The Desert That Speaks - Jeremy Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

We are entering into a new book in the Torah. And it's not so much about current events. It's about ancient events. And a new book is a new level. It's a new dimension of spiritual living. Um, and at the beginning of the book of Bameidbar, the book of numbers, we actually literally count the numbers. We count the names of the individual people. You're like, what am I? Why is the story about Bamebar which is really the journey of us through the desert why does it start off with counting people and recounting their names and naming people individually and I think that there's a deep lesson there because so many of the stories throughout the book of Bameidar are about the spies and about the snakes and about um Korak and about the upheavalss and water and just all of this stuff that is happening to the nation. No, the beginning of the book is saying no, these are actually the occurrences of each individual. So there's now a national hostage rescue celebration. So that's happening to the nation, but it's actually hitting each individual of Israel on a very deep level. And when you think about um Vikra, when you that word is in he calls and really the book of Vayikra is really about the corbot. about the sacrifices and the inner dimensions of that book are really about hearing the calling of God within us like what is happening inside us our gratitude our regrets how do we navigate the internal voice that speaks to us that's probably the essence of vikra which literally means anti-alar that means in the desert and it has the same exact spelling as the word midab which means speaking so the word bame and midair it's the same word and it's like hm well vikra is really about an internal calling and is the story of our journey through the desert to the promised land that journey is speaking to us as well our encounters that we have in life that are external to us those are all about the reality speaking to us and guiding us along the way and so sometimes like well how do we navigate that? How do we navigate what reality is speaking to us? And I think that the answer is we have to train ourselves by learning the Torah. The more Torah that we learn, the more fine-tuned we are at being able to pick up on the hints that our journey will send us.