Like so many, I’ve been struggling over the past few weeks to find the words for where we are today as a Jewish community.
I feel simultaneously lost and tightly focused, energized and exhausted. Fearful and angry, and lost in an expanse with the sun beating down. It is like we, as community, are back in the desert, not certain of where we’re going and feeling the drain of the daily repetition of the same landscape over and over.
The desert has always been the place of transformation for the Jewish people. It is a place where:
“… your possessions cannot surround you. Your preconceptions cannot protect you. Your logic cannot promise you the future. Your guilt can no longer place you safely in the past. You are left alone each day with an immediacy that astonishes, chastens, and exults. You see the world as if for the first time.” (Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Honey From the Rock)
And in this emptiness of self, we find community, strength, meaning and purpose.
So being back in the desert feels like the right image. For a fuller understanding, we must invoke Shakespeare. In Act II Scene 5 of Twelfth Night, Malvolio says:
“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”
Allow me to suggest a slight re-wording to speak to the current Jewish experience.
“Some are born in the desert, some achieve the desert, and some have the desert thrust upon ’em.”
As a people, we were born in the desert, we choose the desert in rituals , and recently, we’ve had the desert thrust upon us.
Born in The Desert
The formation of the Jewish people, begins truly in the desert. In the empty space between leaving enslavement and receiving the Torah at Sinai. In a place of transformation from a disparate group to an empowered community that will impact the world far beyond their numbers.
Achieving / Choosing The Desert
Rabbinic tradition is very deliberate about shaping the calendar and the holiday cycle. And as we travel these cycles year after year, we are put in position where we are encouraged to enter a desert that encourages deep reflection and transformation. At Adventure Judaism, we go to the desert of Moab, Utah each year, to celebrate Passover. This is choosing the desert environment as a place to build as a community and reset as individuals. Join us for this amazing experience.
Have The Desert Thrust Upon Us
The events of the past months have put us back into that open, desert like existence. We are back in a place where our old behaviors no longer serve us, where our identities are being re-examined, and where we need to transform to a new stage. We are back in the desert, yet as frightening as that is, the desert is also the place that shaped us; the state of being that gives us the strength.
Be Not Afraid
As we are here, let us not neglect the first line from the Bard: “Be not afraid…”
Be not afraid because we have been here before. Be not afraid because it is here we find community. Be not afraid, even though it has been forced upon us this time. We are back in the desert, but we know the way out.
