The name of the Parshah, “Bamidbar,” means “In the desert”. It opens with God commanding Moshe and Aaron to conduct a census of the twelve tribes of Israel. The tribe of Levi is counted separately becausethey serve in the Sanctuary as kohanim and workers. We read which of the families are responsible for dismantling and reassembling the Mishkan, the portable Tabernacle; and where each tribe and family encamped.
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There’s a question so obvious we almost forget to ask it: Why was the Torah given in the wilderness — in the desert, of all places?
God could have waited. Forty years later, standing on the banks of the Jordan, the people would have had land, stability, a future they could almost touch. Surely that would have been the moment for Sinai — a Torah rooted in place, given to a people who had arrived.
But it wasn’t. It was here. Bamidbar — in the desert. In the between-space. In the transition. You could say – in the middle of nowhere.
The Midrash in Bamidbar Rabbah asks exactly this question, and offers an answer that I find almost unsettling in its simplicity: Why was Torah given in the desert? Just as the desert is hefker, ownerless, belonging to no one — so too, Torah must be hefker, free and available to anyone willing to receive it.
The desert, in other words, is not a problem in the story, a condition to be solved, a defect to be fixed. The desert is the condition for the story – and for us.
Think about what the desert does to a person. It strips you. There are no landmarks. No social hierarchy. No accumulated reputation. You can’t say “I am from the tribe of Such-and-Such, I have a house, I have a past, I know who I am.” The desert doesn’t care. The desert holds nothing — and therefore, it holds you.
This is exactly what Bamidbar opens with: a census. “S’u et rosh kol adat B’nei Yisrael” — lift up the head of every member of the community, count them, one by one. Every person is counted by name, not by category. In the middle of the wilderness, at the moment of most radical displacement, God says: You are not just a number. You are not lost. You are seen.
Resilience doesn’t begin with certainty. It begins with being seen.
There’s a teaching from the Sfat Emet that strikes me every time I come back to it. He says the desert represents a kind of emunah peshutah — pure, unadorned faith. That faith, that emunah, is impossible to sustain once you settle down. When you have a house and a harvest and a routine, your trust in God gets quietly, comfortably replaced by trust in your own infrastructure. If we are not aware, we can forget God’s presence completely – even if we are very observant. Not so in the desert: it forces a different posture – a posture of hands open, nothing held, complete trust.
This is not weakness. This is the prerequisite for receiving. You cannot receive Torah with closed fists. You cannot receive wisdom if you are already full of yourself.
And then comes Shavuot — arriving almost always after we read this portion of Bamidbar — and we are supposed to re-enact standing at Sinai. We stay studying Torah all night long.
But notice: we have been traveling through the wilderness to get here. These seven weeks of the Omer were not just a countdown, but a count up. The weeks of the Omer are a journey. They are our own midbar — our own stripping down, our own willingness to arrive at Sinai without knowing exactly who we’ll be when we get there.
Resilience isn’t the ability to stay the same under pressure. Resilience is the capacity to keep moving through the desert without demanding that the desert become a more comfortable place. The Israelites didn’t tame the wilderness. They traversed it. And in traversing it, they became the people who could stand at Sinai.
My friends, I want to ask all of us: What is your desert right now? I mean this as a real question, not a rhetorical one. Each of us carries a midbar — a place of not-yet, of between, of stripped-down uncertainty. A relationship in transition. A grief that hasn’t resolved. A question about meaning or direction that doesn’t have an answer yet.
Our Torah doesn’t tell us to escape the desert. It tells us that the desert is exactly where revelation happens.
Openness is not passivity. It is one of the most courageous spiritual postures there is — to hold your hands open, to say: I don’t have all of it figured out, and I am still here, I am still receiving, I embracec the mystery and the transition.
As we move from Bamidbar into Shavuot, let us ask ourselves: What do I need to put down in order to stand at Sinai this year? What certainty, what resentment, what tight grip on how things were supposed to go — can I leave behind?
Because Torah is given to those who arrive with empty hands.
Shabbat Shalom — and Chag Sameach.
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Morning:
Look closely at the text. There are at least two possible readings of this census. What seems to be a simple reading, and what could be a more complex one?
Second question – look at what happens to the tribe of Levi. What are their functions?
Patriarchal lens – only men are counted. But the text says two census were made: kol adat implies that everyone was counted – but then the text pivots to all males above 20 – no mention of the other limit, given later, of 50 years old. In this census, we only get the numbers of the men who are able to fight.