Bemidbar 5777 - English

By Rabbi Guido Cohen

Asociación Israelita Montefiore Bogotá, Colombia

This week we begin reading the book of Bemidbar, known in English as Numbers, from its traditional name in Hebrew: Humash HaPekudim (the book of census).

However, the name we use today in Hebrew (Bemidbar) literally means ‘in the desert’. This name comes from one of the first words in the book, but it also contains a deeper meaning. The desert is perhaps the setting par excellence for the Jewish people, the site where it all began, the geography that made our identity as a people possible.

In a famous article from ‘The New Yorker’ about the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, Edmund Wilson (1955) wrote in the 1950s: ‘It is a landscape without physiognomy; no faces of men or gods, no bodies of recumbent animals, are suggested by the shapes of the hills. “Nothing but monotheism could possibly come out of this,” said one of my companions, who knew Palestine well.’ 

The truth is that the idea of the desert as the founding place for monotheist tradition, where revelation took place, intrigued the sages even before Talmudic times. 

Philo of Alexandria, in his work ‘on the Decalogue’, asks precisely that question: why is the desert the site for the revelation of the Torah? The first of the Jewish philosophers, he explains that cities are spaces where evil, impiety and arrogance live. In cities, according to Philo, men build deities and worship material things. On the contrary, the desert is where everything is purified, where people let go of their vices. 

The Midrash sages also asked what was special about the desert. In Bemidbar Rabbah, it is explained that the Torah was given in a context of rain, fire and desert, for these three things can be obtained freely by anyone, just like the words of the Torah. Many things in the world have a ‘price’, they must be paid for before (or after) receiving them. The desert represents the free-of-charge nature of the Torah. Nobody can claim ‘the desert is mine’, just like nobody can claim ownership over the Torah, which has been given to all of us. However, the Midrash adds at the end that just like the desert ‘has no owner’, whoever wishes to receive the Torah must also recognise him/herself as free. Not only are the words of the Torah free as the desert, whoever gets them must do so with the freedom of one who walks through the desert, rid of all bonds. 

David Hartman says, ‘We were born as a people in the desert so that we could understand that the Earth must be perceived as instrumental and not as an absolute value. The memory of the covenant performed in the desert prevents us from falling victims to idolatry of political power’ (Hartman, A Living Covenant).

Even from an etymological perspective, the desert and the word are connected. Desert in Hebrew is MiDBaR, which is written in the same way as MeDaBeR, meaning ‘speech’. The Dibbur, what has been said, is intimately connected to the desert. It is in the desert where the Torah can be ‘said’, perhaps because it is the most appropriate place for it to be heard. 

In one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, Edmond Jabes refers also to connecting the idea of the desert with the importance of sand in the book of Bereshit, that sand which was a symbol of God’s promise to Abraham. Jabes writes, ‘It is only in the desert, in the dust of our words, where the divine word could be revealed. Nudity, transparency of a word that each time we must find again in order to be able to speak. The wandering path creates the desert (…) The word has a residence permit only in the silence of other words. In the first place, to speak is to support oneself on the metaphor of the desert, to occupy a whiteness, a space of dust or ashes, where the victorious word is offered in its liberated nudity’ (Jabes, Del desierto al libro).

In sum, the desert is the place where our people begin. It is there where everything starts, the space where the word is possible. The fact that the Torah has a book called ‘in the desert’ and that it has no title mentioning the land of Israel is perhaps an indication of a space to which we must return from time to time. The prophetic movement preferred that geography. The desert was the mythical place where it all began, and paradoxically, it was the place where we had to return for guidance. We live in an urban world, where the desert is absent both geographically and as a concept. The noise, the images, the social networks, the ideologies and the ambitions make us part of overpopulated spaces. Loneliness and silence, even momentary, is a dimension we have lost. Because of that, maybe, the Torah continues to invite us into the desert. It is there where our soul is quiet enough to hear the word that is spoken, to perceive the soft whisper of the transcendent. 

On the eve of Shavuot, may God bless us with the capacity to exit the desert. To find moments and spaces that have not been intervened or constructed yet, where our soul can give itself to the silence where the voice of the Eternal can be heard. 

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Guido Cohen