Ah, the great outdoors. This is the time when our weather starts to shift from snowy Buffalo, to the best place to live on earth. I had a chance to spend the beginning of this week in the Delaware Water Gap with colleagues from the Reconstructionist movement learning about wilderness theology.
There we chanted Biblical verses on the Appalachian Trail, walked meditatively draped in Tallis and Tefillin, wrote liturgy on a canoe trip, and recited mourner’s Kaddish by a camp fire, all to discover what it means for to be a Jew outdoors. We spent a great deal of time studying and thinking about the concept of wilderness, or what is known as Hebrew as Bamidbar.
One of my takeaways from our discussions was that Wilderness is much broader than simply being in the wild. The word itself comes from vulnerability. Anytime we feel vulnerable, we have in some way entered into the wilderness.
For the people of Israel, the scariest environment was not the desert, but the mountains. They had lived their lives in the relatively flat Nile Delta. And, here in the Sinai Peninsula they get their first taste of what it means to live at a much higher elevation. For them Mount Sinai might as well have been Mount Everest, dangerous and foreboding in the distance.
This week we read the double portion, Behar-Behukotai, which closes out the book of Leviticus and prepares us for the book of Numbers, a.k.a. Bamidbar. Here Mount Sinai looms large, coming in both the portion’s first verse and its last. Off in the distance, that holy mountain is where the ancient Israelites felt the most vulnerable, it is their wilderness.
Our wilderness may look and feel very different than theirs did. This week, I ask you to find where your wilderness lies. Challenge yourself to approach it, maybe even spend time there. Think of it as your Mount Sinai, because as scary as it seems, your wilderness may be where God is most present.
B’Shalom,
Rabbi Alex