The Israelites’ 40 year sojourn in the desert is described in our parsha as extremely difficult, with snakes and scorpions, hunger and thirst, challenges at every step.
The point of this experience, our parsha tells us, is growth. Lema’an hodia’akha – in order for you to learn something, to come to know some larger truth about yourself and God ((Deuteronomy 8:3). Lada’at et asher bilevavekha – in order to know, in order, perhaps, for you to know et asher belivavekha, what is in your own heart ((Deuteronomy 8:2). It’s not God who needs to know your heart – God already knows – it’s you that needs to learn and know about yourself through these challenges, to grow into your strength and resilience and light and fierceness and creativity. This experience is to help you grow into your own heart, the fullness of your own soul.
Process Lens on Suffering
I want to pause here and take in the implications of this understanding of the desert experience as a spiritual growth process. We are all in some way living through a desert experience. This very life often feels like such an experience, with all its constant challenges and obstacles and difficulties. We suffer. That is the core truth of our existence, sometimes more, sometimes less, but we suffer. The question is: how do we view this suffering, this desert experience? I think we are called by the Torah here into a process lens, a lens of growth and learning. It’s not so much a why question – trying to explain the suffering – as much as it is a how-to question, a question of how to approach our daily suffering, how to allow it to teach us and help us grow into the person we are meant to become.
Our Normal Resistance to Suffering
What is your normal response to suffering? For many of us, there is great resistance to it, an attempt to fight it, to control, minimize, manage, fix, get rid of and medicate it, to navigate our way through it, to hold tight against it. What happens if we open to the possibility that our suffering, our trauma, our challenges, our daily triggerings and hurts, what if we open to the possibility that these are all our teachers, that this, our life, exactly as it is in all its messy imperfection and difficulty, is a perfectly designed divine curriculum for our own maximal growth?
Like Childbirth
Not all pain is the same for us. Our perspective on our suffering affects our experience of it. The pain of childbirth is exquisite, but we willingly endure it, even embrace it, because we understand that it is the pain of opening to new birth. We are now, many of us, in the process of birthing ourselves, and this birth, too, is painful, as is all growth. Can we feel our grief and our anxiety, even our lowest moments of despair, can we feel them as somehow part of a divine process of growth and rebirth? Not as an indication that there is something wrong with us, but on the contrary, as a sign of our growth, as a sign that God believes in our capacity to become bigger. Maybe there is learning here in this difficulty, sometimes even just the learning that we are loved through it, loved through the low points, loved through the failures and mistakes.
Suffering As A Call for Response
The Torah says here that God did all this to you in the desert lema’an anotekha, in order to make you suffer (8:2). This word anotekha, meaning suffering, also has the root anah, to answer or respond. Perhaps God does all this in order to get you to respond, to awaken you, to call you to connection, to invite you into something larger. Perhaps our difficult emotions and challenging life events are like angels knocking at our door, asking us to open up and meet them, asking us to hear them and respond, inviting us into greater connection with ourselves and God. Maybe you can hear those knocks right now through whatever difficulty has been plaguing you. Maybe that restlessness you feel is actually the stirring of your heart, your soul knocking at the door asking for some alone time.
Desert Retreat
Because that’s what the desert is, in way, alone time with God and ourselves, away from the distractions of ordinary life, a kind of retreat. It’s almost like our suffering parts are asking for a desert retreat so that we can spend time with ourselves and God, as if the suffering comes to demand this alone time, getting louder and louder until we turn and notice and take the time to attend, like a toddler pulling at our apron strings asking for attention, first quietly and then louder. Maybe our suffering is our soul asking for this alone time.
