MInia Sushi

>> Torah portion

Japanese Restaurant

Beware of the
personal prison
of wandering in
the wilderness.

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33214 W.14 Mile
at Farmington Road
West Bloomfield MI 48322

248-737-4188

1 84 1 840

NEWLY RENOVATEDieTh FULL BAR

Path To Nowhere

Parshat Dvarim: Deuteronomy 1:1-
3:22; Isaiah 1:1-1:27.

I

remember when my parents'
friends (not anyone reading this)
would come back from vaca-
tion and insist on showing us their
pictures. The first few were interest-
ing. The next dozen were tolerable.
The following several hundred were
excruciating.
We did not want to be
rude, and tried to, at least,
look like we were paying
attention. The pictures
were even worse if we had
been to the places our-
selves.
The entire first Torah
portion of Deuteronomy is
Moses' travelogue on all
the places the people had
been in the wilderness.
Didn't Moses know how
much this would aggravate them? Of
course he did. That was the point.
Moses wanted the people to leave
the wilderness and go into the
Promised Land of Israel. He knew
they did not want to leave the wil-
derness because it had become com-
fortable to them. Their lives were
dreary and mediocre, but they clung
to them out of fear of the unknown.
Moses needed to jolt them out of
their complacency.
The description that Moses gave
of their travels is relentless misery
in each place they went. Their time
in the wilderness was not necessar-
ily all that bad. The people had been
living on manna, which is like living
on cream of wheat. Nutritious, but
bland and uninspiring. They liked it,
though, because they did not have to
work for it. When they were in dan-
ger, God would fight their battles.
Why did Moses want to push them

out to a land that was strange and
unfamiliar to them?
Moses understood that living in
the wilderness is not living; it is not
being truly alive. The wilderness is
a metaphor for when we allow life to
just happen to us. We make no deci-
sions. We take no chances.
We risk nothing and gain
nothing. We settle for dull
and average, and then
wonder why we do not feel
like ourselves, why we do
not feel fully engaged in
the world.
The Hebrew word for wil-
derness is midbar, which has
the same root as to speak.
The wilderness is when
you say you are going to do
things in your life, but just
settle for talking instead of doing.
The Hebrew word for our Torah
portion is Dvarim, which means
words, but also deeds. It is an ana-
gram for midbar, wilderness. Moses
is telling the people that if they do
not take a chance, if they do not mix
things up, they will miss their lives.
It is what he is really telling us.
There is no possibility, of course,
of controlling what happens in our
lives, and we certainly cannot con-
trol the outcomes of what we do.
We can though, choose to live our
lives with courage, without being
held back by fear, by not settling for
mediocrity.
Socrates said, "The unexamined
life is not worth living." Moses
teaches us that the unlived life is not
worth examining. ❑

AL OUN1,1 6,KX

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6096 West Maple Rd. (at Farmington), West Bloomfield

248.539 .0505

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Orchard Lake Rd.

South 0114 Mile

Farmington Hills

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PIZZERIA BIGA
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CONTACT: MARC MEGE 248.750.2442 • marc2@pizzeriabiga.com

Aaron Bergman is a rabbi at Adat Shalom

Synagogue in Farmington Hills.

29110 FRANKLIN RD SOUTHFIELD 48034

JN

[N]

July 11 • 2013

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