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.
旷野始终是核心
4月1日
我们一直以错误的方式讲述出埃及记 [Exodus] 的故事。并非事实有误：解放是真实的，红海分开了，子民获得了自由。然而，叙事的道德分量，即故事真正栖息之处，却被悄然错放了。我们倾向于将其视为一个关于出发与抵达、束缚与应许的故事，仿佛终点处的土地才是全部意义。翻开托拉 [Torah] 数一数。五卷书中有四卷是在移动中、在“之间”的状态里、在希伯来人称之为旷野 [Midbar] 的地带展开的。第四卷书甚至没有使用比喻。它的英文标题《民数记》 [Numbers] 反映了人口普查，但在希伯来语中，它简称为 B’midbar：在旷野中 [In the wilderness]。应许之地只是地平线，直到最后才隐约可见。其余的一切都是沙漠。
对于一个正在应对复杂现状的社群来说，这种不对称性值得深思。并非因为应当歌颂困难，而是因为我们理解自身处境的框架，全然改变了我们认为自己应当在那里做些什么。
拉比们明白，旷野不仅仅是一个地理概念。《旷野大米德拉什》 [Bamidbar Rabbah] 直接问道，为什么托拉 [Torah] 是在沙漠中赐予的，而不是在以色列人正前往的土地上。答案精准得令人震撼：“任何不让自己像沙漠一样成为无主之物 [Hefker (Ownerless)] 的人，都无法获得托拉 [Torah]。”¹ 在犹太法律中，Hefker 指的是正式放弃、不属于任何人因而对所有人开放的财产。让自己成为无主之物 [Hefker]，意味着放下那个时刻防御、高度组织化的自我，不再坚持那种阻碍新事物进入的确定性。旷野并非因环境所迫才发生启示的地方。它是让启示成为可能的地方。
因此，将一个稳定、安全的世界视为真实生活、严肃社群或精神深度的前提，从托拉 [Torah] 自身的术语来看，这是一种范畴错误。作为前提的安全感并不可得。可得的是脆弱性，以及一个懂得如何应对脆弱性的社群。
乔纳森·萨克斯 [Jonathan Sacks] 拉比多年来致力于阐明一种在当下显得尤为重要的区分。在《医治破碎的世界》 [To Heal a Fractured World] 一书中，他直白地写道：“乐观是一种被动的美德，而希望是一种主动的美德。做一个乐观主义者不需要勇气，但拥有希望需要巨大的勇气。”² 他认为，任何了解犹太历史走向的犹太人，理智上都不可能成为乐观主义者。然而，希伯来圣经 [Hebrew Bible] 依然如萨克斯所言，“是伟大的希望文学之一”。² 两者的区别并非语义上的。乐观是等待。希望是建设。
2026年的春天，并不缺乏令人焦虑等待的事情。与伊朗的战争及其对以色列的影响、新一轮剧烈的物价危机、公民对话的破裂、在英国和欧洲卷土重来的反犹主义，以及2023年10月事件持续不断的余波：这些都不是社群经历的边缘问题。但那种等待的姿态，那种期待某种恢复的“正常状态”以便让真实生活最终得以重启的想法，不仅误读了当下，也误读了托拉 [Torah] 自身的时间逻辑。
会幕 [Mishkan]，即以色列人在沙漠中建造并携带的便携式圣所，在《出埃及记》 [Exodus] 的十三个章节中有着令大多数读者惊叹的详尽描述。对于一个临时结构来说，这种关注度是超乎寻常的。萨克斯拉比指出了其中的原因。其建造语言刻意呼应了《创世记》 [Genesis] 的语言。在创世叙事中，神圣者为人类建造了一个家。而在《出埃及记》中，人类为神圣者建造了一个家。“神圣的存在充满了我们为其预留的空间，”萨克斯在《契约与对话：聚集篇》 [Covenant and Conversation on Vayakhel] 中写道，“神圣的光辉存在于我们放弃自身光辉的地方。”³ 圣所并非从天而降。它是由充满恐惧且不完美的人们，利用任何可得的材料，在远非理想的环境下建造而成的。
住棚 [Succah] 从内部提出了同样的论证。它的屋顶必须由天然材料制成，透过这些材料依然可见星空；其墙壁在设计上便是临时性的。它不是堡垒。它是人们聚集、进食与歌唱的居所，坦率地展现出其脆弱性。这一节日庆贺的既不是安全，也不是苦难，而是一种不将两者混淆的操练。
在逾越节 [Pesach] 与七七节 [Shavuot] 之间，数算俄梅珥 [Counting of the Omer] 追踪了一场从解放走向启示的运动：那是成为能够领受托拉 [Torah] 的子民的四十九天。从现在到至圣日 [High Holy Days] 之间，我们正穿过犹太历法中最长、最平静的一段时光，没有任何重大节日可以作为锚点。只有稳定、并不耀眼的生活与建设工作。
《塔木德》 [Talmud] 中有一个关于画圈者霍尼 [Honi the Circle Maker] 的故事。他遇到一个人正在栽种一棵要七十年后才能结果的角豆树。他问为什么要费这份劲。那人的回答既务实又富有神学意味：“正如我的祖先为我栽种，我也正在为我的子孙栽种。”⁴ 这不完全是耐心。这是一种眼界 [Perspective]。我们现在居住的圣所结构、这些社群、礼拜仪式以及艰难赢取的包容空间之所以存在，是因为在土地贫瘠、收获无望之时，曾有人在那里栽种。
我们今天面临的问题不是流浪何时结束。流浪本身就是一种常态。问题在于我们在其中建设什么：我们如何带着会幕 [Mishkan] 前行，为谁搭建它，以及我们现在所建立的一切是否能为尚未到来的人们提供庇护。
托拉 [Torah] 的地图让我们在旷野中停留了很久。然而，它并未在如何于旷野中行事方面留下空白。
祝愿大家逾越节 [Pesach]、七七节 [Shavuot] 快乐，并度过一个美好的夏天。
