Hi friends,
Thank you all for the warm congratulations on our newest family member 💙 Everyone is doing beautifully.
I’m still on maternity leave and will be writing when I can — but this Shabbat we begin Bamidbar — the fourth book of the Torah, whose name means “the wilderness” — the week before Shavuot, when we renew our covenant with God. I couldn’t let this one pass without writing.
Happy Jerusalem Reunification Day and Shabbat Shalom!
The Wilderness Has Found Us. Here Is What We Do Now.
Sometimes I feel a visceral nostalgia for life in the “before” times.
As I was sitting with this week’s Torah portion during maternity leave, I opened old sermon notes from 2018 I’d written about Bamidbar — the Wilderness.
My notes showed a lot of effort on my part. I remember working hard to find the best examples I could for my congregants, so they could really feel the wilderness, the utter uncertainty, the fragility of seeing only sand around you, the chaos that hits a group of freed slaves disappointed in their journey. I mined the Torah for wisdom that could help in those moments.
How I miss those days.
These days, I read Bamidbar and resent how familiar it feels.
Every morning, I wake up enveloped in the exhausting sweetness of caring for my newborn, and already there is a pit in my stomach before I open my phone. My morning diet consists of coffee, oatmeal, and the news. I stay away from social media but check two sites: one for Israel, one for America, and the American Jewish community.
Back then, I had to seek the wilderness. Today, the wilderness has found us and isn’t letting go.
At first, it can seem like Bamidbar offers us little help navigating this moment. The portion opens with something that feels almost bureaucratic: a census of army-eligible men, tribal formations, marching orders. The Israelites are fresh from Sinai, equipped with the Tabernacle and the law, preparing to march in perfect formation toward the Promised Land. The land of Israel is just eleven days away. This is supposed to be the home stretch.
Except, of course, it isn’t.
Within two and a half portions, everything unravels. The people complain. They reject the Promised Land. They rebel against Moses. They are punished severely by God. Instead of a march from slavery to the land, they will wander for forty years. Israel will be inherited not by the freed adult slaves described in such perfect formation here, but by their children, raised in the wilderness.
After all, as Michael Walzer has written, the Hebrew Bible’s key political teaching is that there is no journey from Egypt to the Promised Land without the wilderness in between. The falling apart, we should assume, was always going to happen.
But read carefully, and Bamidbar is not just a record of collapse. It is a training manual we desperately need, for how to survive the wilderness and how to raise a generation that will inherit the promised land we cannot yet reach.
The Torah doesn’t just insist on the wilderness. It hides something inside the formation that precedes the collapse. Something that equipped the Israelites for what was coming.
The mechanism is this: the Israelites were given a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide their movements.
What is striking is how this system combined certainty with uncertainty: they always knew the next step; they never knew the full route. There was no map, only the next direction. When the cloud moved, they moved. When it stopped, they stopped.
We might call this the logic of present-tense certainty despite future-tense uncertainty.
This wasn’t accidental. It was training. The manna followed the same logic. Each morning, it fell fresh; those who tried to hoard it found it spoiled by sunrise. The medieval exegete Nachmanides writes that the test of the manna was precisely this: would the people follow God when they had only one day’s supply, with no assurances about tomorrow?
The wilderness was reshaping the Israelites’ relationship with time, one in which long-term control was never available, and present-tense faithfulness was the only thing asked of them.
This sounds simpler than it is. The great sin of the golden calf was rooted in exactly this difficulty. When Moses disappeared up the mountain longer than expected, the people couldn’t hold the partial clarity. They needed the whole picture, and when they couldn’t have it, they panicked and shattered the covenant.
What the wilderness was meant to inculcate was something truly difficult to acquire: the capacity to take decisive action in the present while genuinely not knowing what comes next.
To move when the cloud moves. To stop when it stops. To trust the next step without demanding the whole map.
I have been thinking about this as I read two pieces by serious Jewish thinkers published in recent weeks, my friend Ben Judah writing from London, and Ambassador Michael Oren writing as a visitor to the United States, both describing the end of diaspora Jewish life as we have known it.
We know the old assumptions no longer hold. We do not yet know what comes next.
And that is precisely why Bamidbar is not only familiar but critically necessary for us. Our task now is to follow our cloud.
To build homes and raise children. To double and triple down on Jewish education and Jewish community. To build bridges and forge new alliances, even when it feels like a drop in the bucket. To insist, with all the force we have, on fierce Jewish joy and pride. To fight to preserve an America where minorities are protected, and Jewish life can flourish. To invest in the great miracle that is Israel, to defend it from its enemies and strengthen it from within.
I still feel nostalgia for the “before” times. But that nostalgia is not where this story ends.
The Jewish children growing up today will not remember the “before” world the way many of us do. They will not carry the rupture of October 7th in the same way.
But if we do our part, if we build boldly, teach seriously, and refuse to shrink in fear, even in this disorienting wilderness, they may yet inherit and build a Promised Land we are only beginning to dream of.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
As we prepare for Shavuot, I wanted to re-share a conversation I had with my good friend Rabbi Joe Wolfson exploring the Book of Ruth (start at minute 6 for the discussion itself - audio here).
The Book of Ruth is such a beautiful and powerful way to prepare for the holiday on which we receive the Torah — a story about loyalty, courage, belonging, and the small ways redemption begins.
I hope it adds meaningfully to your Shavuot preparations.
I am grateful for this essay. Thank you and Mazel Tov on the new member of your family.
welcome back
I checked every week ...your essays are simply wonderful, I repost them for others
mazel tov on your newest addition - I celebrate with you
shabbat shalom