It finally arrived…the day we’ve been waiting for. For the past 49 days, we’ve been counting, counting the days between Passover and Shavuot, the day we stand again at Mount Sinai. This counting has become increasingly important in my own spiritual life.
Every night Richard and I take a few minutes to reflect through the lens of Jewish mysticism on the particular characteristic of the day. We work our way through slowly and intentionally, trying to connect with the dimensions of Divinity that our tradition tells us we can access in our own lives: Chesed, Gevurah, Tifferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malchut –- loving kindness, discipline, harmony, endurance, humility, bonding and nobility. By the time we get to the day before Shavuot: Malchut of Malchut—the challenge is to the focus on our inner selves –- not on performance and how we project to others but how to be at peace with who we really are. It is a powerful spiritual practice.
And then it is Shavuot. We are back on the mountain. We experience again a connection to God. At midnight, says the tradition, the heavens open and our Torah study explodes as blinding revelation, clarity and focus.
But now it is the day after Shavuot. What now? What happens after you finish something you’ve been working for so long? Something you’ve been preparing for? What happens when you come down from the mountain and continue your journey through the wilderness of your life.
Our tradition offers two very different view of that wilderness. The first imagines the wilderness as a harsh and unforgiving place. Our journey was difficult, physically and spiritually. Somehow, in the heat and duststorms of the desert, we forgot how glorious it was to stand at Mt Sinai. We thought only about our physical comfort, looking for easy answers and longing to go back to the good old days when we had onions to eat in Egypt. We complained to Moses all the time. Finally in response to our whining about being thirsty, even Moses lost his temper, and in anger, struck a rock instead of speaking to it as God asked. In the wilderness, words no longer work. We scream and shout and complain, but we don’t listen to each other. We have no shared values; no common dreams. Midbar -the wilderness - turns out to be the same root as m’devar, without words…
The second view of the wilderness is the exact opposite. It was a time of great closeness between God and the Jewish people, a time of expansiveness and spiritual growth. The midrash, rabbinic commentary, describes how God took care of us in the wilderness. We didn’t outgrow our clothes because clothes grew as we did. Clothes never needed washing because the pillar of fire cleansed them and made them white. They never smelled sweaty, because the wells of living waters that accompanied us on our journey sprinkled us with wonderful fragrance. Food fell from heaven; manna which tasted like each of our own favorite food. In the wilderness, because we knew that God was giving us everything we needed, we were grateful. We sang the words of the Psalm: “the Lord is my shepherd; I really do have everything that I need.”
Why two different views? Perhaps because the quality of our journey through the wilderness depends on the choices we make and intention we bring with us.
We can’t stay at Mt Sinai, but we can go back every year. And we can bring the clarity of what we learned to transform the wilderness of our lives into a promised land.
Rabbi Laura Geller
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