In Wilderness Central Synagogue Text Study for Parashat Bemidbar May 19, 2018 / 5 Sivan 5778

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

Only when you are "like a wilderness" are you ready to have God's presence rest upon you and merit the light of Torah. "Like a wilderness" means that you have not yet been touched by human hands, that you have never been cultivated or planted, that you must rely on your own strength, as in the teaching, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" (Mishnah Avot 1:14)

(quoted in Itturei Torah [Hebrew], vol. 5, by Aharon Yaakov Greenberg [Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1996], p. 9). Source: Jeffrey W. Goldwasser, "Becoming a Wilderness"

Rabbi D. Shoham, in Itturei Torah

Another reason that the Torah portion of Bamidbar is always read right before Shavuot, the time of the giving of Torah: to teach you that if you want to merit receiving Torah, you must make yourself like the wilderness, to have a great measure of humility and to feel no reason for pride, to know that you are bare and lacking all, like the wilderness.

Source: https://www.jewishrecon.org/sites/default/files/resources/document/bamidbar-wilderness.pdf

Eitan Fishbane, "Becoming Like the Wilderness"

R. Bahya asks, restating an earlier midrashic teaching (Tanhuma, 6;

Bemidbar Rabbah, 1:7): why does the Torah emphasize God’s speech to
Moshe in the wilderness of Sinai ( בְּמִדְבַּר סִינַי )? It was to teach that “a person
does not attain the Torah until they have made themselves empty and
abandoned like the wilderness” ( אין אדם קונה התורה עד שיעשה עצמו הפקר
כמדבר ) [commentary to Num. 1:1]. To receive the revelation of Torah—or
perhaps a bit less grandly, to let Torah take root in one’s heart—a person
must first make themselves into a midbar, an inner empty wilderness that is
cleared of all the weeds and brush that obstruct true perception and feeling. A
wilderness that returns to the first purity of nature.

Just as divine revelation and the Torah arise from the physical space of
wilderness, of midbar—at the burning bush and then at Mount Sinai—a heart
infused with divine Torah arises through a person’s mindful cultivation of
their own interior wilderness. One should seek to attain the level of hefker—of
feeling unbound by the pride and egoism of ownership, of being unattached
to materialism. In hefker consciousness, we train our spiritual sight to see the
Divine Presence that dwells beneath the surface, beneath the many golden
calves of our obsessions, possessions, and wayward priorities. This is a radical
reinvention of the concept of hefker, a neutral halakhic category of
abandonment and ownerlessness (e.g. BT Eruvin, 45b).

In this transformed reading, the midbar may be said to embody a pure state
of emptiness—an inner cleansing that allows us to go deeper into the spiritual
path. Becoming hefker kemidbar is a process of letting go of our
imprisonment in materiality, in ephemeral and finite desires—to be liberated
into the vastness of an inner wilderness.

...

As the early Hasidic rebbe R. Menahem Mendel
of Vitebsk (Pri Ha’aretz, Letter 27) taught, true wisdom and humanity rises
from the cultivation of deep humility:

The Torah only stands firm in one who makes himself like a midbar
hefker before those who are poor of mind and rich of mind, and he
doesn’t think of himself as better than his friend. On the contrary, he
should be completely nullified before his friend, and it is through this that
they become united and bound up one with the other.

True spiritual refinement, the deepest attainment of hefker kemidbar, must
not remain at the level of individualistic mystical growth and the personal
quest for divine revelation. To realize the ideals of piety, to ensconce the
living Torah in the wholeness of oneself, a person must aspire toward a
genuine humility, to avoid the harmful path of judgmentalism and arrogance.
It is in the bond of loving friendship and fellowship, in kindness and humility
toward the other, that the Torah—and God—are most radiantly revealed.