“Get the F*ck Out!”: Permission to Wander

“And God called to Abraham, ‘Get the f*ck out! Out of your land, out of your birthplace, out of your fathers house, towards the land that I will show you.’ ” (Genesis 12:1)

Sitting alone at the dining room table in my downtown Jerusalem rental in the middle of a weekday, I read this line in Hebrew, with my grueling just-started-junior-year-abroad Hebrew, with all of it. More like, I string it together, word by word, like a talisman, like a spell.

With each word, each sound, an inner shift, a feeling of opening; a deep cellular familiarity that does not offer itself up for translation into words or even thoughts. A deep settling. A settling down. A settling in. A feeling for the first time of something like…presence? Recognition? Rest?

Sitting alone in the rented apartment I shared with three friends, I press both palms into the springy spine of the new Torah splayed open before me, a Hebrew-only edition which with great effort I can just begin to parse, word by word, verse by verse. Open to the weekly Torah portion, Lekh-lekha, which begins with God's call to Abraham, seemingly out of absolutely nowhere, to leave every context he has ever known, every framework that has shaped him to this point, and set off on a journey to a location that is promised to be disclosed - but only in an undefined timeframe, at some unspecified moment, via undisclosed methods.

It takes me twenty minutes to get through this one line. I read it, the whole thing, out loud in Hebrew. Just after lunch on a weekday, alone in the apartment. I read it out loud; and then I read it again. And then I have to put my head down. I feel so heavy all of a sudden, like I just need to…stop. So I put my arms on the table and my head in my arms and I just…feel…the verse…filling me up as it weighs me down, like water, like sand…and finally, filling my eyes with tears…

That was the moment. For the next eighteen more years I ate exclusively kosher food, refrained from using traveling or using electricity on the Sabbath, prayed daily, studied sacred texts in ancient languages. For fifteen of the years that followed reading that first line of text, I found myself living in and around Jerusalem, eight of them studying in very religious all-male rabbinical seminaries, learning Hebrew and Aramaic, studying Bible and Talmud all day. Eventually adding a mystical curriculum, meditating in caves with guided meditations from the Zohar late at night, purifying myself with bracing daily dunks in freezing cold outdoor springs. 

I didn’t have a nervous breakdown: that was the moment, head down on the table, Lekh-Lekha (“Get out and go!”) on my tongue. The original shift. The before/after moment.  

No single event in my past can account for why I was so deeply stirred by Jewish religious tradition that semester in Jerusalem. Eventually I would learn an aphorism that has never been far from me since: “If you come to Jerusalem whole, she will leave you broken. If you come to her broken, she will leave you whole.” 

No single reason can explain my response to the City of Peace – literally, the City of Wholeness (“Ir Shalem”). I was broken, yes - but I wasn’t lost or desperately seeking a strong male role model or surrogate family. I wasn’t convinced of anything by way of arguments or proofs, I didn’t lose my bearings and grasp at faith/belief/religion as a lifeline. 

I was broken, but only in the same way that I had been broken since I could recall being alive.

What changed was: a new space opened up inside me. Either a new space, or a new awareness of a space that had been there all along. Either way, it was new to me. A space of possibility. Permission to depart from all the inherited frameworks I had never felt really served me - the set of pressing expectations about who and how I should be, what and why I should do and believe. 

Permission to just…be. 

“And God called to Abraham, ‘Get the f*ck out!!’ ”

In one fell swoop, the original ancestor, the Founder, the first Jew, is utterly uprooted. And this is pretty much the first thing we learn about him, his introduction as a major character: that to be close to God and fulfill his potential - to embody a new path of human aspiration and become a channel of universal blessing -  to “be” a blessing, to “all the families of the earth” - he can’t know anything from his past, or anything about his future. He must sever all preexisting social ties, erase all familial and cultural inheritances, inputs, imprints - and set off with certain purpose into the blank unknown. 

“...out of your land, out of your birthplace, out of your fathers house, towards the land that I will show you.’ ”

Become a person with no past, no future. 

Which of course, as everyone knows, is exactly what it means to be a Jew. 

Wait what?

