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.

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