Parshah Moment
Desert Honeymoon

I was sitting at the dining room table this week when a movement outside the window caught my eye: I looked up to see a roadrunner. For those of you not in the desert, a roadrunner is a kind of bird that looks like a cross between a woodpecker and an eagle that hasn't eaten for a week. In its mouth this roadrunner was a holding a white lizard, which looked like a Mattel dinosaur that hadn't been painted yet.

I ran to grab my new camera, a birthday present, a digital AK-47PX or something like that. My kids have been too busy to show me how it works and I've been too slow to learn.

I snapped away as the roadrunner repeatedly flung the lizard to the ground until the lizard's neck became covered with blood. The pictures, of course didn't come out, so no, I won't be featured in next month's National Geographic.

To the right of our place forty homes are going up; to the left, hundreds. The desert vistas are giving way to tract homes. Those who haven't been to the desert are surprised when they get here; apparently they expected to see silent sand dunes baking in the sun all the way to the horizon. Those who live here think of it as hotter than Los Angeles, with better air than the Valley and less traffic than Orange County. But with the homes, golf courses, pools and malls the desert part of it is easily forgotten. Or ignored.

The desert is desolate, bare; where survival is chancy and death stares you in the face. Where without irrigation and air-conditioning you would never go, never mind go for a honeymoon. But this is where the good L-rd took us as soon as we left Egypt.

There was no food, no water, and enough sun and scorpions to kill many times over. And we went. Blindly. "Blindly" is thought of very negatively; let us call it "trustingly."

He led and we followed and years later, when the marriage went sour, He remembered our blind love and He turned a blind eye. And then we got sour with Him and we too turned a blind eye, and we settled into being an old married couple. But before we had a chance to get too grumpy, along came a Rebbe who brought a zest and a zing and everything back to the marriage so that we're back on a honeymoon.

And for a honeymoon there is no place better than the desert. Not because of the golf courses. The desert has its own beauty. The vastness, the emptiness, the stark majesty call to the fore something big, majestic and unchanging. Trees and grass for all their beauty and usefulness block that. Houses and fences, for all that we need them, call to mind our accomplishment. And in the face of accomplishment, the stark majesty is lost.

We go back to the desert, that state of blind love and that state of vast majesty. Our love, His majesty. His love, that majesty that pulsates somewhere inside of us. Underneath all the accomplishments.

It is the week we begin Numbers, the fourth book of the Torah five, which calls attention to "in the wilderness." It calls attention to this state in the week of Shavuot, the holiday which commemorates when the Torah was given in the desert. At Sinai. And as our 3318th anniversary draws close, we hold His hand and are grateful that our marriage feels young.