Agency and the Unknown

Building a Nation in the Desert

Dedication: In loving memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and our land: Ephraim ben Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi ben Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo ben Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim ben Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel ben Revital and Elad, Yakir ben Chaya and Yehoshua, Ron ben Sarah and Kenny. May their memories be blessed, and may the elevation of their souls bring merit and strength to all of Am Yisrael.

I was speaking with my brother this week, one of my favorite things to do. He asked how things were going here in Israel, and I answered the way many Israelis would: thank God, things are good. Life is moving. We make our schedules and plan, go to work... while knowing that plans here are never entirely permanent. Things can change on a dime. Over time, we have almost developed an ability to live with that reality naturally. We build structure seriously while simultaneously knowing that life itself is never predictable.

The Conversation

As I opened Parashat Bamidbar this week, I found myself wondering whether this experience is connected to the formation of the Jewish people specifically in the desert.

Parashat Bamidbar opens:

וידבר ה׳ אל משה במדבר סיני

“And God spoke to Moshe in the desert of Sinai.”

And then, after describing the counting and organization of the nation, repeats once again:

ויפקדם במדבר סיני

“And He counted them in the desert of Sinai.”

Why Build a Nation in the Desert?

The repeated emphasis is striking. Why does the Torah keep stressing that the Jewish people are being formed specifically in the desert of Sinai?

At first glance, the desert seems like the worst possible environment in which to build a nation. Nations are usually formed through permanence: settled land, stable borders, agriculture, infrastructure, and institutions. Stability creates civilization.

Yet Hashem deliberately forms the Jewish people in a reality defined by uncertainty, movement, and impermanence.

It feels to me that the Torah is teaching something foundational about how to create a nation, and perhaps a self and a family, that can endure history itself.

What Is the Desert?

Chazal already point us in this direction. Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7 teaches:

כל מי שאינו עושה עצמו כמדבר הפקר אינו יכול לקנות תורה

“Anyone who does not make himself ownerless like the wilderness cannot acquire Torah.”

The desert represents openness. Humility.

The Maharal develops this idea in Tiferet Yisrael, Chapter 1, explaining that Torah was specifically given in a place that is hefker, ownerless, because Torah itself transcends ownership and fixed power structures. A desert belongs to no empire and no ruler. It is open space. The Sfat Emet (Bamidbar תרל"ב and תרמ"א) develops this further through the Midrashic idea of making oneself “like a desert,” explaining that a person must continually remain open and capable of receiving Torah anew rather than becoming spiritually rigid.

The Ohr HaChaim on Bamidbar 1:1 similarly explains that the Jewish people merited Torah through humility and lowliness, reading the desert experience as part of the spiritual condition necessary for receiving Torah.

Humility is the willingness to step beyond the illusion of complete control. The Kli Yakar on Bamidbar 1:1 explains, based on the Midrash, that Torah can only truly endure in someone who makes themselves like the desert, open enough to receive, adapt, and grow.

This kind of humility means recognizing that human beings are not masters of reality itself. Civilizations built entirely on permanence often begin believing that their systems are indestructible, and that structure itself guarantees survival, meaning, and identity. Over time, however, that permanence can create fragility, because people slowly stop seeing themselves as active participants in shaping their world.

As comfort and predictability increase, people can slowly stop seeing themselves as active participants in shaping the world around them. Human beings shift from creators into consumers, and structure itself begins replacing mission and responsibility.

Mitzrayim and Learned Helplessness

The Torah’s description of Egypt is remarkably psychologically sophisticated. Mitzrayim is often associated with the root metzar — narrowness, constriction, compression. Egypt is the civilization of hyper-structure. Everything is centralized: power, economy, labor, identity, and hierarchy. At first glance, this creates stability. But over generations, extreme structure produces passivity.

Modern psychology calls this learned helplessness, a concept developed by Martin Seligman. Seligman demonstrated that when people repeatedly experience situations where they believe their actions do not meaningfully affect outcomes, they eventually stop trying to act, even when change later becomes possible. The helplessness becomes internalized.

This is exactly the danger of Mitzrayim. Slavery slowly erodes the inner belief that a person can shape reality at all. The individual stops becoming a creator and becomes merely a managed being inside a system.

The Desert Creates Agency

Perhaps this is why God does not immediately move the Jewish people from Egypt into another perfectly functioning civilization. Instead, He places them in the desert. The desert removes the illusion that the structure itself will save you. Suddenly, the people must become active participants in their own becoming. They must build camps, organize tribes, carry the Mishkan, travel, adapt, and create meaningful structure within uncertainty itself.

The uncertainty is not something to survive; uncertainty itself creates the possibility for agency.

Agency is the ability to move, create, and build meaning even when conditions are unstable, especially when conditions are unstable.

But agency alone is not enough. Uncertainty without meaning does not create growth. It creates despair.

This is where Viktor Frankl becomes so relevant. Frankl observed in the concentration camps that the collapse of external structure stripped human beings down to a terrifying question: if comfort, status, possessions, certainty, and predictability disappear, what remains strong enough to keep a person psychologically alive?

