Wilderness and Word
The parasha of Bemidbar, “In the Wilderness,” is usually read immediately prior to Shavuot, the commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.1To be sure, neither the Torah, nor any other book of Tanakh, explicitly connects the two events. For an account of the connection, see my introduction to the Shavuot Maḥzor (Jerusalem: Koren, 2016).
Accordingly the rabbis strove to find a connection between them. A midrash, for example, states that “the Torah was given in three things: fire, water, and wilderness – wilderness, as it says, ‘The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.’”2Numbers Rabba 1:7.
There were various suggestions as to what this means. How exactly is Torah essentially connected to the idea of wilderness?
One interpretation is psychological: “Anyone who does not make himself open to all [hefker, literally ‘ownerless’] like a wilderness cannot acquire wisdom and Torah.”3Ibid.
To receive the word of God, we must make ourselves open, the way a desert is. We have to engage in active listening. If we bring to the Torah our own presuppositions and preoccupations, we will hear only what we expect to hear. We will never encounter the voice of God, the radically Other, the transformative presence, within the text. We need an open mind and a receptive heart.
Another midrash relates the wilderness to the rabbinic tradition that God offered the Torah to all the nations of the world, but none except Israel wanted to accept it. That is why the Torah was given in open space, in no-man’s-land, so that it could be heard by everyone. Had it been given in any specific country, all the other nations except that one could claim that it was not offered to them.4Mekhilta, Parashat Yitro, BaḤodesh 1.
Another similar interpretation is that just as fire, water, and wilderness are not things you buy, but are available to all, so the Torah was and is a free gift from God; whoever wishes to avail themselves of it may do so.5Midrash Lekaḥ Tov, Parashat Yitro, 20:2.
However, there is something altogether deeper at stake, and it is suggested by the assonance, the similarity of sound, between midbar, “wilderness,” and davar, “word.”6Noted by, among others, Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 143.
There is a connection between the silence and barrenness of the desert and the unique revelation that took place there. Looking back on that event at the end of his life, Moses reminded the people that it was an auditory experience, not a visual one: “Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deut. 4:12). This was a radical departure from the history of religion.
Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were struck by the profound difference between the religion of the Bible and all other religions of the ancient world. God, in Judaism, is invisible. He cannot be seen or visually represented. To attempt to do so – to make an icon or a visible representation of God – is in Judaism a form of idolatry. For every other ancient religion, the gods were eminently visible. They could be seen in the phenomena of nature: the sun, the stars, the sky, the sea, the wind, the rain, the storm. There was no problem of revelation. The gods were everywhere.
It was in Israel that a revolutionary idea was born, that God was not in nature but beyond it, for it was He who created nature in the first place:
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars which You have set in place… (Ps. 8:4)
This was a paradigm-shifting concept.7“It needs an effort of the imagination to realise the shattering boldness of a contempt for imagery at the time, and in the particular historical setting, of the Hebrews. Everywhere religious fervour…sought plastic and pictorial expression. The Hebrews, however, denied the relevancy of the ‘graven image’; the boundless could not be given form, the unqualified could but be offended by a representation…. Every finite reality shrivelled to nothingness before the absolute value which was God” (Henri Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949], 242). This was, according to Frankfort, a decisive moment in “the emancipation of thought from myth.”
The entire universe, almost infinite in extent, is no more than the work of God’s fingers. Everything we can see is not God but merely the work of God. Hence the repeated prohibitions in Judaism against making an image or icon. To Judaism, the idea that God is visible is idolatry. God is beyond the totality of things seen.
How then can He be encountered? In Judaism for the first time, revelation became a problem. When the gods are to be found in nature, they are close. But if God is beyond nature, beyond the universe itself, then He is vast beyond our imagining, and infinitely distant. The answer Judaism gave was radical. God is close, but encountered not in things seen, but in words heard. This is how the historian Heinrich Graetz put it:
The pagan perceives the divine in nature through the medium of the eye, and he becomes conscious of it as something to be looked at. On the other hand, to the Jew who conceives God as being outside of nature and prior to it, the Divine manifests itself through the will and through the medium of the ear. He becomes conscious of it as something to be heeded and listened to. The pagan beholds his god; the Jew hears Him, that is, apprehends His will.8Heinrich Graetz, “Judaism Can Be Understood Only Through Its History,” in Ideas of Jewish History, ed. Michael Meyer (New York: Behrman House, 1974), 223.
