Bamidbar: Living in the Twilight Zone

When the old life ends — but the new one hasn't begun . . .

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The Israeli writer Aaron Applefeld, who wandered alone through the forests of Europe as a child survivor of the Holocaust, wrote that in the years after the war, he existed without a past he could speak of and without a future he could see. He was alive, but he didn't know what that meant yet. He was simply suspended. That suspension has a name in Jewish history. It's called the wilderness, and it's what an entire book of the Torah is named for. Welcome back to Torah in Seven. I'm Bela Olidoard, and this week we begin reading Parshat Bamidbar. It's a new book, the fourth book of the Torah. In English, it's known as the Book of Numbers. But the Hebrew name of this book is a word that is also a situation, Bamidbar, in the wilderness. And here the Torah pauses not to talk about redemption or revelation, but to focus on transition itself, on what it means to live in a long interval between where you were and where you are going. To understand Bamidbar, we first have to understand what the desert meant for the Israelites, because for generations they had lived inside one of the most structured societies on earth. Egypt was a civilization of order where everything, from work to life and even suffering, followed a system. So we can imagine the exhilaration of sudden freedom, no more taskmasters, no more quotas, no more forced labor. But that could also be terribly destabilizing because for anyone who has lived inside rigid boundaries for so long, the sudden absence of boundaries is disorienting. So with the structure of Egyptian life gone, the horizon stretched as far as the eye can see and looked the same in every direction. The midrash describes the desert as hefker, ownerless. No one claims it, nothing organizes it. Unlike farmland or cities, it offers no natural borders and no stable sense of place. In a city, for example, streets hold memory and buildings tell you where you are. But in the desert, your footprints vanish behind you. The ground itself refuses to remember that you walked there at all. And this is what makes this in-between space so dangerous. The Torah showed us an early sign of this danger. If you remember, when Moshe ascended the mountain and didn't return at the expected time, the people panicked. And because they had no visible point of orientation in this endless landscape, they reached for something solid to stand in front of. And so they built the golden calf, something that would give them a sense of footing when everything around them felt so undefined. Jewish law has a precise term for moments like this. It calls them Beinhash Mashot, Twilight. Not quite day, not quite night. It's a time that exists at the seams of reality. And because it's unclear which set of rules applies in twilight, Jewish law tells us to act with extra care, to add boundaries, because uncertainty calls for greater caution. For the Israelites, the wilderness was a national twilight, no longer slaves, but not yet citizens of their own land, no longer escaping, but not yet arrived. In that undefined space, they were displaced. And even as they experienced the euphoria of freedom, the risk of total disorientation was real. The people needed to be grounded, to be held, to be named. And so God tells Moshe, lift the heads of the entire community, count them by their families, by their ancestral houses, by their names. And that's how the Book of Amidbar opens, with a census that will place these displaced people. Now it wasn't about counting bodies. In Egypt, they were counted as workers, numbers in a labor force. Here, each person is placed inside a family, inside a tribe. Each one is given a place to pitch their tent. In a wilderness that had no landmarks, the census became one. And this brings me back to Applefeld, who wrote of another time when our people were so displaced, suspended between two worlds, one that was destroyed and one not yet built. The DP camps, the displaced persons' camps. In those camps, survivors were no longer prisoners but not yet citizens. They were totally displaced, precisely as their station was called. Their homes were gone, their communities destroyed, their future unknown. And in that twilight zone, survivor testimonies tell us that the first thing they did was create a census of their own, a kind of a census. They searched for names, lists were posted, relatives were traced, they looked for where and who they belonged to. And think about it. The first thing people who had been reduced to tattooed numbers did was attempt to recover the dignity of being recognized, to hear their name, to hear someone say, I know you, you belong with us. Only then could they begin to rebuild. We tend to think that the important moments happen at the destinations, at Sinai, at the land, at our arrival. But Bamidbar tells us that's not necessarily so. The book is named for that liminal space not because the wilderness is where you want to be, but because as much as it's a place of danger, it's also a place of possibility. Maybe that's why God chose to give us the Torah there. In our own lives, we pass through periods that feel like twilight. A job ends, a relationship changes, a chapter closes before the next one has opened. We move forward, but often without clear landmarks. We look back and it can feel as if the wind has already erased the path behind us. And yet, when nothing is fixed, nothing is foreclosed. The wilderness doesn't only take away, it opens. Because unmapped ground is also unmarked ground. You can go somewhere you've never been. But in Bainhash Mashot, in this in-between place, you don't abandon the ambiguity, you inhabit it carefully. The Israelites didn't cross the desert casually or carelessly. They moved as a camp, named, placed, organized around a center that held. They weren't trying to tame the wilderness, but to survive it intact. If you're in a twilight now, the Torah isn't telling you to push through to the other side. It's telling you to pitch your tent. Find the people who know where you belong. Let yourself be named and stay open to the possibilities. This was Torah in Seven, A Thought for the Journey. May we travel it well. Before I sign off, I want to let you know about a companion study guide that I prepared for this episode. It's got key sources, Hebrew terms, additional readings, and questions for further study and discussion. It's available to subscribers at TorahIn7.substack.com. The podcast will always be free, but if you want to go deeper, please join me there. You can also dedicate an episode in memory or in honor of someone you love. Again, it's Torah in 7, that's one word, Torain7.substack.com. Thank you for listening. Shabbat Shalom