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To the Wilderness

Parshat Ekev, (perek 8, pasuk 2) establishes the time the children of
Israel spent in the wilderness as one of great spiritual significance. We
are commanded by Moshe to "Remember the way which God has led us these
forty years in the desert". The desert strips away everything inauthentic,
tests us so that God–and we ourselves–"can know what is in your hearts."
It is no coincidence that the Torah itself was given in the desert, as the
Midrash Rabbah tells us. "Whoever would wish to acquire Torah, must make
himself ownerless like the wilderness."

What does it mean to be ownerless? Why the wilderness?

For Maimonides, writing in the 12th century, wilderness represents the
means of escaping the seductive influence of an evil society, an influence
powerful enough and hypnotic enough to "own" you. "If all the countries he
knows or hears of follow evil ways, as is the case in our time," the Rambam
says in the Mishna Torah, then one must "go out into the caves, the clefts
of mountains, and the wilderness" (Hilchot Deot, 6:1) to save oneself from
a degenerate society's mores.

Rabbi Nachman of Brazlav, six centuries later, also contrasts the sanctuary
offered by wilderness to society's corruption. But in his depiction, in the
story "The Master of Prayer," societies have sunk one step below evil–into
insanity. The story describes a series of countries, each with its own mad
obsession. In one, money is worshipped so totally that it has become the
key to human identity: "Whoever had more money was a human being, and those
who were very wealthy were considered gods." In
Rabbi Nachman's analysis, the connection between money, class and status
drawn by society can penetrate to the depths of a person's psyche until the
poor themselves believe that they are animals, and the rich are convinced
that they are gods. The master of prayer infiltrates these societies, and
subversively draws people "out of the settled places," into the wilderness
and a life of prayer and meditation.

Prayer is the antidote to societies obsessions because it has the power to
lift consciousness out of the web of socially constructed desires and
definitions into a new matrix whose center is God. Prayer, the effort to
reach out–and in–towards the transcendent, to stand before the One, creates
a wilderness within, where a person can be alone with God. Even during
public prayer, the crescendo of intensity is reached during the whispered
Amidah, whose sound should not be heard by another human being. By adding a
vertical vector to the world of horizontal relationships, a new dimension,
the dimension of soul, is opened up.

But this process can only happen if we have the courage to let it happen.
To become a master of prayer involves breaking, at least for a few precious
moments, the norms for "proper" behavior, whose first principal is the
constant, vigilant awareness of oneself as a social animal. It's not an
easy thing to do–just as living in the wilderness is not easy. The
following scene from the 19th century Hasidic work "Abir Haroim", like
descriptions of prayer from Biblical times to today–shares the
characteristic of wilderness:

"Rabbi Avigdor Yehudah HaLevy, the Rabbi of Koy, used to remain the whole
day, until night fell, in the synagogue with the doors locked… It
happened once that…people looked in the windows…He was lying on the
floor in tallit and tefillin, stretched out, arms and legs extended in full
prostration before the holy ark, which was open, and surrounding his holy
body were many white doves. And so was he pouring out his heart in prayer
before the Creator, blessed by He."

Another teaching of Rebbe Nachman's purposely reverses the simple meaning
of a rabbinic warning: "Whoever stays awake at night, and goes out alone,
and puts his mind to nothingness (batala) is liable for his own soul."
Rabbi Nachman re-interprets this dictum in a positive light as referring to
the transformative power of solitary prayer, at night, alone in the
wilderness: this kind of prayer roots our identity in God's absolute and
necessary existence (mechuyav hameziut), freeing us from the spider-web of
relativity which pulls us towards disintegration.

Perhaps no civilization in history has been as aware as ours of the extent
to which identity and consciousness are conditioned–by history, social
class, economic, biology, language. After Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche,
Foucalt, and Derrida, we see human consciousness as lacking a center,
identity as false, language as "an infinite play of reference" with no
meaning outside itself.

And as forests and deserts have disappeared from most of our lives, for
most of hours, so has prayer. Or rather, prayer has been repressed, as
sexuality was repressed in previous generations and heresies in still
earlier ones. People may still pray, but prayer–wild, heart rending
prayer-is almost never represented in mainstream culture. You don't hear it
on the radio or see it on TV, in movies or in literary creations. Just as
the sight of a grown man crying has become almost taboo–it wasn't always
so, Jewish men used to cry openly, not least during prayer–so has prayer
become something slightly shameful or embarrassing, indicating despair or
even madness.

Yet we need prayer. We need to ground our identities in the hope of the
absolute. Only through prayer can we "acquire the Torah" can we "test
ourselves to know", can we find meaning in language, receive transmitted
truth, ground our identity in the absolute.

And, as Freud has taught us, the repressed has a way of returning in
grotesque, horrific forms. It returns in the Muslim shouting Allahu Akbar
while detonating a car bomb, in the Jew who rises for sunrise prayer at the
sacred burial place of his nation's ancestors only to train his gun on
human beings kneeling in devotion.

There are many reasons these atrocities were committed. Yet it would be a
mistake to ignore the connection between our repression of individual
expressions of spirituality, and the violence which keeps appearing in our
midst, always in different forms. We have driven prayer into the fringes.
We must learn to pray for peace with abandon if we are to steal prayer back
from violence.