Dear friends, I have been feeling, variously in different weeks and on different days, the slog of this time we're in. I have felt myself moving forward through it, through time, with difficulty. As if trudging through deep mud. I know and trust I can do it. But there is such resistance. Each meter of movement takes more out of me than I am used to. I feel the ways in which I – and all of us – are being called on to reach into our deep inner resources, our reserves, and spend it out, leaving us emotionally and spiritually undercapitalized.
I move from day to day noticing that each day has a little different flavor. It might have to do with what I read in the news. Or what's up with you all. Or if I've walked or meditated or been breathing through a mask or staring at a screen or hearing some bad news.
This is a wilderness we are going through. And we will all be transformed by the journey, God willing. If we are not, if we emerge – although "emergence" is perhaps the wrong idea since it's not like there's something ahead that looks like what was before – but if we emerge from this unchanged, untransformed, unclarified, it will be a dishonor to the people who have suffered or died from COVID and a dishonor to our own vast potential.
So we move through this wilderness with endurance and vulnerability. Looking inward. Looking outward. Feeling the suffering. Also feeling the contentment, the dayenu, the "I have enough" realizations. Feeling the pangs of longing for family and loved ones and hugs and close talks without masks. It is in feeling all of this and letting it change us, tear us open, refine us, that we will have made the journey one of deep transformation.
It is a journey worth remembering. So we will count our steps as we go. As is our wont. Just as today we mark the 9th day of our 22-day journey Beyn Hametzarim, through the narrow place to Tisha B'Av, we also mark the 122nd day of our isolation, of our shelter-in-place, in this wilderness of a time that has no obvious end.
But I suspect that this endlessness that is so frustrating is the feel of all great epic journeys. Our famous 40 years of wandering in the Wilderness in Torah only seems to have finiteness to it because it is in the past. The Children of Israel, walking, trudging, coaxing livestock through rocky desert did not have an end date. They went step by step not knowing if it would be another week or an eternity.
But Torah seems to care that we count the steps. That we not let the memory of that journey be a blur. In this week's final portion of the Book of Numbers, called Mas'ei, we are again counting, this time the stations of the journey that the Israelites took from Egypt to the Promised Land over those years. Every single one of them.
Torah is determined we should remember how many marches there were and maybe what the flavor of each might have been. The journey itself is important, Torah suggests. It is not told as "we were slaves . . . and then miraculously we reached the Promised Land." The journey was a process of refinement and transformation. It was this 40-year journey in which those who were born into slavery gave way to those born in freedom.
This journey from slavery to freedom, this transformation of collective consciousness, was not direct and linear and not all joyful. It was a journey of forward movement, missteps, backsteps, sidesteps. A journey of sustenance and dissatisfaction, hope and despair. A journey of breaking open. It was all of this together that changed who we were.
And so Torah lays out and reviews the route this week, encampment to encampment, like a AAA triptik. We read all the places where we set up camp. And the names are strange, archaic, indigenous names. But if we translate them, this begins to seem less like a mysterious map of a foreign country and more like the familiar markers of an emotional and spiritual journey. Let me show you.
We began in R'amses, the land of the Pharaohs. From there to Sukkot, just a temporary dwelling, a place of uncertainty. And from there to the frontier, the edge of the Wilderness.
We crossed the Sea at Pi-Hachirot, the Mouth of Freedom, camping at Migdol, a place of Astonishing Greatness. Then onto Marah, where we drank waters of bitterness. A few journeys later we reached Dofkah, the place where our hearts pounded.
For a while we stayed at Kivrot Hata'avah – the deathplace of our desire. But several journeys later we reached Rimon Peretz, where the pomegranates burst with sweet juice. From Risah, where we dwelled in the ruins, we traveled to Har Shefer, a place high and exquisite. Then there was Charedah, the place of our trembling. And Mak'helot, where we gathered in close to each other. There was Terach, a place of terrible inertia. And Moserot, where we felt shackled. We camped at Avronah, a place of passage. And Etzyon Gever, where we had to stiffen our spines.
In Kadesh we felt the flow of holiness. Tzalmonah was full of shadow. In Divon we felt how much we had lost. In Amon Divlataymah there were hidden treats. And in Nevo we were all prophets.
And after all those stations, the bitter and trembling and sweet and beautiful, we were at last at the Jordan River, ready to step into our new lives.
So how many stops? How many journeys? Ask Douglas Adams what the answer is. There were 42. Forty-two encampments over 40 years. Unlike Dr. Kubler-Ross's 4 stages of grief, it took 42 stages for us to become different people.
And the number 42 rings out for us, reminding us of our 42-letter name of God, the name we embody when we sing the Ana B'choach prayer, the first letter of each word being the next letter of this 42-letter Name. Forty-two stops and 42 letters of a name of God, this observation brought by my teacher Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan.
What I think she means (and if she doesn't, I do) is that the journey itself is a Divine Name. Each stop on it is a letter. Not just this famous journey in Torah, but the journey were are each on right now. This journey through stations of sorrow and hope, outrage and love, grief and fear and fatigue and coziness too. Each stop, each encampment on this journey wants to be noticed and counted, lest in retrospect it become a blur. And by noticing each stop, each letter, this journey becomes far from meaningless. It becomes an unfolding name of the Divine, and we are transformed in pronouncing it.
So in this journey whose duration is still undetermined, and whose landscape changes from day to day, in this narrow place, this in-between, let us hold the possibility that each step, each mood and insight and sigh at the end of the day – each of these is a letter spelling out a still-unfinished name of God. To which, in our tradition, we must respond: Baruch Shem K'vod Malchuto L'Olam Va'ed. Blessed is the Name of the Glory of God's Present Unfolding, always.
I am grateful for the insights of my teacher, Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan.