The outdoors rapped on my window today, like a lover, wide-eyed, hoping to elope. Like the beloved in Song of Songs, gazelle-like, peering in, enticing me into the garden. And frankly, I am decades past playing hard to get.
So I put on my rose-colored Old Navy sneakers which I figured would lighten my step. They have no arch support, for which I knew my sister would scold me once she found out, when I could have worn the more supportive but heavier shoes she bought me for my birthday. But the rosy color felt like spring and I figured the lovers in Song of Songs did not have arch supports either, and so, rosy-shod and flat-footed, I ventured out.
I walked through the back gate, across the neighbor’s yard, down the road, past the guardian laurels on either side, forming a bridge of branches over my head. I moved amid the warm honeysuckle and jasmine. I sliced through the waft of dry grass, both aromatic and agonizing, as I felt my eyes and throat begin to sting from the seasonal allergies which, I am told by 23&Me, might be related to a DNA variant I received from my Neanderthal ancestors, whose genetics I seem to have inherited disproportionately.
The Kinsey Sicks used to have a line where the character Rachel mentions her ex-boyfriend. My character, Winnie, always full of helpful judgment, responds, “Your ex-boyfriend was a Neanderthal.”
“No,” replies Rachel. “He was a Rosenthal. The Neanderthals went to the other synagogue.”
But now, thanks to the genetic sciences, we know that the Neanderthals are alive and well in every synagogue of every denomination.
So my miserable allergies might come from them. I felt annoyed, but then I thought back 40,000 years and pictured bands of unhappy, sneezing Neanderthals crossing the savannas and I was duly humbled, and back in my place.
It’s a wilderness out there.
It’s a garden too. And I began to wonder what the difference is. Because this is the week we begin reading the Book of Numbers which in Hebrew is named after one of its opening words, Bamidbar, meaning: “In the Wilderness.”
A lot happens in the Wilderness, as we readers of Torah know. Food falls from the sky. Sinkholes open. Rocks gush with water. The ground rumbles. Mountains smoke, God speaks, and Torah is delivered. The Wilderness can be a wild ride.
But wild as it may be, Wilderness is not chaos. I felt that profoundly as I walked in nature today, my calves beginning to ache from the lack of arch support.
Nature is far from chaos – it is a palace, complex and fine, built on biological and geological design principles from which it does not deviate; at least not nearly as much as we, who pretend not to be nature, deviate from ours.
So what makes Wilderness Wilderness? For one thing it is uncharted. Previously unobserved. It has no mile markers, no on- and off-ramps. It has no interpretive placards. Wilderness is the unknown.
In Hebrew there’s another element that makes Wilderness Wilderness: and that is speech. The Hebrew word for Wilderness, midbar, is from the same root as davar – word.
But then I wonder: isn’t speech just the jungle I want to be freed from? Speech can keep us going in circles. Talk is cheap. The truth of words is no longer guaranteed and probably never was. And in this Wilderness of a time that 're living in, I sometimes just want to shut off the chatter.
But besides the Wilderness of our mythology and the Wilderness of our current state of affairs, there is the Wilderness inside. What are the uncharted places we are finding in ourselves now, during this long period of aloneness? The places we suspected were there but had not looked at? Skirted and not mapped. And the places we would actually be so delighted to find if we were brave enough to take a few steps in? We carry a Wilderness in us from the time we’re born. How much we are willing to explore it, traverse it, map it, find its beauty – that is up to each of us.
It can be a frightening prospect, charting our Wilderness. But what is there to be frightened of? Poisonous beasties? Allergens? They are in our gardens too.
I suspect that if we took the opportunity to start walking our Wildernesses, what we will find are guardian laurels and honeysuckle. Manna on the ground to sustain us. A mishkan where we can offer our incense. Far from empty, we will find our inner landscapes full, populated with tribes made up of old and young and all genders, with songs and dances and languages of their own. And livestock, and soaring birds, fleet gazelles, scrubby plants and tall forests, mountains and rivers. All of that inside of us.
The more we explore our Wilderness, the more I suspect it will look like a garden. Because maybe that is the most salient difference between a Wilderness and a Garden. It is the fact of being witnessed. And the speech waiting for us in the Wilderness? Maybe it’s not chatter and not the earth-shaking thrum of God at Sinai. But the loving voice of a gardener.
Kol dodi dofek. The Beloved’s voice reaches out to us. Bati l'gani. I have come to my garden! the Beloved says. The gardener’s words coax the new shoots; the Beloved’s voice coaxes us out of our homes.
And so it is with each of us. Our Wildernesses are not there to be uprooted and paved over. But to be explored, witnessed, and spoken to with love. Take a moment right now to reacquaint yourself with your midbar, your inner Wilderness. Notice its vastness. Its wild beauty. Take it in, walk it, even if your calves ache. And speak to it. Say, Ah, I have at last come to my garden.
That is the voice that each of us has and the voice that each of us has been longing to hear.
More Reflections from the Itzik’s Well COVID Journal:
Tourist in Shapeless Time
Can I let go of my need for every moment of this terrible time to be productive or meaningful or insight-giving? What will it be like to let this time be: let it be its frustrating, tedious, anxious and sad self, without the pressure of having to be the source of global transformation or personal enlightenment? Click here.
A Theology of COVID Times
Where is God in all of this? The answer is, maybe, everywhere. And why isn’t God intervening? Of course God is intervening. In fact we are doing so every day. (May 8.) Click here.
Isolation, AIDS Flashbacks, & Divine Embrace
There are pieces of this isolation I want to remember and bring with me when we are finally able to move freely about the cabin. But I also know that this isolation, no matter how pleasant parts of it may be, is something we will all need to reckon with over time. Because there is injury in going so long not touching and not being touched! Noticing and having to ignore the skin’s desire to feel skin, our bones’ desire to be pressed in an embrace. (May 1) Click here.
Through the Lattice
The doe sauntered away, leaving me wondering how we got here. Our glorious, sorry species. How did we end up living this way? So far removed from the rest of Creation that is just outside our door? How did we end up seeing this Earth so imperfectly, as if through carnival glass? (April 24.) Click here.
You’ve Got Mail
Talmud says a dream uninterpreted is like a letter left unread. What does this if-only-it-were-a-dream time have to say to us? (April 10.) Click here.
The Mood that Came to Dinner
Anxiety has moved right into my house, camped out in my own living room! Leering at me with its purple face and lime green 1970s pants. And what do you do about an unwanted guest? (April 3.) Click here.
A Planet of Priests
Torah tells us that we are meant to be a nation of priests. It is our calling and our destiny. And now the call is even broader. Because right now we are being called to be a Planet of Priests. Each of us tending the altar of our relationships with God and Earth and each other. Offering up our guilt over the profit-driven, Earth-consuming culture we have allowed to take root. And offering up like fragrant incense our gratitude for the simple and intimate gifts of connection and food and shelter. (March 28.) Click here.
By Our Own Hands (Vayakhel in Quarantine)
Whatever is ahead, the best of it will come from the people. We, the people, whose inspired ideas and skilled fingers will concoct new ways of being together, new ways of being, period. (March 21.) Click here.
Koved – Virus and Humanity
In this moment of unfolding epidemic, I am called to honor the complexity of the Creation we live in. This Creation in which uncountable species compete for space and survival, including the tiniest ones, who can sometimes, without malice, take down the mightiest among us. (March 6.) Click here.