Near the beginning of the Book of Jeremiah, the prophet waxes nostalgic over God’s love for Israel. “I remember the love of your youth,” he has God say. “Your love as a bride—How you followed Me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” For Jeremiah, the wilderness is a honeymoon setting, a paradise of distilled spirituality and uncomplicated love.
Compare that with Bamidbar, the fourth book of the Torah (the Hebrew name literally means “the wilderness,” but in English it is called the Book of Numbers). In Bamidbar, the desert produces dreadful hunger and thirst, cowardice, fury, collapse, rebellion, all followed by plague, bloodshed, poisonous snakes, catastrophic defeat, and hopelessness.
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