The rumor is that Spring is finally here(ish) as we see light green begin to appear on the various branches that have too often been covered with snow. We are also at the beginning of the book of B’Midbar, Numbers, which seems to be a parallel to another set of books, but I’ll get to that later.
B’Midbar begins with an enumeration of the tribes of Israel (hence the English title of
the book. Preceding this book is Leviticus, which, for the most part, is a book of structure that creates order and tells of what happens when order is violated, as in the case when God kills Nadav and Abihu. However, this book seems to be an answer to the question, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Interspersed in the texts of some ritual are the accounts of the spies, the revolt of Korach, Pinchas killing others in cold blood, and the attempt of Bilaam to curse the Israelites. So, what could go wrong…plenty.
In our Jewish tradition, there is often a focus on answers, yet if B’Midbar has anything to teach us, it is that a more vital survival skill is to know how to exist absent answers. And in the Talmud, even when there are answers, you may get more than you can use. Yet that same Talmud on page 4b has a passage that I find unsettling, and at the same time affirming in our world that always wants to have answers, or as many businesses tell us now, they sell ‘solutions.’ Page 4b states the following simple but profound statement, “teach your lips to say, ‘I do not know.’” There are times when saying such a phrase is hard because it means that we have to look at how we lack in knowledge, skill, or simply…there is no answer. And this is what I see the wilderness teaching the Israelites (and us). Better to learn how to live with the ‘I do not know’ than to live with answers that are wrong or incomplete.
The wilderness exists to teach us about how to be rather than how to answer. And so when we can live in the tension of the question…perhaps this is the resilience God seeks to impart in us.
Kol Tuv,
Rabbi Jim