Matot Masei 2022:The Midbar

Rabbi Margaret

The Israelites set out from Rameses and encamped at Succoth.

They set out from Succoth and encamped at Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness.

They set out from Etham and turned about toward Pi-hahiroth, which faces Baal-zephon, and they encamped before Migdol.

They set out from Pene* -hahiroth and passed through the sea into the wilderness; and they made a three-days’ journey in the wilderness of Etham and encamped at Marah.

They set out from Marah and came to Elim. There were twelve springs in Elim and seventy palm trees, so they encamped there.

They set out from Elim and encamped by the Sea of Reeds.*

They set out from the Sea of Reeds and encamped in the wilderness of Sin.

They set out from the wilderness of Sin and encamped at Dophkah.

They set out from Dophkah and encamped at Alush…

And so on.  Our little aliyah here goes on to name forty-two  places, if I counted right, that the Israelites camped between Mitzrayim and the edge of the Jordan river.  How could anyone ever say that Torah is boring?  

Actually I love this little section (and I fondly remember Yemaya teaching from it when she became bat mitzvah many-all years ago now.)  It is the briefest summary of the epic forty-year journey that the Israelites took through the midbar.  This journey through the midbar is the subject matter of the books of Exodus and Numbers — our book, which is called Ba-midbar in Hebrew, which we are finishing today.  

This recitation of campsites is like a paper map, showing the whole route through the midbar, as opposed to the GPS version that we have been looking at up to now, where we just get to see the next intersection and a directive to turn right or left — or in ancient terms, see the pillar of fire begin to lift and move in a direction that we are to follow.  

I don’t remember what led up to it, but on Lag B’Omer, when I was sitting around a campfire in the evening with the Young Jewish Adults, Aviv and I got to talking about this word midbar and its root DALET BET REYSH.  Very briefly and most familiarly, midbar means wilderness, m’daber means to speak, and davar — same root — means both word and thing.  So what do wilderness, speech and thing-ness have in common?  I’ve been contemplating this juxtaposition ever since. 

So I’m going to free-associate here for a minute.  Any wilderness is a midbar, but THE midbar is the one that our ancestors wandered through in Torah.  We meet the word for the first time in Lech Lecha (Gen. 14:6).  It’s describing the layout of fiefdoms that Abraham and his clan encountered as they left their brief sojourn in Egypt and headed back northward to the land that God had shown them.  Then we see the word maybe thousands of times in the rest of Torah and the prophets and writings.  

Lots of places are called midbar — wilderness.  I suppose this place could be called midbar Caspar.  But that particular stretch of wilderness between the home areas of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their families and Mitzrayim, Egypt, the place of enslavement, and then the circuitous path taken by the Israelites when they left Mitzrayim and made their way back north — roughly, let’s say, in modern terms, from Jerusalem to the north to the top of the Gulf of Suez to the west and then a huge parabola running all the way down the west side of the Sinai peninsula and up again along the east side to the top of the Red Sea, east a bit more into Jordan, north again around the Dead Sea and up to the bottom of the Jordan River — our ancestors traveled that particular path, or parts of it, over and over at crucial moments in biblical time.  

I have been in various parts of that midbar over the years.  I have heard said that the northern desert — the Negev — wasn’t always desert — that it was desertified by overgrazing in ancient times.  There is in fact a fair amount of rainfall there.  So it is possible to imagine that land having once been more verdant, more of a grassland.  But the Sinai is like the moon — raw and wild, geographically astounding, with huge extremes of temperature.  I remember climbing Jabal Musa — the place considered by some — and certainly by tour companies — to be Mount Sinai — in the winter.  It was so cold that water flowing downhill was frozen solid in sheets.  And the mountain was so vertical that one climbed a staircase — 1000 steps — to reach the summit.

That midbar —- between Canaan and Mitzrayim — is the platform for the narrative of Torah.  It is the stage on which everything happens.  I have been chewing for a long time on the fact that the story told in Torah ends while the Israelites are still in the midbar, before they cross into the Promised Land.  Moses dies at Mount Nebo, on the east side of the Jordan, and the Torah ends there.   With that we circle back to the creation of the world and start reading Torah again.  If you read on just a couple pages further, past the end of Torah, into Joshua, the Israelites cross right into the Promised Land.  But that little matter doesn’t even make it into Torah.  Torah is interested in the midbar.  This isthe place of transit, the — to use a word that I am getting tired of, because it is relevant to everything now — the liminal space, the ground — the literal ground, the place where the story happens.  Beginnings and endings matter less than the large middle.

