Wilderness Wandering

The Episcopal Church follows the Revised Common Lectionary for our readings of sacred texts in worship.  During the long season after Pentecost, there are generally two choices of readings from the Hebrew Bible: one that is keyed to themes in the Gospel reading, and one that encourages consideration of longer narrative portions in their own right, week after week.  We are almost at the end of Year A of a three year cycle.  The "in-course" readings this summer have taken us through the lives of the Patriarchs, into the land of Egypt, and through the liberating events of the Exodus.  We saw the Israelites rejoice as God parted the Sea and they walked across on dry land.  We watched Miriam lead the women in a joyous dance, singing: "I will sing unto the LORD; for he has triumphed gloriously.  Horse and rider he has hurled into the sea!"  Last week, we watched the Israelites wrestle with the disheartening discovery that what followed next was a long-term project.   God would work with these former slaves, and the result would be a people, a nation, that would be a vehicle of God's blessing to the whole world.  Change and success would be measured in decades, not hours. 

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg has been my companion as I reflect on this journey.  In her fascinating commentary on the Book of Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture (New York: Doubleday, 2001), Zornberg follows the contours of the Hebrew lectionary that divides the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) into readings--called parshat-- for each week of the year.  She writes:

At the moment of crossing the border, we might have imagined high elation, the intoxication of freedom; in so many literary accounts of breaking across borders to freedom, even in dangerous situations, a giddy symbolic joy is the main response to arriving on the "other side."  In the Exodus narrative, however, we find a spate of negative statements.  On the one hand, there is the baking of the matza, the unleavened bread, "for it had not risen, for they were driven out of Egypt and could not delay; moreover, even provisions for the journey they did not prepare for themselves" (12:39).  On the other hand, "God did not  lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, because it was close; for God said, Lest the people change their minds when they see battle, and return to Egypt" (13:17).

 ...God's choice of travel-route for the liberated people--or, rather, of "the road not taken," of the rejected itinerary--is given prominence by being placed at the beginning of the Parsha.  To describe God's thinking process, as it were, and to reveal the rejected alternatives, together with an opaque rationalization for the chosen route, is certainly an unusual narrative strategy.  For what purpose are we told of the road not taken?  And how are we to understand God's explanation of His choice?

...Rashi explains: the logic of God's thinking is about the people's desire to return to Egypt.  If the journey back is too easy (direct, straight), they will think the forbidden desire and act upon it.  So God leads them by a crooked route, hoping that the complication will prevent their having such subversive thoughts.  By being admitted into God's thought process, the reader learns one essential fact: the central importance of the people's desire to return to Egypt, even in the first elation of freedom.

The opposition of the road not taken (the "straight" road) to the route chosen (the "crooked" route) carries its own paradoxical resonance.  Obviously, the straight road is preferable to the "crooked"; strategically, physically, and ethically; indeed, the metaphorical use of these expressions--the straight and the crooked paths--is a commonplace in ethical writings.  (pp. 199-200)

 Zornberg suggests that the Israelites need the time and space to be cynical, to "think thoughts," to be anxious, even, about how this process of God's redemption is to proceed.

• "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?"

• "What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?" (14:11)
• The people complained against Moses, saying "What shall we drink?" (15:24)
• "If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots full of meat stew and ate our fill of bread; for you [,Moses,] have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." (16:3)
• "Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?" (17:3)

The Israelites, in their zigzag crossing of the Wilderness, had the time and space to participate in a sort of two-way testing. As God tested or tried them, they were testing limits, as well.    All this testing leaves a bitter taste in everyone's mouth. (Note that the place where they complained about dying of thirst, where God provided water for them is called "Meribah" (bitterness) and "Massah" (testing).

Zornberg summarizes:

...although God's design to prevent a return to Egypt has clearly been effective, all these moments of rebellion are, indeed, moments when the Israelites "think their thoughts" about the issue of the Exodus.  Moreover, they express their thoughts in words.  And all with impunity; God does not seem to be angered by this kind of thinking, of speaking.

Indeed, we might say that God ha set aside for them a kind of "academic space" in which, precisely, to do their thinking.  For this activity to be innocuous, they need the protection of a vast wilderness, so that acting on their thoughts becomes too complicated to be realistic.  Their "crooked road" into the wilderness gives them, paradoxically, a freedom to think, to ask their subversive, sarcastic questions.  It gives them, also, the outrageous freedom to "zigzag," not only geographically but intellectually, emotionally. The road that is akuma ("crooked," "devious") threads through places of vision and faith and, adjacently, places of doubt and revision.  It makes possible a journey that is like a graph curve (a modern Hebrew meaning for the word, akuma), zigzag lines joining highs and lows, discontinuities that are intellectually baffling to the reader, but that are presented by the narrator in a matter-of-fact, empirical spirit: this is the way it was; this is the way it is.  These discontinuities cannot be avoided or dispelled (Zornberg, 204).

I am grateful for a glimpse of God who, in dealing with humankind, provides us a safe space for questioning, even for doubting.  I am grateful that there is room in the Divine Kindergarten for those pupils who simply can't, or won't,  color within the lines.    The arc of God's dealing with us is wide enough to encompass the wilderness phases of our faith journeys, and use them for our growth.