Other civilisations gave rise to visual cultures, while Judaism is supremely a culture of the ear – of words, speech, listening, interpreting, understanding, heeding.
This created, for Jews and Judaism, a distinctive phenomenology, a unique way of experiencing the world. Seeing, said Hans Jonas, is immediate, but hearing requires interpretation. When I hear a dog barking, for example, I hear the bark, not the dog. To know that it was a dog producing the sound, I have to use inference.9Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14, no. 4 (1954): 507–519.
Sight can be instantaneous; that is what is captured by a photograph. But sound, communication, speaking, and listening are necessarily extended in time. You cannot freeze a sentence.10See Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985).
So a culture based on listening rather than seeing encounters God not in timeless moments but in time, which is to say, in history.
Even Sigmund Freud, otherwise hostile to religion, could not avoid being impressed by this idea:
Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one that has more significance than is at first obvious. It is the prohibition against making an image of God, which means the compulsion to worship an invisible god…. [This] was bound to exercise a profound influence. For it signified subordinating sense perception to an abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely, an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary consequences…. It was certainly one of the most important stages on the way to becoming human.11Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage, 1939), 144–145.
A revolution of this magnitude cannot take place under ordinary circumstances. In the great river lowlands where civilisation began (the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile), the eye is captivated by the shifting scenes of nature; in cities, by the works of man – art and architecture. Only in the emptiness of the wilderness is the eye subordinate to the ear. Only in the silence of the desert can the sound beneath sound be heard:
In Hebrew thought, Book and Desert are contingent upon one another. When God revealed Himself to Moses and charged him with the task of freeing the Hebrews, terms such as “freedom” and “liberty” were not used. The idea of emancipation from bondage is expressed as “going on a three days’ journey into the desert, to sacrifice to God our Lord” (Ex. 3:19; 5:3), as if God could not be apprehended without this initial journey into the desert.12Jose Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 4–5.
Or as Edmond Jabès put it:
The word cannot dwell except in the silence of other words. To speak is, accordingly, to lean on a metaphor of the desert, a space of dust or ashes, where the triumphant word is offered in her unrestricted nudity.13Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1990), 68.
The historian Eric Voegelin saw this as fundamental to the discovery by the Israelites of a completely new form of spirituality:
If nothing had happened but a lucky escape from the range of Egyptian power, there only would have been a few more nomadic tribes roaming the border zone between the Fertile Crescent and the desert proper, eking out a meagre living with the aid of part-time agriculture. But the desert was only a station on the way, not the goal; for in the desert the tribes found their God. They entered into a covenant with Him, and thereby became His people….
When we undertake the exodus and wander into the world, in order to found a new society elsewhere, we discover the world as the Desert. The flight leads nowhere, until we stop in order to find our bearings beyond the world. When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit that with its urgent whispering has already driven and rescued him from Sheol [the domain of death]. In the Desert God spoke to the leader and his tribes; in the Desert, by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they had at last reached life and became the people chosen by God.14Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 153.
So there is an intrinsic connection between the desert, midbar, and God who reveals Himself in speech, medabber. But note also what is unique about the Jewish story. It is not unknown in the history of religion for founders to spend time alone – their “wilderness years” – during which their understanding of their mission takes shape. There are such stories told of the heroes of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. What is unique to the Jewish experience is that this happened to an entire people. It was not Moses alone but the Israelites as a whole who experienced the wilderness years. This too is essential to the distributed and democratised nature of Jewish spirituality. “The Torah Moses commanded us is the inheritance of [all] the community of Jacob” (Deut. 33:4).
The way to the holy land lies through the wilderness. It was not simply that the more direct route, along the coast, was dangerous: “When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, ‘If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt’” (Ex. 13:17). Rather, the desert was the place where the people would be alone with God. There, undistracted by the sight of natural or man-made beauty, they were hyper-sensitised to sound. They could hear the voice of God, becoming the only people in history to have received a revelation experienced directly by every member of the nation. What they heard was a unique challenge: to take the pain of suffering in Egypt and redirect it into creating a society that would be the opposite of Egypt, not an empire built on power but a society of individuals of equal dignity under the sovereignty of God. To quote Voegelin again:
What emerged from the alembic of the Desert was not a people like the Egyptians or Babylonians, the Canaanites or Philistines, the Hittites or Arameans, but a new genus of society, set off from the civilizations of the age by the Divine choice. It was a people that moved on the historical scene while living toward a goal beyond history.15Ibid., 154.
In the silence of the desert, the Israelites heard the Word and became the people of the Word.