Parashat Bamidbar: Desert Thirst

Upon driving out of the city limits of the little Negev town of Yerucham, where we are living this year, all one can see for miles is desert--barren brown mountains stretching out to the horizon. My first nervous thought is always: Do I have enough gas? Do I have a cell-phone? Do I have enough water?! One feels the desert’s barrenness, that it is a place of absences, a place without, without color or vegetation, without the basic necessities of life –water, food, shelter.

This week we begin the fourth book of the Torah, Bamidbar, “In the desert.” What happens “in the desert?” Almost everything of importance to the Israelite people. It is here that they become a nation, here that they receive the Torah, and here that they begin to develop a relationship – with all its ups and downs – with God. Why “in the desert?” Why in this place of emptiness and absence?

There is something important about the emotional experience of this barrenness. The rabbis say that only one who makes himself “like a desert” is truly capable of receiving the Torah. The Sefat Emet explains that a person needs to be aware of his own barrenness, of his own intense lacks before he can be filled by the great presence of the Torah. A person who views himself as already complete will not be open to receiving the gifts of the Torah. The more one feels that one is missing something, the more one feels incomplete, like an open, empty vessel, the more room the Torah has to enter and fill the vessel.

Maybe being “like a desert” means cultivating a kind of longing or yearning – a thirst like that of the parched land. Thirst is an intense awareness of the lack of a basic necessity; our desire for Torah should be like thirst, a desperate and intense longing. All the complaining the Israelites did in the desert, the constant crying out for water, the yearning for the watermelons and squashes of Egypt, perhaps this desert experience of longing is meant to be translated into a spiritual longing, a longing for God and for Torah, a deep awareness of absence which leads to the yearning for Presence.

In modern Hebrew, the word to express this emotion is ga’agua. It can be used to express the feeling of missing someone who is temporarily absent, but it can also be used to express a kind of yearning for something greater than oneself, a sense of oneself as essentially “missing” in some way and therefore striving, reaching for something beyond the self. The desert experience of lacking something like water is the physical parallel to this basic human emotion, an emotion which is at the core of religious pursuit.

As the Psalm -- also found in a popular Shabbat zemer (song) -- goes:
Tzamah nafshi lelokim, l’el hai. "My soul thirsts for the Lord, the living God (Ps 42:3)."