Verdant Wilderness
Dear Friends,
My great grandfather dedicated his life to writing an encyclopedia of biblical commentaries that was so big he couldn’t finish it in one lifetime. He got through all of Genesis and Exodus, some of Leviticus and a few pages of Numbers before the small letters at the bottom of the page trailed off. His book formed the basis of my rabbinical studies. I scribbled notes into the few leftover white spaces on the page, year by year, swallowing the book leaf by leaf until all the corners of the canon had been dusted. There are many corners. I have no desire nor the skillset or brains to finish his book, but this month, I will accomplish the nearest task. I am gathering my favorite commentaries, the gems, the most significant spiritual teachings of the vast tradition, for our children’s coloring book, working title, the same as his, “The Whole Torah.”
This week had me at the end of Leviticus beginning of Numbers, surveying two archetypes, wilderness and rain. The homeland now, in the sweet shadow of the mountains of the Hudson Valley, is exploding in green. The leaves of the mighty twin catalpas guarding our home grow by the hour, I check them daily and am awed by the experience of seeing growth. The green is a joyous enveloping monster, a wilderness of green that would swallow homes, gardens, domains of civilized living, were we not armed with lawn mowers and weed wackers, to keep the wilderness at bay. And yet there is something profoundly disturbing about the incongruity of spring and war. War afar endows the spring with a foul bitterness. Of all living creatures we are the most confused about our purpose. The plants are one with their nature, they do not deviate from their command, grow. Instead of making art and beauty and healing and music and ceremony, we make war and money and greed.
The commentaries ask why wisdom is given through the element of wilderness. They apply a strange term to the quality of wilderness, “hefker” ownerless. The term is used in Talmudic property law, when an item is left in a public space without any mark upon it to identify the owner, a bag that could be anyone’s bag, a shirt with no distinguishing features. After a day or two, a stranger passes by the bag again, notices that no one seems to be coming back for it, and takes it for themselves and puts the perishable contents to good use. This is not stealing, according to the law, because the bag had become “hefker” ownerless. The wilderness is ownerless. Though nations, businesses, rich folks may lay out worldviews in which they can divide and buy up parcels and territories, according to the natural laws of spirit, wilderness can never be acquired. Like the elements, fire, water, wilderness cannot be possessed.
Wilderness is an essential quality because our homes are sited at the borderline between the wild and the domestic. And just as we carve lines into the grass that separate the wild field from the walkable pathways, so too the inward space of human beings is a wilderness, and we make sense of the too muchness of what our hearts and imagination can access within, by carving identity pathways that say, this is me, this is not me. But always we are sitting on the edge of a wilderness whose void wishes to scream and cry in sounds more animalistic than human. What do the rabbis counsel to human beings tasked with making a life atop such a fragile terrifying perch? “Only a person who makes themselves like the wilderness, ownerless, can acquire wisdom (Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7).”
When I read that line this week it reminded me to expand the conception of the field of my being. I opened my edges to the unknown that lies beyond what I know of myself and the world, and felt held by the breadth of the wilderness, wildness in tune with itself, mystery becoming, faith in healing happening slowly. The pain of being human is the incongruity of bone and soul, the yearning for a home quickly dismisses its humility, dreams of buying up the town, and forgets that what gives the soul greatest nourishment are frequent goings past the edges of the wilderness, the infinite touched briefly and brought back to the sanctuary of home.
The owls were out again last night, they are a trinity now, Mary, Jesus and the Holy Ghost singing the Song of Songs to each other in coos, who is that fine winged creature rising up out of the wilderness? I got in there too last night, underneath the shadow of the catalpa and the full moon, I listened to the coos and asked the owls to teach me how to speak. Five short coos followed by a deep long one. They said hello, didn’t seem to mind my presence, told me I had a long way to go before I’d be fluent in owl tongue. I let the love triangle continue uninterrupted. Every time we speak, we are calling out spells from the infinite dark of the wilderness within us, pulling somethings out of the nothingness we have access to. The throat, a wilderness speaking organ. My your voice is comely, when you name, make poetry from the pain of the watchful stars and all they wish to say, a trio of owls hooting love songs at midnight.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman