Wilderness Guides

by Dan Libenson

This blog is called The Wilderness because the Wilderness (midbar in Hebrew, also translated as desert) is one of the most important places in Jewish mythology, and it maps quite well onto the current situation of American Jews and the institutions of the American Jewish community. (and assumedly everywhere else in the world).

I have heard people say that “we don’t have a playbook” for the current situation—the rather sudden imposition of physical distancing as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. But I don’t agree. I think we do have a playbook—two of them, in fact: the Torah and the Talmud. 

The central story of the Torah is the story of the Hebrews in the aftermath of a plague that results in their rapid expulsion from the life they knew before, and how they navigate the chaos and fear of the Wilderness in which they suddenly find themselves. As my friend Benay Lappe has famously laid out in her “Crash Talk,” the Talmud tells an analogous story, about how the Jews re-built Judaism after the plague of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews from that capital.

On the one hand, the story the Torah tells doesn’t bode well for us. Mistakes are made, and many of them. These mistakes include the majority of the people mis-remembering what it was like before the Exodus and wanting to go back to their familiar life in Egypt, as well as various leadership failures, especially that of a group of scouts to communicate a positive vision for a better future—a failure of vision, which, as is the natural order of such things, results in forty years of aimless wandering, even though the journey to the better future could have taken only a few weeks or months. 

The point of mythology, as I see it, is to pass down through the generations a kind of “secret knowledge” or wisdom that we as a people have learned through the school of hard knocks, but that few people alive today have ever learned in their lifetimes. Or, it’s the kind of knowledge that, by the time you learn it through the school of hard knocks in your own lifetime—as a person or as a people—it is too late. You’ve missed the boat, or been beaten to the punch. If I am remembering Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens correctly, or at least this is my riff on it, this basically describes the evolutionarily competitive advantage of human beings over other animals—our ability to learn from bad experiences and package that learning in the form of stories (the original “memes,” as Richard Dawkins coined the term) to pass down to our descendants so that they can use that knowledge before the hard knocks deal them a death blow. 

If we read the Torah as having nothing to tell us about what to do because the story didn’t go so well, I think we are misreading its style of storytelling, or at least a major component of it, which is teaching by negativeexample. I will have more to say about this in future posts, and I will give many examples (of teaching by both positive and negative example), but it’s something like this: if a story in the Torah results in an obviously bad result, then the wisdom being passed down is probably that we should do the opposite of what the characters did in the story when faced with an analogous situation; at the very least, the story is telling us what not to do. And when something works out well, we should map the story onto our own situation.

I’ll write about some of the negative examples in another post, but here is one example of a story that had a positive result. Early on in the Book of Exodus, Moses’s father-in-law Jethro comes to visit Moses. Seeing that Moses is exhausted and also engaging in certain dysfunctional leadership practices that are not conducive to keeping the people mentally healthy, Jethro gives Moses some leadership advice—not only the famous advice about creating a pyramidal management structure, but also, by modeling it, advice about how to personally project and cultivate among the people a more positive and hopeful attitude. As traditional commentators point out, the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai only happens after Moses takes Jethro’s advice, and indeed the Torah portion in which the Ten Commandments are given is called “Jethro.”

I’m sure I’ll get into the specifics of that advice in a later post, but here I want to focus on the source of the advice that I think most people miss. I have taught this text dozens of times, and I missed it until the other day. Many have remarked on the ideas that Jethro is a non-Israelite, and it’s important to be open to advice and help from outsiders. Agreed. Many have also pointed out that Jethro, who is described as the priest of Midian, is an experienced leader, and it’s important to take advice from those with more experience than you. Also agreed.

But the key point about Jethro, the one that I missed and that most people have missed, is that he is the priest of Midian, and Midian is in the Wilderness. That is, Jethro is a man of the Wilderness, while the Israelites are city-folk, albeit of the lowest social class. The Israelites have no idea how to live in the Wilderness. All they can do is try and map their Egyptian practices, ideas, and organizational structures onto a landscape where those practices, ideas, and structures make no sense and may be—I would say, prove to be—dysfunctional. As a man of the Wilderness, Jethro says to Moses, “Welcome to this world in which I have been living a long time. Let me show you around and help you see what works here.” Any of us who have ever traveled to a wild place know how important it is to have a guide who knows the terrain; it’s the same in the Torah’s story, and it’s the same in our present circumstances.

There are people who have been living in the Wilderness just outside of the “American Jewish community” as defined by its pre-COVID-19 organizational structures, and we would be well advised to seek their counsel. Some of us have been living here in the digital Wilderness where all of a sudden millions of fellow Jews have just arrived. We’re here to help!  

And many of us have been living in the Wilderness for all kinds of other reasons, often because the Jewish community as it has been organized did not accept us fully. In this group we might find Jews of Color, LGBTQ+ Jews, intermarried Jews, Jews whose conversions are not accepted or who are Jews through self-determination, atheist Jews, Jews who are unconcerned with Jewish law, Jews with disabilities, Jews with ideas about Judaism or Israel that are unpopular, and many others, not to mention many Jewish-adjacent fellow travelers, friends and relatives. The Wilderness in which millions of our fellow Jews have now suddenly arrived is not only a digital Wilderness, but also a Wilderness in which many of the old rules, structures, and assumptions just don’t apply; well, the mixed multitude I have just described has been building Jewish life outside of those rules for a long time. While I only fall into some of these categories and cannot speak for everyone, I think that most would also say: We’re here to help.

So, I hope those now streaming into this Wilderness are open to what all the Jethros out here have to say. Our future most likely depends on it.