Rabbi Janet Marder

June 2, 2007

In the Wilderness

         The world is at war. A plane traveling somewhere over the Pacific is shot down. All the passengers are killed, except for a group of young English schoolboys, who find their way to the shores of a deserted island. The island, a wild place covered with jungle, becomes their home. The boys attempt to organize themselves so that they can find food and survive until they are rescued.

         A few of the boys emerge as the voices of rationalism, moderation and decency; but others, liberated from the constraints of society, gradually give in to their aggressive impulses, and their island paradise is turned into an inferno of evil. By the time the boys are finally saved from the island, they have been transformed into virtual savages – they paint their faces, worship the head of a pig impaled on a stick, and have brutally murdered two of their companions.

         William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” published in 1954, was required reading when I was in junior high school. It’s a shocking story of man in a state of nature, man liberated from what Freud called “civilization and its discontents,” free to run wild and indulge his innate brutality. Not a pretty picture.

         The Torah, surprisingly, has its own version of “Lord of the Flies” – a narrative of human beings removed from their social setting and all traditional authority structures, and transplanted to a wild place, there to survive as best they can. It’s the Book of Numbers, which tells the story of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness of Sinai.

         In the wilderness, a place empty of cities, unmarked by the human footprint, B’nei Yisrael are exposed to the elements – and they, too, are stripped down to their elemental nature. Their most primitive qualities emerge: fear, anger, belligerence, paranoia. Sefer Bemidbar, the Book of the Wilderness, chronicles their repeated descent into aggression, driven by naked panic and terror.

         In our portion this Shabbat, B’ha’alotecha, Numbers chapter 11 recounts such a tale of spiritual bankruptcy, a tale of people who have exhausted their resources. The Israelites have just completed an intense three-day march from Mt. Sinai . They “complain bitterly” before God. The Torah doesn’t tell us what they’re complaining about. Probably they are tired and thirsty and hot, furious at the way their lives have turned out. It is not the first time they have felt this way. Their simmering resentment spews forth, and God is incensed.

         A fire erupts among them. Some commentators think they saw flashes of desert lightning; others imagine a real blaze consuming the outskirts of the camp; others see the fire as a symbol of the conflagration within – the raging anger that has inflamed the people. The people cry out; Moses prays to God; the fire dies down. The place is named “Taberah -- place of burning.”

         The embers still smolder inside them, and soon the people are venting their rage again. This time it is about the monotony of the food. “If only we had meat to eat!” they cry. “We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt , the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look at!”

         Anyone who has fed her family pasta for the third time that week can imagine how Moses might wish to respond to the 600,000 food critics he is shlepping through the desert. “If you don’t like the meal, then fix your own blankety-blank dinner!”

         But Moses doesn’t respond by lashing out at the people. He turns, as he always does, to God, addressing the Holy One in a tone that is strikingly direct and intimate. He berates God for giving him a task that is beyond his abilities. He confesses that he can no longer cope with the people’s insatiable needs. He says that he is physically and emotionally exhausted, and he begs for death.

         “Why have you done me this wrong?” he asks God. “Did I conceive this people? Did I give birth to them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant’ to the land that You promised to their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all these people when they whine before me and say ‘give us meat!’ I cannot carry all these people by myself, for it is too much for me. If this is how You treat me, kill me, I beg You, and let me see no more of my wretchedness.”

         In the wilderness, far from what we would call today any “support system” of extended family, friends or therapist, Moses stands alone with an impossible task. It is a task he never asked for – it was thrust upon him, and he accepted it because he had to; there was nobody else to do the job. Night and day he expends his energies worrying about the people in his care, trying to provide for them, trying to keep them on the right path, trying to keep them calm and contented, trying to motivate them to keep going.

         The people never once express their gratitude for all his efforts. Instead, they pour out upon him all their impatience and anxiety. With almost infantile dependence, they look to him for everything, battering him with their demands, expecting him to have all the answers. They never give him any peace.

         Moses, at these moments, is not the magnificent sculpted hero that Michelangelo gave us, triumphantly descending from Mt. Sinai with the tablets in his hands, beams of light radiating from his face. He is not the stalwart liberator standing before Pharaoh, demanding “let my people go!”

         He is an 80 year old man, worn out from a lifetime of work, in a frustrating, aggravating situation. He is a human being stuck with a problem that is too big to handle, but he has to handle it anyway.