And what is the story told in Torah?  There is a linear story: the world is created, then almost destroyed, then repopulated, then the Israelite clan begins and grows, is enslaved, is freed and takes its long journey back to its ancestral land.  And there is also a circuitous story, a spiral story.  We read Torah in a circular way — rolling the scroll back to the beginning every year, just before what one might think should be the climax, and we start again.  And so too with life, with history — it both moves forward from campsite to campsite and at the same time is full of loops and layers, and old stuff comes up over and over again in new ways, even as we think we are moving forward with our story, individually and collectively.

Which brings me to a dream I had long ago, when I was 22 years old and about to become Bat Mitzvah.  In my dream I was buying matzah at a local supermarket in LA where I lived, and I got to talking with an old woman in front of me in the checkout line.  The woman brought me to her house and, in the way of dreams, she took out a Torah scroll, unrolled it and wrapped me in it, coiled me in spirals of Torah.  I remember that it was warm and that the letters somehow shimmered in a very pleasant way.  In some associative way I connect the warmth and embrace of that dream scroll with the midbar, with the platform on which the sacred happens.  

I think about places that have that embracing, shimmering quality for me — dry riverbeds, with their little sparkling puddles and soft, round rocks, the Mojave desert of childhood weekends, Big River, especially a couple miles upstream — pieces of ground, of wilderness, that I circle back to when I can, that shimmer in my memory and in my stories.  And I can think as well about places that are less pleasant in my memory, where I was lost or injured or out of place.  All of this my midbar.

The Torah, of course, is fundamentally built of devarim, of words.  Vaydaber ADONAI el Moshe — God spoke words to Moses.  God gave Torah — words — at Mount Sinai, a platform of words, a roadmap of story and commandments, which are themselves a story, which circles around and around, year after year, generation after generation, even while the scroll itself — which is a davar — an item, a material thing — moves from, say,  Amslerberg to Sedlcany to a nazi warehouse to Westminister Synagogue in London to Mendocino to Caspar, or from somewhere in northern British Columbia (we think) to Orange County to us.

Let’s listen to the names of the resting places in the midbar:

Raamses / Sukkot / Etham / Pi-hahirot / Marah / Elim / Sea of Reeds / Wilderness of Zin / Dophkah / Alush / Rephidim / Midbar Sinai / Kivrot Ha-taavah / Hatzerot / Ritmah / Rimmon-Perez / Libnah / Rissah / Kelelathah / Mount Shepher / Haradah / Makhelot / Tahath / Terakh / Mitka / Hashmonah / Moserot / Bene Jaakan / Hor Ha-gidgad / Yotvatah / Abronah / Etzion Gever / Midbar Zin / Mount Hor / Tzalmonah / Punon / Ovot / ruins of the passes at the border of Moab / Divon-gad / Almon-Diblataimah / the passes before Nevo / Jericho / Avel- Shittim.

In my little life I’ve lived in West Lafayette Indiana, Garden Grove CA, Tustin CA, Madison New Jersey,  Santa Cruz, Echo Park, Silverlake, Jerusalem, Manhattan, skid row in LA, Boyle Heights, three houses in the Fairfax area, Mendocino, two houses in Elk, and one in Albion, with shorter sojourns in Muizenberg in the Western Cape of South Africa, Durbanville, also near Cape Town, and plenty of still shorter encampments along my looping path.

Each of those places, and the paths between them, is midbar — wilderness, land, the stage on which the story of my life has happened (so far).  Each of them is also a davar, a name, a word, a designation on a map.  And each of them is also a house, an apartment, a curb, a street, a landscape.  Each of these places has held my devarim, my things, and they have each held me and my family and my friends and not-friends and my schools and workplaces and everything else.

I love this quality of Torah — that it is at once land, word and stuff.  It is a staging ground for travel, for journeying, individually and collectively and generationally.  It is words.  And it is everything that is carried by means of those words to make life and make history and make meaning.  

We have arrived at the end of the midbar here, at the end of the book of Bamidbar and also of the journey across the great midbar.  We leave our friends the Israelites and our teacher and prophet, Moshe Rabbeinu, standing at the edge.  The next and final book of Torah is Devarim — another variant of the same root as midbar, the plural of davar.  Words.  Things.  In Devarim Moshe looks backwards to the journey they are completing.  And he looks forwards to the pitfalls of the future, which he can see in the distance.  But right now he stands where we all do, in the wilderness, in our lives, in our stories, in our community, in our world, in the middle, in our present moment, with both smoke in the air and challah about to go in the oven.  

What am I saying here?  I don’t exactly know.  I am exploring the way that Torah feels like land, and land feels like Torah, like there is something sacred that holds the story and the material reality of our lives.  I hope we can feel the shimmer and the embrace that come from all of it.