RABBI PHIL

Three Months in the Desert

  It is easy to remember the great moments.  The splitting of the Sea.  The thunder at Sinai.  The voice that spoke and did not cease.  These are the pillars of our story, the scenes we return to again and again.

  But the Torah lingers, almost quietly, on what came in between.

  Three months.

  From the Sea of Reeds to Mount Sinai, the Israelites, the People, traveled not in triumph, but in uncertainty, in the long, exposed light of freedom.

  What does that mean for the People to live for three months without Torah?  Not simply without revelation, but without the law that revelation gives.  The Israelites had left Egypt, but they had not yet arrived at Sinai.  They were free, but not yet fully formed, only somewhat formed.

  Freedom is not a single moment, not secured at the edge of the Sea, even when the waters part and the enemy disappears.  It must be practiced, endured, learned.  Freedom is a learning curve, and like all learning curves, it is uneven, with   moments of clarity and moments of confusion, steps forward and steps back.

  In Egypt, their lives were constrained, but also structured.  Food, however meager, appeared.  Labor, however crushing, was defined.  Identity, however diminished, was fixed.  In the wilderness, all of that dissolved.  For three months, the Israelites, the People, were left with the burden and the opportunity to form themselves, individually identity, family identity, communal identity.  This was not only their task.  It was also Moses’ problem, as he stood between a People newly freed and a future not yet defined.

  To be free is to choose.  To choose is to risk error.  And so they faltered at times, not because they longed for Egypt, but because Egypt had  provided a kind of terrible clarity.  The desert offered something else, openness, and with it,  uncertainty.

  And yet, they learned.

  They learned to gather manna, each according to their need, no more and no less.  They learned restraint, that one does not hoard what is given for the day.  They learned that there would be water, even if it came from a rock.  These are small lessons, but they are the beginnings of learning how to live with freedom, how to think about it, how to inhabit it, even if only as part of that learning curve.

  And what is Torah if not a structure for freedom?  Not a return to Egypt, not the imposition of   bondage in another form, but a way of shaping human life so that freedom can endure, grow, deepen.  Without structure, freedom dissolves into anxiety or confusion.  Without law, possibility becomes burden.  The Israelites, the People, lived for three months in that space, between release, and responsibility.

  Perhaps it was only in that interval that they came to understand that freedom alone was not enough.  That to live as a People requires not only release from oppression, but a framework within which life can be ordered and sustained.

  We might recognize something of ourselves in those months.  Our own journey from Pesach to Shavuot traces a similar path, though compressed into seven weeks.  We begin with liberation,  celebrated at the Seder.  The weeks that follow are not empty.  They are an invitation to ask, what do we do with our freedom?

  We, too, live at times without clear structure, or with structures that no longer sustain us.  We   experience moments when the horizon opens and the path forward is not yet defined.  Like the  Israelites, the People, we may feel both the  exhilaration and the unease of that openness.

  The counting of the Omer is not merely a ritual marking time.  It is a discipline of attention, a way of inhabiting those in-between days.  Each day counted is a day shaped, a small act of bringing form to what might otherwise remain formless.

  It suggests that revelation is not simply given; it is prepared for.  Crossing the Sea is insufficient.  Greater preparation is required.

  And so we remember not only the Sea and the mountain, but the space between them.

  For it is in that space, exposed and unfinished, that a People begins to understand what it has been given, and what it must yet become.

 Phil

Rabbi Phil Cohen