Wilderness

Rabbi Melanie Aron

May 22, 2004

As a very young child I lived in New York City and my experiences of nature were limited. What I remember most were the beautiful grounds of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo. Nature was sculpted and manicured and most of the time you had to “keep off the grass”. When I got a little older and lived in the Mid-West I got outside a bit more, but still nature was pretty benign. If you went for a hike and got a little lost, there were lots of people around and the worst the weather might throw at you while biking was a little rain.

Then I went hiking in the Rockies and learned more about the power of nature. Those mountains could be dangerous and you could really get hurt. We learned to come down below the tree line before the afternoon storms and that getting lost was not a big joke.

Our sages make a big point about the wilderness, the midbar, being the place both of the giving of Torah and of the people’s wanderings. It could not be coincidental that so much of what was important to the formation of the Jewish people happened there. But concerning the wilderness, the commentaries do not mince words: “The wilderness is harsh, unforgiving, trackless. Food is scarce, water virtually non-existent. It is a place of ceaseless danger.“ Yet we can’t grow up as a people without passing through.

There is a moment in every parents’ life when we are tempted to coddle our kids, to protect them, to spare them some challenge that might also be dangerous, some growing experience that might also be painful, physically or psychically. We’d rather just this once, we say to ourselves, that they remained in the terrarium and not go outside to experience nature unmediated by human intervention. But that’s not what God did with the Israelites, because God recognized that pretend challenges don’t stretch us or force us to grow in quite the same way.

Shoshi, I remember being in Israel at the Hartman Institute the summer after the Gulf War and hearing about your arrival. Such joy and such nachas. Now as you grow up we have to allow you to take your own journeys, even as we want to hold on tight. But just as God provided the Israelites with the teachings and guidance that enabled them to get a handle on their situation and to create order in chaos, so we hope that the support of your parents and the teachings of the Torah, will carry you through the adventures to which you are about to embark. I am delighted to be here as part of this special day.