         I have met this Moses many times at Beth Am. She’s taking care of her frail, elderly parent, who is a difficult person,  while trying to hold down a job and manage some sort of a private life. He’s getting up and going to work each day while enduring severe chronic pain.  She’s going through cancer treatment while trying to be a positive, loving wife and mother; he’s had multiple surgeries but he can’t get his strength back. One Moses is caring for a spouse whose illness lingers for years; another Moses battles alone a terrible, debilitating depression.

         Some Moses are worried about a child with learning problems, a drug problem, Asperger’s, an eating disorder, other kinds of physical or mental illness. Some shoulder the responsibility of helping an adult child who is having a difficult time in life – providing financial support, emotional support, help with the grandchildren. Some struggle on and on to find a good job, to bring in business, to pay the bills, to buy gas for the car.

         I know all of these Moses; you know them, too, though you may not know the private burdens they carry. Each of them is unique, but all of them are the same: they are facing a long-term challenge that depletes their resources and tests the stuff they are made of. They are stuck in circumstances not of their making. They do not feel heroic. They are doing what they have to do.

         Their emotions are unpredictable, and all over the place. Sometimes they feel that they’re coping all right; they have contented moments; they can even joke about the situation. Sometimes they burst into tears, or dissolve into rage. They contemplate the future; they wonder how long they will be able to hold out; they wonder if there is ever, ever going to be a change for the better.  

         Bemidbar, the Book of the Wilderness, has survived three thousand years because the wilderness is a part of the human condition. We find ourselves, we find the people we know, inside this story of journeying through an empty, desolate place where there are no tracks to follow and no guarantee of when or where we will get out of it. We recognize Moses, the man who keeps going through exhaustion and aggravation, out of some mixture of love and commitment and guilt and faithfulness, but mostly because for him there is no alternative but to go on.

         This week, in the words we read on this Shabbat, we see Moses hit bottom. He says he has had enough. He asks for death. I do not know if he means it, or if his anguished words are simply an expression of great pain, as such words sometimes are. I do know that God responds in the most practical and compassionate way. He asks Moses to gather 70 of Israel ’s elders – wise, experienced people – and God says that He is going to draw on Moses’ spirit and put some of it into these elders. “They shall share the burden of the people with you,” God says, “you shall not bear it alone.”

         Then God promises that there will be meat to feed the people. Moses isn’t sure he believes it; he is as negative and skeptical of God as the people are towards Moses. But God reassures him that it will be all right. And surprisingly, it is. Moses gathers the elders; the spirit rests upon them, and the Torah says that “Moses entered the camp together with the elders of Israel .” He is still the leader, and his loneliness has not disappeared, but now his isolation is broken.

         Miraculously, meat appears to feed the people and their hunger is satisfied. The peace does not last for long; soon the people are sick – maybe from overeating -- and Moses has another problem to solve. But this time there is no mention of despair. For the moment, he seems to have the energy to cope.

         There are no mountaintop revelations in this week’s portion. But there is a story of survival, and some Jewish lessons in how to endure what must be endured. First lesson: Moses has a trusted confidant, to whom he can open his heart and say whatever he wants to say, to whom he can express all of his feelings, even when they are very far from heroic.

         It could be a sibling or a spouse or a dear friend or a therapist or even a rabbi, but in Moses’ case, the confidant is God, which brings us to lesson number two: Moses prays. He prays when he needs guidance. He prays when he needs courage. He prays when he doesn’t know what else to do. I believe in the power of prayer to get a person through an impossible time, and so does our tradition.

         Third lesson: Moses asks for help. He overcomes pride, shame, embarrassment, whatever it is that holds people back from admitting they are not entirely self-sufficient, and he says that he can’t go on alone anymore. He acknowledges his human frailty; he is ready to let the world see him as imperfect.

         Lesson four: when help is offered, he takes it. He doesn’t come up with a hundred reasons why the plan won’t work. And he doesn’t expect others to make all the effort. He rouses himself from despair and follows the advice he has been given.

         Lesson five: he doesn’t expect perfection. He accepts what he can get. He is still in charge of the Israelites. It is still a monumentally difficult task, and it’s going to go on for another 38 years. But even a small change can be helpful. Now he has some partners, and he knows that he is not alone. And he takes satisfaction in small victories: one problem has been resolved, and that is something, even if the next problem is coming up just a few verses later.