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In Judaism, wisdom is found where the wild things are

This story originally appeared on My Jewish Learning.

(JTA) — Several weeks ago, I experienced the delights and the challenges of being on retreat in the high desert of New Mexico. Each morning, the sun flooded my cozy straw-bale house. Afternoon winds whipped the fields of tall grass into undulating waves, scattering the few wispy clouds and dusting every surface with a fine orange film of pine pollen. By night, a river of glittering stars flowed across the darkened sky.

For all its raw beauty and breathtaking vistas, the high desert is a harsh environment. I was warned to be on the lookout for rattlesnakes, scorpions and black widow spiders, not to mention the legions of bloodthirsty mosquitoes that appeared at sunset. My gut rumbled and my head ached with the sudden shift from my sea level home to an altitude of 7,300 feet. In the extreme dryness my skin itched, my lips cracked and my nose, irritated by the pollen, ran constantly. To compound my physical discomforts, distresses I’d been repressing for months bubbled up as searing neck and shoulder pain, obsessive thoughts and troubling dreams. I drank a lot of water and breathed deeply, praying that in time my body would adapt and my mind would clear.

Being in the desert especially attuned me to the weekly Torah readings from the Book of Numbers, whose Hebrew name, Bamidbar, means “In the Wilderness.” This Shabbat’s double portion, Matot-Masei, comprises its final chapters. The entire book — and much of the Torah, in fact — unfolds in an arid desert wilderness not unlike the scrublands of northern New Mexico. For 40 years, after narrowly escaping Pharaoh’s pursuing army at the Sea of Reeds, the Israelites roamed this unforgiving land, crisscrossing its hills and ravines, beset by challenges, struggling to find ways to live together and obey the dictates of a demanding, often wrathful, cloud-thundering, flame-throwing God.

Masei opens with a list of 42 spots in the wilderness where the Israelites camped along the way — 42 phases of their epic trek from slavery toward the ever-elusive promised land. Trouble and discord have plagued them every step of the way. Torah scholar Avivah Zornberg describes this wilderness as a space of “bewilderment,” “a quicksand ready to consume human bodies” where “cries and whispers and rages and laments fill the air.” Other voices in the tradition romanticize the people’s extended desert sojourn, nostalgically recalling the spiritual intimacy of those times when God’s voice would pour through Moses and the Torah, like a marriage contract, bound them and all of nature to divinity.

Why is the midbar so central to the Israelites’ mythic journey? What is it about wilderness that both fascinates and repels, excites and terrifies? For me, midbar represents not simply a tract of wild land, but a state of mind. Unbounded, undomesticated, these trackless “deserts of the heart” are those times in my life when I don’t know which way to turn or what’s coming next, when I’ve lost my internal compass and feel at once overwhelmed, unmoored and wrenchingly vulnerable. And yet the shattering realities of the midbar can also confer a breathtaking sense of freedom, inducing me to wriggle out of old identities like a snake shedding its skin.

A radical teaching attributed to the famous second-century mystic Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai answers the question of why God brings the people the long way around on their way out of Egypt like this: “Only to those who eat manna is it given to really study the Torah.” (Mekhilta Beshalach 1:34) Manna, the food of faith that drops from the sky to feed the Israelites during their desert wanderings, symbolizes their dependence on an invisible power for sustenance. This midrash suggests that only those who face the rigors and incalculable risks of the midbar, trusting they will be provided for, are able to receive the deeper layers of meaning buried in Torah.

During my recent retreat, my mind and body eventually settled. As I leaned into the land, offering up to it my fears, self-judgments and perceived limitations, I began to hear whispers of wise inner guidance and to feel enveloped in a protective, sheltering presence — something akin to what sages and mystics through the ages have referred to as shekhinah, a sense of immanent divinity woven into everything. The Hebrew word for wilderness, midbar, shares a root with the verb l’daber, to speak. The desert spoke to me, fed me, renewed me and softened my heart. I received its teaching as a gift, with humility and gratitude.

Returning home to the city, I faced a challenge similar to what I imagine the ancient Israelites must have faced at the end of Bamidbar as they prepared to leave behind 40 ragged and majestic years of wilderness strife and holy intimacy: How shall I weave the open spaces, the silence and the words, the struggles, triumphs and raw emotion of that desert time into the daily routines of work, home and relationships? How can I keep the whispers and visions, the gifts from the wilderness, alive in my soul?

Holding these questions, I find myself listening for the silences, the unbidden voices, and even the doubts and creative confusions that stir just beneath the surface.


The post In Judaism, wisdom is found where the wild things are appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency

The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.

They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.

Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.

State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.

Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.

Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.

Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.

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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation

Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family

i24 NewsThe body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.

Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.

“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.

“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.

“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”

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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack

A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24

i24 NewsThe stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.

Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.

The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.

“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”

“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”

Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.

After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.

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