Hearing in the Nothingness

This week’s Torah portion is Bemidbar, which means, in the Wilderness. It is the first portion in the book of Numbers, so named because in the beginning of the portion, God asks Moses to take a census of the male Israelites who are eligible for the fighting force which will, in time, be called upon to conquer the land.
This portion takes place in what the Torah called the Wilderness of Sinai. The place of giving the Torah was barren, arid, desolate, rugged, and empty, a fitting place for the Torah to be received, for many reasons. As there were no distractions and no other groups of people there, Israel could be alone with God for that moment of Divine communion in which the 10 commandments were revealed and the laws of Torah were expounded.
The late 19th Century sage known as S’fat Emet quotes a Midrash: “there was a prince who entered one city after another, only to see the populace flee before him, until he came to a ruined city, where he was greeted with praise. Said the prince, this is the best of all the cities. Here I will set my throne.” Perhaps this story accurately depicts both the desperation of the prince and the lack of choice of the inhabitants, and mirrors the position of God and the Israelites. The S’fat Emet derives the word, “midbar”, from the root which means to lead or rule. We were a people without power, ripe for teaching and leadership. In this sense, perhaps the wilderness was itself a school, as was also suggested by the Israeli historian Nachman Ran. The setting, itself, was to teach us something. We were captive, and out of desperation, receptive; and in fact, Israel was ready to accept a body of laws that was unknown to them and say to God, we will do and we will hear.
But what really happened, as we read in the Torah, was not that simple. After hearing the 10 Declarations, the Israelites pleaded with Moses that hearing God’s voice was too frightening to bear. They wanted Moses to hear God’s voice and they would listen to Moses, receiving the information second hand. It was terrifying to be alone with God; yet only in that aloneness could be found the connection to God that we have been trying to recover every since. The Talmud teaches that in order to truly receive the gift of the Torah, we must make ourselves open like the desert (Nedarim 55a) But being open is difficult: it is fraught with danger, vulnerability, and more than that; it means giving up that which we think we know. The sage Or Chayim claims that the real effort in learning Torah is in negating our own mind in order to understand the mind of God. In metaphoric terms, we have to leave Egypt: the life we know and understand, the life that makes logical sense to us; and enter the wilderness of the soul, which is called nothing. In kabbalistic thought in the Zohar, “the Ancient Holy One is called ayin (nothing)… the hidden, unapproachable, the transcendent”. In order to understand God, we have to enter the state of Nothing. As Helen Keller once said, through my handicaps, I found my work and my God.
The aloneness of nothing is what is sought in meditation. Meditating on the breath or the name of God allows one to leave the realm of the “I” and enter the space of the oneness of all being. The Torah teaches us to reach this state, not by meditating, but in the midst of life, by negating our ego desires for the will of God. That is what is meant by the passage we read after the V’ahavta, which speaks about wearing the fringes of the tallit: not to go about after our own heart and own minds, but to be guided by God’s will, as revealed to us in the Torah. In detaching our power of action from our own desires, we truly recreate the nothingness of the wilderness and allow God’s voice to be heard within us. The commentary Mechilta reminds us of this. It says, the Torah, like the desert belongs to no one. It is accessible, open, and free to all. But in order to hear, understand, and accept the ancient wisdom, we must first ourselves, become like the desert, and empty ourselves of the inner voices that are not God but ego, in order to hear the true ones that are spirit and soul. Abraham Joshua Heschl says it this way: “ We have so much to say about the bible, that we are not prepared to hear what the bible has to say about us.” What the Torah says about us is that God is accessible through self negation and deeds of love. The wilderness is really a fertile place where we are taken care of with great compassion. We are never abandoned in this wilderness, but are taken by the hand and led to holiness.. I end with a quotation from the Zohar which comments on the Song of Songs (191a): When Israel “is very lovesick for her Beloved, she shrinks to nothing until only a dot is left of her, and she is hidden from all her hosts and camps. … He knows that his Beloved is lovesick like himself, so that none of her beauty can be seen, and so through the voices of those warriors of hers her Beloved comes forth from his palace with many gifts and presents, with spices and incense, and comes to her and finds her black and shrunken, without form or beauty. He then draws near to her and embraces and kisses her until she gradually revives from the scents and spices, and her joy in having her Beloved with her, and she is built up and recovers her full form and beauty” As Heschl points out, God has never given up on humankind: always hoping to find righteousness among us, and showing us how to travel there. May each of us find a true home in the quiet of the wilderness, guided by the loving Presence who gave us the great gift of Torah.