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Parashat Bamidbar <big>פָּרָשַׁת בְּמִדְבַּר</big> “in the wilderness” is the first Torah portion in Bamidbar (“Numbers”) 1:1-4:20, and the 34th weekly portion in the annual Jewish Torah reading cycle, in 2025 read and studied on 31 May, 4 Sivan 5785.
<big>❦ Bamidbar RabbahVilna ed., Ch.1, ¶ 7:</big>
“Whoever does not make himself like the wilderness, hefker [open to all], cannot attain wisdom...” [Yair Barkai, transl'd by Rachel Rowan].
h/t Larry Lagarto
Wilderness is a minimalist expanse, at once frightening and exhilarating, empty yet filled with sky and earth, the scrape of rock, green resin and dust scents, raw heat and cold, solitude, a thirst, and above the singing wind a profound silence. It makes us feel infinitely small at the same time as part of the infinite all-there-is. Lost and self-found, removed from the complex, conflicting pulls of materialistic life that easily blind us to what else there is. Here, the challenge is basic: understanding how to gain footing, nourishment, shelter, and a sense of direction, from horizon to horizon.
In 2011, a Muslim, a Jew, and a Christian ;-) quoted the passage blocked in gray above, in their argument for interfaith intellectual humility. As have too sages of countless other belief systems. A person of no supernatural faith myself, I hope that goes for atheists and agnostics, too.
Not in matters of creed alone, but every area of thought for which we humans create doctrine —even informally— and then hew relentlessly to it ... often all unawares.
In sciences, politics, workplaces, relationships, daily life —ruthless confrontation by every occurrence and concern, case by case, inevitably yields to habituation of thought —assumptions, givens, generalizations, prejudices— because our species is wired that way. Habit is an inherent time-saver, a talent that preserves sanity and functionality amid constant, otherwise-overwhelming inputs and demands. (Skill is well-practiced habit.) Ask someone with cognitive deficits that interfere with that, and you’ll find one very exhausted specimen forced to burn up the same energy and time just analyzing what’s going on while everyone else has already moved successfully forward to deciding which way to cope, and proceeding upon that choice.
h/t ColoTim
Success (or gratification, satisfaction, ‘reward’, resolution, etc) is probly the single most powerful mortar in what habits of body or mind we make. Then, once built, even if those habits stop working well, to dismantle them would be hell. To lose them would be to become fearfully lost in maelstrom. So, people rarely do that. And consequently rarely see that these habits are indeed prejudices —prejudgements acquired/developed to make thought easy and life manageable.
Or we distantly know it, but can’t face the fact.
Or figure we can’t afford to. And that might really be. The typecast third-banana actor. The farm family whose livelihood depends on growing specific animals or crops a specific way because of costs and the market. The teacher trapped by an abusive school board or too underpaid to go back and re-specialize in an added field of study. The electric or gas employee where one company has the whole monopoly so there’s just no one else to work for. The social services staffer with no other skills and no way to get any, who sees that the system isn’t lifting up into greater self-sufficiency the very people who need uplift the most — and whom we need uplifted so they can add their talents, productivity, insight, and diversity to our society and culture for all of us to share the benefit — and that even proven win-win solutions go ignored if presented from the ‘wrong’ quarter.
h/t Denise Oliver Velez
The writer, speaker, or politician, who’s won mass enthusiasm for ideas s/he has always stated, would “lose face”, votes, book sales, reputation, funding, maybe even job, family, spouse, if/when telling the constituency, “wait a minute, I’ve found facts and new information that changes a lot about what we’ve been saying until now, about how we’ve been looking at this …“
Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that Michael Lerner wrote (also in 2011) regarding Parashat BaMidbar, of people bent upon certainty
...in matters of the spirit, purpose, identity and relationships between [individuals] and groups. I have watched in amazement and despair as [they] lap up the “us good victims, them evil, evil perpetrators” discourse in speeches, print and Facebook, over and over again, like a toddler listening to a familiar bed time story.
It surprised me because it’s applicable in more directions than only the one he may have meant.
Another writer at that link said the Or Pnei Moshe, a student of the Noam Elimelech, taught that people easily become arrogant and haughty, from a sense of “immortality in the moment” — we forget that this moment of our own, with the emotions, sensations, drives, opinions, beliefs and certainties we hold at this point, are not nearly all there is.
h/t Pakalolo
That this moment, with all it contains, may be so transitory as to offer little that’s “real” at all beyond ourselves and whatever holler-down-the rain-barrel-cum-neo-greco chorus that shapes our current perambulations.
And that we aren’t going to be around for more than an instant of it, as the universe — or even as history — measures time.
Frightening thought. We turn to hide from it in distractions, entertainments, material achievements, sensory and emotional gratifications, and big expressions of self, to invent a preferred bodily or psychological experience of reality, or prefer a fraction of larger reality’s dimensions.
In privileged societies, we don’t all have to outgrow toddler-hood, because this way of life offers every imaginable refuge (and some we can’t imagine ‘til we’re in’em) from acknowledging that ambiguity is a constant everywhere, that neither the scientific method nor faith in doctrine reliably preserves us from errors of judgment, that things change before our very eyes —thru’ growth or destruction or just because we didn’t see clearly before— and must, and should.
h/t BMScott
So, we may feel as if, were we to lay ourselves open out there in the big empty, we’d be naked to danger, adrift in open sea, bewildered in wilderness, desperately flailing for safety, perplexed without a guide. Who would choose such vulnerability, and its risks?
Recall the famous Frost poem we’re all taught to understand the same way — use the link to read it in full if you’d like to, I’ll wait — whose key lines are:
And … long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
...
Then took the other...
Though ... the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
...
...Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by...
Less traveled, perhaps, by still a road, in any case.
Seeing, roads, he assumed — by habit — that that’s all there is to choose from.
He might have chosen trackless, unconfined wilderness, had not the sheer existence of roads blinded him to that alternative even while it stood welcoming before him, only awaiting a courageous, visionary first step.
And so, conformity of thought, habit, prejudice, leads the traveler astray, safe from the risks of what else there is.
It takes a non-habitual kind of vision to venture into wilderness. First needed is ability to imagine its existence. Then to perceive the possibility of that choice. Then realize what an amazing gift has opened up right before our feet. Then, step forward...
Why don’t we? Perhaps not least because our psyche knows that out there we have to hoof it all on our own, carrying only what we ourselves can bear — bravely hoping we’ve learned enough for finding our way in unknown terrain and strange surroundings, guided only by a sky-map of our deepest-held ideals.
… one always being hope/trust we’ll not be so alone after all, that we’ll meet other wanderers, break bread, share water, perhaps even join together, no matter how different, diverse, avoidant, and arrogant we might have been back in the world. Here, perhaps we can finally shake ourselves loose enough of habits of minds that we can choose to recognize our differences of thinking as valuable and wondrous, at least as increased kinds of survival gear for this journey. We can together be ohel mo’ed for each other: a tent of congregation partaking of wilderness, beneath strange new stars, in our seeking for openness, for willing embrace of humility about the ambiguous fact, the transitory answer, the transformative insight — all that comprises the living, paradox-laden well-spring of wisdom.
It would be hard to live in wilderness. Only some can do it. But we all can travel there at the times that are most necessary. As Hillel said, “go and learn.” Let us be on our way.
Shabbat shalom.
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This dvar is a revision from 2017.
