relationships into existence: \u201cI found him in a desert land.\u201d It is a place of love, protection, guidance, and, significantly, of redemption.<\/p>\n It is also a place of rebuke, exile, and total undoing.<\/p>\n In today\u2019s Haftorah, which is from the book of Hosea, we find all of these contrasting moods on vivid display.<\/p>\n The imagery is of relationship. Marriage, but a sad marriage. The husband rebukes the unfaithful wife. He threatens to abandon her and her children and leave them destitute. He says he will make her \u201clike a wilderness, render her like a desert land.\u201d She will pursue her lovers, but find nothing but desolation. This metaphoric couple represents God as the husband, and Israel, as the wife.<\/p>\n God threatens to lay waste to the sources of abundance, the grain, the wine, the wool, the linen, the vines and the fig trees, which the wife had mistakenly thought were owed to her for performing the services of a prostitute for the ba\u2019alim.<\/p>\n But then her divine partner entices her to follow him into the Wilderness, and speaks tenderly to her there. He proceeds to make even the most desolate wastelands fertile and generous again. She returns to him, and significantly no longer calls him \u201cba\u2019al,\u201d or master, but \u201cish,\u201d husband, connoting a relationship of reciprocity and love, rather than of ownership and exploitation.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all in there \u2013 the courtship in the wilderness, the education that takes place there, and finally redemption, which comes in the form of restoration of the land\u2019s fertility and abundance. The reciprocity of relationship between God and Israel is embodied as, what else? A generous and nurturing landscape.<\/p>\n A commentary on this verse is found in Talmud. <\/p>\n (Berakhot 7a:22) And Rabbi Yo\u1e25anan said in the name of Rabbi Yosei: A single regret or pang of guilt in one\u2019s heart is preferable to many lashes administered by others that cause only physical pain, as it is stated: \u201cAnd she chases her lovers, but she does not overtake them; she seeks them, but she will not find them; and she will say \u2018I will go and return to my first husband; for it was better for me then than now\u2019\u201d (Hosea 2:9). Remorse is more effective than any externally imposed punishment \u2026 (Hosea 2:11\u201319).<\/p>\n The rabbis use this verse to teach that it is better \u2013 and more effective – to change one\u2019s ways as a result of remorse and understanding than through punishment.<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to go just a little bit deeper into the redemptive quality of Wilderness \u2013 or perhaps the necessity of Wilderness to bring about a certain type of redemption.<\/p>\n There are many beautiful, or terrifying, or fascinating invocations of Wilderness in Torah, but one of the most mysterious is found in Leviticus, Chapter 16, when on Yom Kippur, two identical goats are wrestled into the presence of the High Priest at the Temple. We all probably remember this: one of them is slaughtered in the normal way, its blood daubed on the horns of the altar. The other goat remains alive; this is the \u201cgoat for Azazel.\u201d \u201cAaron lays his hands on it and confesses over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, even all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat and shall send him away by the hand of an appointed man into the Wilderness.\u201d Leviticus 16: 19 <\/p>\n The great 20th Century Leviticus scholar and interpreter, Jacob Milgrom, explains that the sacrifice of the goat that is slaughtered purges the sins that were the result of the inadvertent wrongdoings of the people. However, \u201crebellious acts,\u201d committed by those who \u201cact defiantly and revile Adonai,\u201d cannot be purged in this way. Hence this mysterious ritual of the \u201cgoat for Azazel.\u201d<\/p>\n Milgrom goes on to state that even then, \u201conly a limited amount of deliberate sin will be tolerated. There is a point of no return. One day, purgation will no longer avail; the accumulated rebellious acts of the community will rise beyond a set limit; at that point God\u2019s endurance of his people\u2019s impurities will end; at that point he will forsake his earthly abode to abandon it and his people to destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n Whereas \u201cThe pagans believed that impurity was caused by personified demonic forces intent on driving out their patron god from his sanctuary\u2026.\u201d In Israel, \u201cHumanity has replaced the demon. People have the ultimate power to obey or resist God. If they choose to rebel, \u2026, they will pollute the sanctuary to the point that God will no longer abide in it\u2026\u201d (p. 147 JM Lev)<\/p>\n This brings me to the central point that I want to make today, which is that there is a conception of Wilderness in Judaism is not a location<\/em> somehow just outside of human habitation and domesticity; this is the Wilderness that can pursue us into the confines of our simple lives.<\/p>\n What do I mean by this? We repeat it in Torah and in our liturgy; it\u2019s written on our doorposts. Some of us bind it to our arms and to our foreheads. Many of us recite it when we rise up and when we lie down to go to sleep, when we are traveling and when we are at home. It\u2019s the second paragraph of the Sh\u2019ma, which is from Deuteronomy, but is essential a recapitulation of the warning issued in last week\u2019s Parsha, Behukkotai.<\/p>\n It is obviously very very important that we remember and never forget that *we* ourselves can bring about a state of the land that is incompatible with civilization, incompatible with life; that the good land that we enjoy and feel that we are somehow entitled to, that we have somehow earned, can be transformed into a howling Wilderness; we are warned and warn ourselves repeatedly, that we can disappear from the good land that we have been given.