Wilderness Wisdom

Wednesday April 17, 2026/Rosh Chodesh Iyyar

Hevre/Friends,

What an extraordinary week it’s been. As I put the finishing touches on my teaching notes for our Rabbi on the Road journey to Sicily and Calabria—Andi and I set out for Italy next Monday—I found myself holding a sense of anticipation and excitement. And yet, as life so often reminds us, joy rarely arrives unaccompanied. That sense of anticipation was tempered by the deaths of two individuals who I’m grateful to have known, each loss one for which I was honored to offer rabbinic presence and care.

These contrasts are not only personal; they’re embedded in the rhythms of this season of the Jewish calendar. Throughout the month of Nisan, we’re called to extend the joy of Passover, even to the point of modifying certain mourning rituals. And now, with Rosh Chodesh today (and tomorrow) marking the arrival of Iyyar, my week encountered a threshold where endings meet beginnings—an encounter that gives rise to a complex, if inevitable, alchemy of emotion. Beneath it all pulses our ancient journey in the wilderness from Egypt to Sinai, from Passover to Shavuot, measured day by day through the counting of the Omer. These convergences are not incidental; they carry within them a quiet and profound meaning.

The Sages teach that in order to receive Torah, one must make oneself hefker—ownerless, like the wilderness. The desert belongs to no one. It is unbounded, unstructured, free of the markers that define and confine us. It holds no possessions, only presence. What the Israelites carried with them was not material, but essential: a longing for dignity and freedom; a commitment to justice; a memory of suffering that might cultivate compassion; a sense of belonging to a people and a story; and a humility before the Divine who made their liberation possible.

So too in our lives. Possessions come and go. Even life itself has its beginning and its end. But these inner qualities—formed in vulnerability, refined through experience—endure. They are what remain when so much else falls away.

The wilderness, vast and shifting, resists containment. It invites openness and possibility. To become hefker is not to become empty, but to become receptive—to loosen our hold on certainties that limit us, to release the narratives that constrain us, and to make space for what may yet emerge. It asks of us a certain courage: to remain open even in the face of life’s most difficult moments, even in the presence of loss.

There is, too, a humility that the wilderness imparts. Its expanse reminds us of our smallness, situating us within something far greater than ourselves. It calls us to surrender, not in defeat, but in recognition—of the larger rhythms that shape our existence, the cycles of life and death, loss and renewal, to which we all belong.

We live in a world shaped by both human freedom and the mysteries of nature—a world in which sorrow and suffering coexist with beauty and joy. The moon, too, in its steady waxing and waning, offers a gentle, celestial reflection of this truth: fullness and absence, presence and loss, held in a single, continuous rhythm.

And in the new moon, visible only as the faintest sliver of light, we are offered a quiet and enduring promise—that even in moments of fragility and grief, the possibility of renewal is already beginning to take shape.

As the week draws to a close and the restorative stillness of Shabbat approaches, I find myself holding these teachings close. I am grateful for the gift of life—for my own, for the lives of those I love and who love me, and for the larger unfolding Life story of which we are all a part.

May I learn, and may we all learn, to live our days with compassion and kindness, with humility and grace.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo by Ronen Avisror