Parashat Bamidbar Numbers 1:1-4:20

Haftara Hosea 2:1-22

Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah explores the opening verse of the Book of Numbers, Bamidbar (or B’midbar Sinai) with this famous passage:

“The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai” – why in the wilderness of Sinai? From here the Sages taught that the Torah was given with three elements: With fire, with water, and in the wilderness. With fire, from where is it derived? “Mount Sinai was all smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire” (Exodus 19:18). In water, from where is it derived? It is as it is stated: “Indeed, the heavens dripped, indeed, the clouds dripped water” (Judges 5:4). In the wilderness, from where is it derived? “The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.” (Numbers 1:1)”

The Hebrew term for desert many of us are familiar with is midbar, מדבר. But here, the translation gives “wilderness.” Sometimes, the Hebrew word for wilderness is aravah, ערבה, as for example in the name for the region in the south of Israel, the Aravah. The semantic and associative field of the terms “desert” and “wilderness” overlap to a certain degree but are ultimately distinct.

Both refer to a dry, arid geographic space with little water and vegetation. When as a child I heard “desert,” I thought of sand dunes and caravans, after having been in Israel, the Southwest, and Southern California, desert now also evokes dusty stones and mountain plateaus, bushes, cacti, and Joshua trees – and blooming flowers, oasis orchards.  Whereas when I hear “wilderness,” I might think of dusty and empty, sandy or rocky spaces as well, but not of anything that offers relief, lushness, beauty.

And indeed, the Jastrow dictionary notes that midbar also refers to pastureland – the hills of the Judean desert are green in the winter, just enough to graze your flocks of sheep or goats – whereas aravah can refer to confusion. “Pastureland” I connect with relief, “confusion” with being lost in the wilderness.

So why then did the JPS translator choose to render the Hebrew original midbar as wilderness? Isn’t it called the Sinai desert? Maybe there is not much to it. Maybe these words can just be used interchangeably after all. Sometimes poets read too much into one word over the other and go down an exegetical rabbit hole. It happens a lot in rabbinical school, whether you’re a poet or not.

Rabbit hole or not, poet or not, I would like to offer this thought: Using the term wilderness makes sense and is intentional because it is a foreshadowing of what is going to happen in the Book of Numbers: Tradition teaches that the Israelites became a nation with matan Torah, the giving of the Torah, revelation. This has just happened. The Book of Leviticus is a hiatus in the unfolding of the narrative, beyond time and space. Numbers picks up where Exodus ended. The Israelites are getting ready to march toward the Promised Land. They may have received Torah, but they are still very much a nation in formation. They don’t really know what they are doing. There still is a lot of chaos, confusion, despite the military buildup and marching orders, the tribal banners clattering in the desert wind. As they will make their way through that figurative wilderness of growing into a nation, they literally make their way through the desert, longer than anticipated, as it turns out. But this is how they receive Torah: step by step, failure by failure, chaos by chaos, station by station.

Another thought: During that long and arduous journey, Torah itself serves as a pastureland, as the blooming desert flowers, the wellspring under date palm in the oasis, as the murmurs of the desert that speak to our souls, our imagination, our creativity. And it serves as a litmus test for our capacity to learn from chaos and disorder: Torah was given through wilderness in the desert as a reminder that where once was emptiness and confusion, beautiful flowers can begin to bloom. (Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7)

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Julia Knobloch