ESSAY: The Faith We Need for the Journey (Parashat Devarim)

Moshe looks back and, in retelling the incident of the spies, recalls what he had said to the people about their inability to move forward into the promised land —   badavar hazeh eynkhem ma’aminim bashem Elokeikhem  (Deuteronomy 1:32).   “With reference to this thing you don’t believe in God.”  What stops you from going forward is a lack of faith.

And specifically, a lack of faith in davar hazeh, “this thing.”  What is this thing that they, and maybe we, don’t believe in God about – this thing that stops us from going into the promised land, from fulfilling our destiny?  

Below we will explore three possible “things” (devarim) that they and we sometimes don’t tend to believe in and see if, in exploring our doubts, we can come to taste the possibility of faith in these things and how that might help us move forward toward our own promised land, into a place of peace and belonging and our largest most evolved self. 

I. Our Unbelief in Being Carried:

 בדבר הזה אינכם מאמינים בה’ אלוקיכם 
“With reference to this thing you don’t believe in Hashem your God.”

What is it that we don’t always trust or believe?   Look at the verse right before this: “And in the wilderness, where you saw how Hashem your God carried you like a man carries his child all the way that you traveled until you came to this place” (1:31).   

What we don’t believe is that God carries us the whole way that we travel, the whole desert journey.  There is a midrash that compares the situation to a child who is riding on top of his father’s shoulders and sees a friend of the family and asks the friend – have you seen my father?  (Shmot Rabbah 26)   

For us, too, It is like that; it is like we are sitting on God’s shoulders, carried along through life, and we have no idea.  We are totally blind to it, blind to the care.  It’s all around us but we don’t feel it, don’t notice it, don’t let it in. 

What if we were to feel it, to let it in? What if, whatever difficulty we are facing, we could feel that we are carried through it on God’s shoulders, never abandoned, never left alone, always held and carried forward, no matter what we do?

Sometimes, looking backwards, after a difficult experience, we can see that we were indeed carried through the trouble by divine grace, that we were somehow supported from something beyond ourselves.  That’s the past.   Can we also see it and feel it, notice it, in the present?  How different would it be right now to notice the carrying as you go through the experience?  It doesn’t mean there won’t be trouble and pain and suffering.  But through all of that you will be carried.  

II. Our Unbelief in the Process:

בדבר הזה אינכם מאמינים בה’ אלוקיכם 
“With reference to this thing you don’t believe in Hashem your God.”  

Another understanding of “this thing”: What we don’t believe is that we are on a path to a good place, to the promised land, that we are “getting somewhere,” that all this pain and difficulty is part of the process of growth and transformation, that all of it is part of the journey toward the land, toward fulfilling our destiny.  

This is Rashi’s view.  Badavar hazeh, he says, refers to “that He promises to bring you to the land.”  That’s what you don’t believe in – that all this wandering in the desert is meaningful, that all the difficulties you encounter on the road are part of the process of getting you to the land, to fullness, to your destiny.  Part of having faith is to believe in ultimate redemption, to believe that we are moving in a good direction, both personally and in the world, that we are always evolving, becoming.  

It makes a difference, when we are in the midst of a difficulty, how we perceive its function, the story we tell about it. Often, if we are experiencing something painful, we take it as a sign of failure or that we are doing something wrong, that we are on the wrong path, that the future is doomed.  

What happens if we put that difficulty into the context of a life journey that is in fact heading, perhaps with lots of bumps on the road and very slowly, but still always heading toward our own promised land, our own fully realized self?  What if we understand the difficult experience not as a sign of failure, but as a sign of growth and movement and transformation, a part of the inevitably painful birthing process of birthing our new larger self, of coming into a new land?  

The divine angels that served as guides on the Israelite journey were made one of fire and the other of cloud.   What if the fires of intense emotion inside us, though sometimes painful, are serving as guides to point us on the path to our new land?  And what if the clouds of confusion and uncertainty and doubt and even despair are similarly serving as guides, guides to becoming, to evolving more fully into ourselves?  

How would it change your experience of difficulty to imagine that it is meaningful, intentional, a part of the unfolding process of growing?  How much more would we grow if we didn’t resist the angels that are trying to guide us, but leaned into them with faith in the process?  

III. Our Unbelief in Ourselves:

בדבר הזה אינכם מאמינים בה’ אלוקיכם 
“With reference to this thing you don’t believe in Hashem your God.”  

Perhaps the biggest “thing” that we don’t believe in, that stops us from achieving our full potential is ourselves.  We don’t believe in ourselves, in our own capacities, and this, too, is a form of not believing in God. 

The first generation of Israelites could not enter the land because they didn’t believe they could do it.   They didn’t believe in their own capacity to carry God inside them and defeat opponents and meet challenges.  To not believe in yourself and your own ability to meet challenges is to not believe in the divine spark that God placed inside you, to not believe in the God who made you as you are.  

What if we did believe in ourselves, if we did fully inhabit our own strength, our God-given power, our infinite potential?  How might that change how we view our difficulties and challenges, trusting that we are strong enough to meet whatever comes?   Such trust would free us from our stuckness so that we could move forward with confidence towards the promised land, a land that has perhaps always been there waiting for us to realize who we are and what we are capable of.  

IV: Conclusion: Returning to Being Carried

This journey is a process, a process of both being and becoming. The Israelites in the desert moved and rested, moved and rested.  There was not just the long term destination of the promised land, but many stopping points along the road where it was okay also to just be as they are, as we are.  We, too, are on this journey. The long journey may be hard to see or perceive and it may be intergenerational, as it was for the Israelites.    We pick up the journey where our ancestors left off and pass it on to our descendants.   And we also pause along the way to simply rest, to be as we are and to notice again the divine holding, the sense of being carried through it all. 

Returning now to the first image of being carried on God’s shoulders, maybe we can rest in that sense of being always held and carried through the ups and downs, the journeying and the stopping, the difficulties and the growth and even the stagnation and the moving backwards.  Through it all we are carried with faith.  Even when we don’t notice it, even when we lose faith in ourselves and in God and in the process, even then, still, God does not put us down, never puts us down, but continues steadfastly to have faith in us and to carry us through the desert. 

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