<\/p>\n -This spring, 200 million people in India experienced temperatures of 120 F. Tonight, we begin a two-day long celebration of the Holiday of Shavuot \u2013 also known as Hag HaBikkurim, the pilgrimage festival of First Fruits.<\/p>\n This holiday has a double layer of meaning. On the one hand, we remember it as the day on which we received Torah in the Wilderness, and entered into a covenantal relationship \u2013 a marriage, if you will \u2013 with God.<\/p>\n It is also the Festival of First Fruits, in which we openly acknowledge and give voice to our gratitude to God for the gift of the produce of the land, the fruit, the grain, the abundance that makes life good. With this Festival, we demonstrate our understanding that the source of all that we enjoy is God.<\/p>\n Notice that we have a beautiful huppah here on the Bimah, which we will decorate this evening and use during our Shavuot celebrations.<\/p>\n But we would do well to ask ourselves, individually and as a community, before we enact this drama, are we entering into this marriage contract in good faith and with a clean conscience? Do we intend to uphold our end? Or are we already bargaining to be allowed to maintain our comfortable relationship with our ba\u2019alim?<\/p>\n I want to return to the theme of Wilderness and redemption.<\/p>\n If I don\u2019t cry first, I\u2019m going to quote from a story by Marybeth Holleman, about an encounter she had with whales in the waters off a tiny island off the coast of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.<\/p>\n \u201cStill, through my hard-beating heart, what I feel more than anything is safe. Safe in this wilderness where we\u2019re put into proper scale. Here in the bay in the fog with the cruise ship out of sight, in our small yellow kayaks on a still and foggy sea, with whales around us, here is where I feel a safety of scale. Like the surf scoters or the marbled murrelets, we are small and held, held in the place, our human concerns and transgressions shrunk down to size, as if there\u2019s still a place where we can go and be forgiven.\u201d (What We Talk About When We Talk About Wilderness: Marybeth Holleman)<\/p>\n That need to tap into the language of forgiveness; of redemption, is no longer limited to people of faith. We are living in a time when the urgent call to Tshuvah, and to Redemption is speaking now, in every voice, in every earthly language. Remember the voice of the mother orca who lost her calf, and for two weeks held her dead baby above the water, a drama that was heard and understood by anyone who saw her or heard her story, in every language.<\/p>\n Amitav Ghosh, the Indian author, wrote a work of nonfiction called The Great Derangement<\/em>, in which he explains how our modes of thought have rendered climate change unthinkable. He has words for us, the importance of communities like ours, communities of faith: \u201cOrganizations with religious affiliations possess the ability to mobilize people in far greater numbers than any others. Moreover, religious worldviews acknowledge intergenerational, long-term responsibility. They are capable of imagining nonlinear change \u2013 catastrophe, in other words. Finally, it is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits, and this is intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one may wish to conceive of it.” (Pp. 160-161 AG TGD)<\/p>\n Sometimes, quite honestly, I am afraid, afraid that our collective transgression may be so great that it will cause the spirit of God to depart from the earthly abode forever.<\/p>\n I am afraid that short of this, we will be chastised with a period of exile such as we read about last week in Parshat Behukkotai, stalked by a desolating experience of Wilderness proportionate to the damage we are causing, defiantly, as it were, since we have no excuse for failing to understand either cause or consequence.<\/p>\n I am, however, comforted by my faith, not that God will take care of all of this for us. That isn\u2019t the Torah I know, or the history I know.<\/p>\n Rather, I am comforted by this idea, expressed by Adin Steinsaltz in The Thirteen Petaled Rose<\/em>, on the subject of Repentance: \u201cRepentance is lies beyond the correction of sinful deeds; it is reached when the change and the correction penetrate the very essence of the sins once committed and, as the sages say, create the condition in which a man\u2019s transgressions become his merits<\/em>: This level of Tikkun is reached when a person uses the knowledge of the sin of the past and transforms it into such an extraordinary thirst for good that it becomes a divine force.\u201d (pp. 93 \u2013 101 AD TPR)<\/p>\n May we, through sincere, immediate, transformational repentance, as individuals, and in our sacred community, seek to enter into a relationship of true reciprocity and love with God and Creation.<\/p>\n And may we learn through repentance, regret, and understanding, rather than severe rebuke, to transform our sins into such an extraordinary thirst for good that it becomes a divine force.<\/p>\n Shabbat Shalom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Deirdre Gabbay, delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, 2019 Shabbat Shalom. Today we begin reading from the Book of Numbers, or in Hebrew, Sefer BeMidbar, which means \u201cIn the Wilderness.\u201d The book begins, \u201cNow THE LORD spoke to Moshe in… <\/p>\n
\n-A million species face extinction.
\n-The earth\u2019s oceans could rise 6.5 feet by the end of the century.
\n-Global carbon levels are higher now than at any time in the past 3 million years. By mid-century, if trends continue, our atmosphere will resemble that of the Eocene, a time 50 million years ago when \u201cpalms and crocodiles inhabited the Canadian Arctic.\u201d (Climate Central)<\/p>\n