Zornberg - Bewilderments : reflections on the Book of Numbers

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker, III, 14244

This book began as a series of lectures I gave to rabbinical students at Boston Hebrew College. Some of the students were in the classroom with me here in Jerusalem, while others sat in the College in Boston. The technology involved was in itself a source of considerable bewilderment for all concerned. Despite this, our journey into the wilderness evoked much valuable discussion and gave me the sense that a book might come of it. I am grateful to these students and to the two later generations of students with whom I shared my developing understanding of the biblical and midrashic texts.

I am grateful to Betsy Rosenberg for reading some chapters and for her dedicated attention to large and small aspects of the book. I am grateful to David Shulman and to Linda Zisquit for their generous readings of parts of my manuscript.

Special thanks to Adele and Ron Tauber for their warm hospitality in New York during my U.S. lecture tours. And to Altie Karper, my wonderful editor at Schocken, together with her devoted team; to Sharon Friedman, my agent; and to the many friends and students whose conversation has helped me on my journey.

My love and gratitude to and for Eric, my husband and friend, and our children, Bracha, Moshe-Yarden, and Avi; their partners, Paul, Yael, and Tali; and our grandchildren, Miriam, Aluma, Zohar, Shuvi, Yasmin, and Amir. They radiate the light by which I live and write.

The Hebrew name for the book of Numbers is Sefer Bamidbar, the Book of (lit.) In-the-Wilderness. as it werea world of imaginative being.

Between Egypt and the Holy Land, the wilderness intervenes. As the Torah tells the story, this was meant to form a brief episode in the history of the Israelites, a passage between leaving Egyptyetziat Mitzraimand entering the Land. But the brief interlude suddenly and tragically swells to deathly proportions. In one traumatic moment, the divine decree goes forth: this interval will encompass the life and death of a whole generation. Those who left Egypt will sink into the sands of this wilderness. Only their children will see the Land.

What is the nature of this interim space, so terribly extended? The surface of the wilderness proves to hold vertical menaceInto this wilderness your carcasses shall fall! the Torah intones repeatedly. This is not simply a walking surface for the traveling people, but a quicksand ready to consume human bodies. The first such bodies figure in the macabre showdown of Korachs rebellion, where the earth opens its mouth and swallows Korachs followers. They vanish from the human landscape, into the netherworld: the hungry maw of the earth has removed them from the surface on which human acts are played out. Nothingness has triumphed over being.

This terrible image haunts the reader, who contemplates the It is an environment that is inimical to human life. Jeremiah describes its singular horror when he reminds the people: God has led you through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and deadly darkness, through a land that no man passed and where no man dwelt (Jer. 2:6).

This landscape does not yield to human demands: it frustrates the need for food and drink, but also the basic demand for direction, for markings to indicate a human mapping of blank space. No human steps have trod this sand, it stares back at the traveler indifferentlypathless, bewildering to the human imagination. A kind of horror besets the mind. Already traumatized by their Egyptian past, the Israelites, one by one, must be swallowed into this senseless space.

A great and terrible wilderness: the experience of midbar, extended to the edges of life, suddenly becomes a total experience. These people will never know any other reality. But precisely here lies the central enigma of the narrative. For in its way of telling the story, the Torah creates an illusion of continuity, as though we are throughout reading about the same people who left Egypt. Till the second census in chapter 26, the reader does not clearly understand that thirty-eight years have passed, with their full harvest of death. Only when the text clearly states that in this census there are no survivors from the earlier census at the beginning of the book (26:64), do we realize that, without our noticing, a generation has slipped into the sands. A great interruption has occurred; thirty-eight years have imperceptibly vanished. By chapter 20, in fact, the new generation is already in place. And yet, even then, even after the census and indeed throughout Deuteronomy, it takes an effort to convince ourselves that, in fact, the generations have changed.

At the heart of the wilderness story, then, there is a gap, which is masked by apparent continuities. As often in traumatic experience, the rupture is somehow elided from the official record. The record continues to register the human hubbub of complaint and rebellion to which we have become accustomed. But the fabric of national life has been ripped open; unremarked within that hubbub, ring the death cries and the sudden silence of a generation.

cryptically playing with the roots for the two terms. In which case, we can say that the Book of the Wilderness yields a human language of querulous skepticism. Cries and whispers and rages and laments fill the air, a cacophony that God describes as issuing from lack of faith.

At the beginning of the Exodus narrative, Moses protests against his mission of redemption: But they will not believe me, they will not listen to my voice! They will say, God did not appear to you! (Exod. 4:1). Moses basic sense of the people is that they are