Parashat Bamidbar and Shavu'ot: On Deserts and the Torah

Make yourself hefker like a desert, the rabbis say. Hefker means ownerless, like an old rag that you put out on the street for anyone who wants to come and take. Let go of your special attachment to yourself, your ownership of yourself, your feeling that the universe revolves around this ego. Become like the desert, free and empty, ownerless and open to the wind.

It is in this state that we receive the Torah, says the Sefat Emet, in this desert place. This week we read on Shabbat the first parsha of the book of Bamidbar, “In the Desert,” and on Tuesday night, we begin the celebration of Shavu’ot, the receiving of the Torah. First we must enter a desert state of mind, and only then do we receive the Torah.

Moshe, the conduit of the Torah, is the ultimate “desert” personality; his primary trait is anavah, humility. He could receive the whole Torah because there was no ego in the way to obscure it. He could see the truth without interference, without worry over whether he was being properly honored or offended. He understood that the project was larger than him, and so he could contain a very large project.

The Torah is a source of personal completion, hashlamah, says the Sefat Emet. The more you are aware of your “holes,” the more room you have to be filled in by Torah. Moshe was not the smartest man that ever lived, but he carried the most Torah because he was the most humble, the most open to completion.

Humility in relation to Torah is not easy. One can easily get trapped in the pursuit of Torah for the sake of communal honor, for the feeding of the ego.

I once heard from Rabbi Don Seeman a connection between this ego issue and the recital of birkhat haTorah, the blessing over Torah study: The Talmud records God as explaining the destruction of the first Temple because “they did not make the blessing of the Torah first” (Nedarim 81a). What does this mean? They were not framing their Torah study as a form of worship, but rather as a personal intellectual endeavor for their own self-aggrandizement. To say birkhat haTorah is to wake up each morning and say that the Torah to be studied today is lishmah “for its own sake,” and not for “one’s own sake.”

Another way of avoiding the pitfall of ego and honor in the pursuit of Torah --of seeking the desert place -- is to acknowledge one’s dependence on others in this pursuit. The last of the 48 qualifications required for the crown of Torah in Pirkei Avot is “one who says what he has learned in the name of the person who said it.” Torah is a communal project. Avraham did not receive it, nor did Yitzhak or Yaakov. Even Moshe was only a conduit for an entire nation who stood together at Mount Sinai to receive God’s wisdom. No single human can contain it, and the more we acknowledge this, the closer we are to that desert place of wisdom and ownerlessness.