On the Move
This chapter reads like a tourist’s brochure though hardly one likely to sell many tickets. Stop reading as soon as you have had enough. The places are not particularly significant but if you are not averse to writing in your Bible underline the words ‘set out’, ‘camped’, ‘turned back’ and ‘went’.
Franziska Bark notes that the children of Israel were always on the move but never arrived. Deuteronomy stops on the threshold. Fulfilment must wait until Joshua. The promise of Canaan may have got them going but the arrival is not the sole aim and purpose. This is not the same as saying that to travel is better than to arrive, but rather that for the Jews the life is in the wandering rather than a means to something else.
In the context of the journey of life therefore the wilderness is a place of constant change and adjustment. Volcanoes explode and pour out their lava. Mountains and seas rise and fall. Ice caps melt and then freeze up again, not necessarily in a generation but over thousands of years because wilderness is God’s time and God’s time is eternity. Wilderness life is not something we go through to get somewhere else; rather the veritable cauldron in which life is lived.
Contrast this with the frustrations we endure in all sorts of ways because we focus on the objective and the arrival and ‘we never get there’. But where are we going? Where do we expect to get? And what would we do when we arrived? Arriving at goals and achieving targets has its place, but it is not necessarily the ‘god’ that many politicians, business people and even preachers would have us believe. In may situations it might be better to change the focus and thus void the frustrations and the tensions by learning to make the most of where we are.
In some respects Jews have been better at this than Christians, perhaps because of their history, perhaps because they have had to be. Towards the end of Fiddler on the Roof, when their village (Anatevye) has been destroyed, they have lost pretty well everything they had and are about to become refugees once again, one of the characters says, ‘’Anatevye was never all that wonderful anyway’. Not exactly ‘tomorrow to fresh pastures new’ but a recognition that the now is what matters.