There is a longstanding custom that Parshas BaMidbar is read on the Shabbos immediately preceding Shavuos. Various explanations are offered for this connection, but one of the most striking is also one of the simplest: The Torah was given in a desert: not in a great city, not in a fertile or comfortable place, not in the center of civilization, but in a barren wilderness – a place empty of distraction, empty of security, empty of everything except the encounter between klal Yisrael and the Ribbono Shel Olam.
Chazal see something deeply significant in that setting. Torah can only truly be acquired, they teach, by one who is willing to make himself like a midbar – a place not crowded with competing obsessions and endless noise. The desert represents a stripping away of distractions, dependencies, and competing preoccupations, a willingness to stand exposed before something greater than oneself.
And perhaps, as we prepare for Shavuos, that raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: What do we really want?
Not what we officially believe in, or publicly identify with, or dutifully perform – but what actually occupies the center of our emotional lives? What are we moving toward instinctively, naturally, when no one is forcing us?
At the beginning of Parshas B’Chukosai, the Torah speaks about blessing flowing from a life shaped by Torah. Rashi famously explains the phrase “Im b’chukosai teileichu” as “She’tihyu ameilim baTorah” – that we should labor in Torah.
This is not limited – as it is often understood in the classic yeshivish sense – to expending great intellectual effort to understand a difficult Tosafos. Indeed, a few lines later, Rashi explains that this labor exists “al m’nas lishmor u’l’kayeim” – in order to observe and fulfill the Torah. Torah is not meant merely to pass through the intellect. It is meant to shape the heart, the instincts, and ultimately the desires of a person.
There is a profound difference between doing something because we must and doing it because we are drawn toward it.
A person can daven because the halachah obligates him to daven, all the while glancing impatiently at the clock. Another person can approach t’filah as the most precious part of the day, as a chance to step away from the noise of life and stand before Hashem. Externally, they may appear to be doing the same thing. Internally, they are inhabiting completely different worlds.
The same is true of Torah itself. One person learns because that is what religious Jews are supposed to do. Another learns because Torah has become the place his soul naturally wants to go.
The Ohr HaChaim offers a remarkable insight into the words “Im b’chukosai teileichu.” He connects them to the verse in T’hilim in which David HaMelech says, “Chishavti d’rachai v’ashivah raglai el eidosecha” – “I considered my paths, and my feet returned me to Your testimonies.” Chazal describe David as sometimes believing he was headed elsewhere entirely, only to discover that his feet had instinctively carried him to the beis midrash.
It is a beautiful image. Torah had become so deeply woven into his being that it no longer felt external to him. It was not simply an obligation imposed from outside. It had become his natural gravitational pull.
Perhaps that is what Chazal mean by ameilus baTorah. Not merely working hard at Torah, but internalizing it so deeply that in everything one does, one’s inner world begins moving him toward Torah on its own.
And that brings us directly back to Shavuos.
One of the best-known customs of Shavuos is to remain awake throughout the night learning Torah. Chazal explain that this serves as a tikun for the generation that stood at Har Sinai, who, according to the midrash, went to sleep the night before Matan Torah and had to be awakened by Moshe Rabbeinu.
At first glance, the criticism seems difficult to understand. Human beings need sleep. Why is this viewed as a failing?
But perhaps the issue was not sleep itself. The issue was anticipation.
A kallah does not sleep indifferently the night before her wedding. There is excitement, longing, emotional readiness. One senses that something life-changing is about to occur.
And so, every year, before we once again stand at Sinai, we attempt to demonstrate not merely commitment to Torah, but eagerness for Torah. We stay awake not because exhaustion is holy, but because longing is holy.
The tikun of Shavuos is not merely to remain awake learning Torah through the night. It is to become the kind of Jews who cannot easily sleep because Torah matters to us that much.
This idea appears again in a different form in the story of the M’raglim.
The Maggid Meisharim, attributed to the mal’ach who regularly revealed himself to the Beis Yosef, asks a fascinating question. If Hashem had already promised B’nei Yisrael that Eretz Yisrael was good, why send spies at all? And why did Moshe instruct them to examine whether the country was good or bad, or whether the fruit was beautiful?
Had Hashem not already promised them, back in Egypt and repeatedly thereafter, that it was a beautiful and abundant land? What difference should any of that have made?
The answer he suggested is profound. Moshe was not gathering military intelligence. He was trying to awaken longing. He was, as it were, winking at them: Go see what a wonderful land it is! See its beauty! Experience its goodness! I want you to return and speak about it in a way that will make the people yearn to enter it.
The mission of the M’raglim was not to investigate Eretz Yisrael. It was meant to cultivate love for Eretz Yisrael.
And that, perhaps, was their deepest failure.
Rav Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal Hy”d developed this idea with extraordinary emotional force in Eim HaBanim S’meichah. Writing during the horrors of the Holocaust, after rethinking many of the assumptions with which he had grown up, Rav Teichtal returned again and again to one painful realization: Jews had become too comfortable in the Galus.
For centuries we prayed for Eretz Yisrael, cried over Eretz Yisrael, spoke passionately about Eretz Yisrael – yet our desire to return was often more theoretical than real, for we had grown too comfortable where we were, to go there now.
He compared this to the generation that slept on the night before Matan Torah. If Chazal believed that a lack of visible anticipation for Torah required a tikun for all generations, how much more so must we repair the failure to cultivate genuine longing for Eretz Yisrael.
His words are especially powerful because he himself never merited reaching the Land. He wrote with urgency, heartbreak, and longing, trying desperately to awaken Jews to the gift standing before them, but he was murdered before he could arrive.
Perhaps that is part of what genuine preparation for Shavuos demands from us: not merely more learning, but deeper longing.
Parshas BaMidbar reminds us that the Torah was given in a wilderness, in a place stripped of distractions and competing loyalties. To receive Torah fully requires more than observance alone. It requires a willingness to let Torah become central – not merely something we fit into our lives, but something around which our lives begin to revolve.
The question, ultimately, is not only whether we are keeping Torah, but whether our hearts are moving toward it – whether Torah has become a place to which we naturally gravitate, whether mitzvos feel merely obligatory or deeply precious, whether the things that are holy still occupy the center of our emotional lives.
Because the strongest and most enduring forms of Jewish life are rarely sustained by obligation alone. They are sustained by learning, slowly and sincerely, to desire the right things.
Rabbi Yehuda L. Oppenheimer, former rav at several congregations in the United States, lives in Israel and is an educator, writer, and licensed tour guide. He eagerly looks forward to showing you our wonderful land on your next visit. He blogs at libibamizrach.blogspot.com and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or voice/WhatsApp at 053-624-1802.