A Home in the Wilderness

The Desert as City of Refuge

If someone [who fatally struck another] did so but not by design—it came about by an act of God—I will assign (samti) you a place to which he can flee. (Exodus 21:13)

Whose home have I made (samti) the wilderness,
The salt land his dwelling-place? (Job 39:6)

And the Lord said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the marvels that I have put (samti) within your power. I, however, will stiffen his heart so that he will not let the people go. (Exodus 4:21)

In this week’s parasaha—Mishpatim—we learn that those who kill by accident will have a place to flee, a city of refuge. The case of the non-intentional killer is paradigmatic of Mishpatim as a whole: the laws we read just after the receiving the Torah at Sinai concerns messy reality. They concern a world in which well-meaning people can be inadvertent instruments of destruction. They concern the administering of procedural justice in a world where substantive justice is wanting. They concern the art of compromise, the art of the possible.

The law is torn between two worlds: the world of perfect justice and the world of human reality and human experience. The city of refuge marks a kind of bridge between these worlds. Without God in the picture there would be no city of refuge, no distinction between intent and consequence; we would judge people only on results. But the city of refuge is also a profoundly worldly institution with its own intrinsic rationale: it offers a recognition that some events in life are tragic but cannot be blamed on anyone in particular. The city of refuge is a step away from our tendency to scapegoat others for our own suffering. As the pop song goes “Don’t blame it on me. Blame it on the night.”

The Torah’s language suggests that God intervenes to create the city of refuge. God transforms normal coordinates into a place of exceptional status. God’s appointment of the city of refuge corresponds to an implication in the law, namely, that God is the sole giver and taker of life. Practically, we must act as if we ourselves are responsible for life and death; we must insist on free will and moral responsibility. At the same time, we have to make space to acknowledge that the source of life is mysterious and God’s own calculus is beyond us. Just as God places the city of refuge in the world, God decides who shall live and who shall die.

In accounting there is a principle that the books must be balanced, revenue must equal expenses. So if the city of refuge sits on one side of the books what sits on the other? I would argue it’s God’s own culpability. God absorbs the hit so that the accidental killer can go free.

Here I come to a strange proposition: the wandering of the people throughout the desert for 40 years represents not just a psychological and spiritual challenge, and not just a presage to conquest of Canaan, but a kind of term sentence in the first city of refuge. The entire people are “accidental killers”—of the Egyptian populace.

Of course, they are not responsible for the mass loss of Egyptian life. Their intent is not to drown the Egyptian army—God accepts responsibility for that—but they nonetheless enable it. Their intent is not to kill the Egyptian first-borns, yet this is an “act of God” that accompanies and precipitates their Exodus. The same word samti, which appears in God’s invention of the city of refuge appears in the context of God’s injunction to Moses to wield his staff and perform signs and wonders (e.g., initiate the 10 plagues).

We could just chalk the loss of Egyptian life as part of just war and forget about the city of refuge, but two further details support my reading. First, Moses himself kills an Egyptian task-master and then flees to the wilderness. His manslaughter is intentional, yet regarded effectively as inadvertent—Moses is never explicitly punished for his misdeed. Moses serves time in the wilderness for his outburst of righteous rage, but he is spared the reciprocal punishment of Hamurrabi’s code. Why? Because we intutively understand that although Moses’s deed was procedurally reckless—a form of vigilante justice—the sadistic task-master had it coming to him. Moses’s own journey to the burning bush following the killing of an Egyptian serves as a microcosm of the people’s journey to Sinai following the mass death of the Egyptians. Second, a verse in Job uses the same language “samti” —I placed—as our verse in Exodus to teach that God turns the wilderness into a home. Wilderness is not just a place—a no man’s land—but a state of consciousness, a sense of restlessness and wandering.

The refugee must turn an uninhabitable place into a habitable one, not just in the sense that they are no longer in their native home, but in the metaphoric sense. The refugee must find a home even as they are on the run, even as they are alienated. Cain, who is arguably the first accidental killer in the Torah is cursed with restlessness (na v’nod; Genesis 4:12), eventually settles in the land of Nod whose name means “wandering”: “Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” (4:16) Cain takes his curse—having to wander—and makes peace with it, makes a home of it.

The purpose of law is to create order, to create a home in the chaos and wilderness of everyday life. The city of refuge combines the instability of the fugitive with the stability of a place that is sheltered from vengeance and blood feuds. It puts a stop to karma, or simply redirects the energy of the past to a more open future. Those who make the journey to the city of refuge and do their time in the wilderness free themselves to define themselves by their future rather than origins, by the life they seek rather than the life they’ve lived. In so doing they repeat the Abrahamic principle of lech l’cha: it is incumbent on every spiritual descendant of Abraham to undertake a journey from the familiar through the unfamiliar to a new, promised land.

While the law helps maintain social order—and this is the core focus of Mishpatim—it also enables a spiritual journey, one in which we move through imperfection and our reality as it is to a higher order understanding and a more enlightened character.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh