The Wilderness Was Always The Point
We have been telling the Exodus story wrong. Not factually: the liberation is real, the sea splits, the people go free. But the moral weight of the narrative, the question of where the story actually lives, has been quietly misplaced. We tend to hold in mind a tale of departure and arrival, bondage and promise, as though the whole point were the land at the end. Open the Torah and count. Four of its five books unfold in movement, in the in-between, in the terrain the Hebrews call midbar. The fourth book doesn't even reach for a metaphor. Its English title, Numbers, reflects a census. In Hebrew, it is simply B'midbar: in the wilderness. The Promised Land is a horizon, glimpsed at the very end. Everything else is desert.
For a community navigating its own complicated present, that asymmetry is worth sitting with. Not because difficulty should be celebrated, but because the frame we use to understand where we are changes entirely what we think we are supposed to be doing there.
The rabbis understood the wilderness as more than geography. Bamidbar Rabbah asks, directly enough, why the Torah was given in the desert rather than in the land the Israelites were moving towards. The answer is disarmingly precise: "Anyone who does not make himself hefker, ownerless, like the desert, cannot acquire Torah."¹ In Jewish law, hefker describes property formally relinquished, belonging to no one and therefore open to all. To make oneself hefker means releasing the defended, organised self, letting go of the insistence on certainty that prevents anything new from entering. The wilderness was not where revelation was forced to happen by circumstance. It was where revelation became possible.
So the expectation of a stable, secure world as a precondition for real life, for serious community, for spiritual depth, is, in the Torah's own terms, a category error. Safety as a precondition is not available. What is available is vulnerability, and a community that knows what to do with it.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spent years clarifying a distinction that carries particular weight at this moment. In To Heal a Fractured World, he drew it plainly: "Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope."² No Jew who knows the shape of Jewish history, he argued, can rationally be an optimist. But the Hebrew Bible is nonetheless, as Sacks put it, "one of the great literatures of hope."² The difference is not semantic. Optimism waits. Hope constructs.
Spring 2026 has not been short of things to wait anxiously about. The war in Iran and its effect on Israel, the new, inflamed cost of living crisis, the fracturing of civic discourse, the resurgence of antisemitism across Britain and Europe, the ongoing reverberations of October 2023: none of these sits at the margin of communal experience. But the posture of waiting, of looking towards some restored normality that will finally permit real life to begin again, misreads not only the present but the Torah's own logic of time.
The Mishkan, the portable sanctuary the Israelites built and carried through the desert, is described across thirteen chapters of Exodus with a level of detail that startles most readers. For a temporary structure, the attention is extraordinary. Sacks identified why. The language of its construction deliberately echoes the language of Genesis. In the creation narrative, God builds a home for humanity. In Exodus, humanity builds a home for God. "God fills the space we make for His presence," Sacks wrote in his Covenant and Conversation on Vayakhel. "His glory exists where we renounce ours."³ Sanctuary is not delivered. It is constructed by frightened and imperfect people, from whatever materials are available, in conditions far from ideal.
The succah makes the same argument from the inside. Its roof must be made of organic material through which the stars remain visible; the walls are impermanent by design. Not a fortress. A dwelling, candidly fragile, in which people gather and eat and sing. The festival does not celebrate safety or suffering, but the discipline of not confusing the two.
Between Pesach and Shavuot, the counting of the Omer traces a movement from liberation to revelation: forty-nine days of becoming the kind of people capable of receiving Torah. Between now and the High Holy Days, we move through the longest, quietest stretch of the Jewish year, with no major festival to anchor it. Just the steady, unspectacular work of living, and of building.
There is a Talmudic story of Honi the Circle Maker, who encountered a man planting a carob tree whose fruit was seventy years away. He asked why bother. The man's reply was both practical and theological: "Just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants."⁴ Not patience, exactly. Perspective. The structures of sanctuary we inhabit now, the communities, the liturgies, the hard-won spaces of inclusion, exist because someone else did the planting when the ground was difficult and the harvest invisible.
The question facing us today is not when the wandering ends. The wandering is the condition. The question is what we are building within it: how we carry the Mishkan forward, for whom we pitch it, and whether what we are raising now will give shelter to people not yet here.
The Torah's own map has us in the wilderness for a very long time. It does not, however, leave us without instructions for what to do there.
Wishing you all a good Pesach, Shavuot, and a good summer.
Rabbi Adrian
Endnotes
Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7; see also Tanchuma, Bamidbar §6.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World (Continuum, 2005), as cited at rabbisacks.org/quotes/optimism-and-hope/
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "Encampments & Journeys," Covenant and Conversation on Parshat Vayakhel, rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/vayakhel/encampments-journeys/
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Ta'anit 23a. See Sefaria.org source text at sefaria.org/Taanit.23a.