There is a beautiful verse in Hoshea related to this idea: Behold, says God, I will assuredly entice her and lead her to the wilderness, the midbar, and there I will speak to her heart, vedibarti al libah (Hosea 2:16). What if all of our suffering is actually God calling us into the wilderness for a heart to heart, calling us away from our busy lives, breaking our hearts open so we can listen and take in God’s love? The words midbar and midaber, wilderness and speaking, are actually written the same way, just vocalized differently. It’s as if the midbar, the desert with all its travails, is a way for God to be midaber, to speak to us. Can you hear the whisper of God’s love through your desert troubles, opening to what God might be telling you through this experience?
Nisayon: Trial as Growth Opportunity
The other word that is used in our parsha in reference to the desert sufferings is lenasotekha (8:2); these difficulties are given to you as a nisyaon, a trial, like the 10 nisyonot of Avraham (Pirke Avot 5:3). This word nisayon is normally translated as a trial or a test, but I think it means something far more subtle. Was Avraham given 10 tests by God to see if he would pass or fail, a yes or no question? It seems rather that the tests were growth opportunities, stepping stones, challenging experiences that were presented at exactly the right moment in order to help him move forward into greater faith capacity, in order to help him know his own strength and resilience and deep faith in God, to know his own heart. That is what it means that the desert experiences were meant lenasotekha, not in order to test you, but in order to help you grow, in order to help you see who you really are, to help you become who you really are. Maybe your life challenges don’t so much happen to you or against you, but for you, for your own growth. It is not like a test that you face, you vs the test, but more like a coach that pushes you to become yourself. Your life, with all its challenges and difficulties, is given to you for you, exactly as you need it to become your fullest self.
This is important, this difference in understanding of nisayon. The question our life challenges pose is not – did you pass the test? But rather – how can you grow through this? Who are you being asked to become through this experience? What new spiritual capacity are you being asked to strengthen and grow inside you? We often think of ourselves as a yes or no question – am I good or bad, right or wrong, but this nisayon mindset asks us instead to think of ourselves as learners, as dynamic evolving sacred processes. We are not static objects, but growers, seeds waiting to blossom, stories waiting to unfold and be told.
Becoming a Miracle (Nes)
There is another facet of the word nisayon. It is also related to the word nes, miracle. The implication is that when we go through nisyonot, the trials and tribulations of our lives, and grow through them, we become a nes, a miracle; we become someone we never imagined that we could be. There is something divine in us that is waiting to be manifested, unleashed into the world, something that is indeed a nes, a miracle, the miracle of our true brilliant essence. When we allow ourselves to be touched and tutored and guided through our nisyonot, our life challenges, we grow into this nes, this miracle of a person. We shine.
Becoming a Land Flowing With Milk and Honey
There is in our parsha also an inkling of this nes, this miracle, of who we could become. It is the reference to the land that we are headed towards through this desert experience, this land that is eretz nahalei mayim, a land with streams and springs and fountains, this land that is eretz hitah useorah, a land of wheat and barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates, this land that is eretz zavat halav udevash, a land flowing with milk and honey (8:7-8). This is the vision of our essence, the untapped potential waiting to be born, the nes, the miracle, that we truly are. We are a spring of fresh waters, a land flowing with milk and honey, a place of abundant, diverse produce. Like a tapestry woven of many colors, we contain all of that, waiting to be blossom and manifest as we work through the desert experiences of our lives. It is our very suffering that is calling us into this becoming, inviting us to be our fullest, flowing, abundant, creative selves.
Patience With Our Process
We should note that the journey is neither linear nor quick. It takes a long time. Forty years the Israelites spent in the desert, and their travels circled, moving forward and then backward. So it is with us. We often can’t see our own progress, sometimes don’t even know we are in a process at all. Ours is not a clear and direct path. When we ask these questions about our suffering – how is God calling to us through this experience? how are we being invited to grow and who are we being invited to become? – the answers will not necessarily come quickly and clearly. We learn to sit in the questions, trusting the unfolding process, letting ourselves grow through the challenges rather than fight them and manage them, offering ourselves patience and compassion along the way and learning to trust where we are, wherever we are, learning to trust that where we are is exactly where we should be, the next unclear step on our journey.