He concluded that human beings can endure almost unimaginable suffering when they retain meaning, responsibility, and a sense that their life is still directed toward something larger than immediate survival. The people most likely to psychologically survive were often not those with the most physical strength or comfort, but those who still believed they had a purpose, a responsibility, a future task, or a reason to continue moving forward.

That insight remarkably illuminates Bamidbar.

The desert itself is not magically transformative. A desert without meaning becomes chaos. In fact, throughout Sefer Bamidbar, whenever the Jewish people lose orientation and purpose, the result is collapse, complaint, rebellion, and longing to return to Egypt, meitzrim.

What transforms the wilderness from chaos into covenant is that every individual is given mission, direction, and place. The Mishkan creates a center. The tribes create belonging. The tzava creates responsibility. 

The Torah is creating meaning-oriented people, people capable of creating purpose through uncertainty.

Tzava: A Nation of Purpose and Service

The Torah repeatedly describes the people as:

כל יוצא צבא בישראל

Usually translated as “all who go out to the army.” But tzava in Torah does not only mean military combat. The word also refers to organized service and purposeful function. The Leviim are also described as serving:

לצבא צבא בעבודת אהל מועד

Their service is spiritual service within the Mishkan.

Every person in the camp has a role, a mission, a direction, and a place within the larger structure. The Mishkan stands at the center of the camp physically, but service stands at the center psychologically. Without mission, uncertainty becomes chaos. With mission, uncertainty becomes a powerful journey.

The Movable Center

This may be the most mind-blowing idea of all: the Mishkan itself is portable.

God does not wait until the people arrive in the Land of Israel to create holiness. The Mishkan teaches that holiness, covenant, meaning, and identity can move with the Jewish people through every stage of uncertainty and journey.

The goal is to raise a people capable of carrying their center through uncertainty.

That creates an entirely different kind of nation.

The Land of Israel stands at the very center of the Torah’s vision. God specifically chooses this land for the Jewish people, and the mitzvah of building, settling, and sanctifying the land is of enormous significance. But perhaps the Torah is teaching that before a nation can inherit permanence, it must first learn not to become enslaved by it.

Civilizations often become corrupted by their own stability. As structures harden and comforts increase, societies can slowly lose flexibility, humility, purpose, and agency. The structure itself begins replacing the mission. People begin expecting the system to sustain them rather than seeing themselves as responsible participants in building meaningful and covenantal life.

The Jewish people, therefore, begin in the desert. Just as Avraham first encounters God through the uncertainty of Lech Lecha — leaving behind fixed identity and walking toward an unseen destination — the nation itself must first be formed in movement before inheriting settled land.

The desert becomes the place where the Jewish people internalize humility, agency, flexibility, mission, and dependence on God. Only after that process can they enter the Land of Israel without becoming another Egypt.

The goal was never rootlessness. The goal was to build a nation capable of permanence without spiritual stagnation, structure without passivity, and settlement without losing the ability to keep moving toward God.

The Land of Israel and the Danger of Permanence

Most civilizations depend heavily on permanence: land, empire, political continuity, and centralized structures. When those collapse, the civilization collapses with them.

But the Jewish people were formed differently. They were formed in movement.

The nation learned from its inception how to carry Torah, purpose, mission, identity, and structure through constantly changing conditions. Perhaps that is why Jewish history unfolds the way it does. The Jewish people survive exiles, destruction, wandering, and upheaval because they were never built solely upon permanence to begin with, they were built around a movable center.

From the very beginning, Jewish existence is woven together with movement, trust, and the ability to continue journeying even before the full picture becomes clear.

The Nation Formed in Motion

Maybe this is why the Torah insists on repeating:

במדבר סיני

The desert becomes the environment that creates a people capable of surviving and thriving throughout history without losing themselves.

A nation built entirely on permanence eventually collapses when permanence collapses. But a nation formed in the desert learns how to build structure without worshipping stability, how to carry meaning without needing permanence, how to remain flexible without losing identity, and how to continue journeying even when the destination is not yet fully visible.

The Jewish people are formed while learning how to move through the unknown with purpose, humility, agency, and the brit at the center.

Perhaps this also contains a profound lesson for the way we raise ourselves and our children. Growth rarely happens inside perfectly controlled and “bubble wrapped” lives. The greatest accomplishments in our lives almost always emerge from moments when we were striving toward something meaningful and were willing to step into uncertainty in order to reach it. Human beings grow when they know they matter, when they are connected to a mission larger than themselves, and when they are trusted to move beyond comfort toward purpose.

Maybe this is why the Mishkan had to be movable. The goal was never to create people dependent on external structures to carry them. The goal was to create human beings who carry an internal Mishkan within themselves — people capable of bringing meaning, courage, direction, and covenant wherever life takes them. The deepest strength we can give our children is the confidence that they possess the inner center, resilience, and sense of mission necessary to step into the unknown and build something meaningful there.