*****

I’ve always had a wandering spirit, a roaming mind, and a persistent, perplexing inability to formulate and execute long-term plans geared toward achieving practical goals. All I have ever managed to care about enough to focus on for longer than a blip was trying to understand what it is I am, why I am here (in this body, time, place), and what the best use of my tiny window of consciousness.

When I returned from one semester in Jerusalem a fundamentalist Orthodox Jew, I was unrecognizable to all who knew me prior, unwilling to eat at restaurants, use electricity on the Sabbath, or shake a woman’s hand. Unequivocally (some might have said insufferably) confident in the precious treasures I’d found buried in my identity’s own backyard! 

When I graduated, I spent three years studying in an Orthodox yeshiva in the West Bank, then three years writing short stories towards an MFA in upstate New York, the only Orthodox Jew on the premises. 

“Career”? What even was that, other than something I knew I was supposed to care about, and felt I was falling behind in, but whose relevance and priority I seemed constitutively incapable of wrapping my heart around? 

Until recently it was axiomatic to me that my inability to plan and achieve practical goals in a linear fashion was a character flaw, a mark of shame, and the main psychic hitch accounting for the many detours and failures and regroupings that have frustrated and defined my meandering, distraction-riddled path. My biggest deficit to overcome; a sign of being lost, disoriented, and probably lazy; of not quite ever obtaining my bearings in this world. 

Interrupting this vicious cycle of shame has required a journey into what I have come to understand as the sacred Path of Wandering, which emerges from the very heart of Jewish tradition – and is confirmed by my direct lived experience – as the heart of human being. 

I came to learn that it wasn’t a recidivist proclivity to wander that was constantly knocking me off of my path – it was beating myself up because I didn’t understand that there’s something called Wandering, which is its own path. 

Discovering (and ultimately accepting and understanding) this has meant slogging through all the landfills of steaming cultural dung that have junked up my psyche over the course of my life. Why did I hate that I loved to Wander so much? It’s always felt so central to who and how I am, there was no way to hate Wandering without at least partially hating myself. 

Releasing that deeply conditioned reflex has only been enabled by an emergent understanding that Wandering in all its forms (geographical, intellectual, creative, empathic) – one of humanity’s most ancient, instinctive, liberating and defining practices – is a way of living, thinking, and being that powerful social and political interests throughout human history have found existentially threatening, and harshly suppressed. 

The more I came to understand about Wandering, the more I understood why it took me so long recognize how fundamental it is to being a fulfilled human being oscillating in relationship with self and other. 

And while I could try to define wandering (and did!), we all know deep down that language doesn’t actually run on dictionary definitions. Those get tacked on post-facto after a word has become charged with its more familiar connotative sense through diction’s actual currency, usage. This intimacy with words that emerges from centuries of steeping in rich cultural associations, the living lexicon of spoken language. 

That’s what I would like to both excavate and build from scratch for Wandering, here, in this blog…with your help! I’m going to bring all the thoughts, experiences, texts, and associations related to Wandering that have gotten me through some of the darkest periods of my life. My hope is that these  will spark, in you, further thoughts, experiences, texts, and associations that you are moved to share, and together we can piece together a useful new language of Wandering. 

*****

“And God called out to Abraham, ‘Get the f*ck out!’ ” 

Sitting with my head in my arms at the dining room table of my rented Jerusalem apartment over twenty-five years ago, what I had stumbled onto was…a provocation. To step back and assess my whole inherited value system from a sober perspective. To detox, unattach, see there’s nothing natural or necessary or inherently true about it. To think, maybe this culture you happened to be born into just isn’t a good fit…maybe you can just go try something else. Maybe you don’t even have to know where you’re going. 

“...out of your land, out of your birthplace, out of your father’s house, towards the land that I will show you...”

Here was a big wide-open door with a sign over it that said, You don’t have to objectify all relationships into a networking strategy. You don’t have to be perpetually, incessantly “impressive” or “high-achieving” or have the kind of internships or money or sex certain to set you up for more, better internships and money and sex. You don’t have to feel ashamed at this bottomless longing that’s always burned you alive. You don’t have to feel bad that you’re so sensitive to other people’s pain, how without saying anything you can feel how they’re feeling with bruising immediacy…

That you can make the perfectly legitimate choice to become one of Ginsburg’s angelheaded hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

Sitting with my head in my arms at the dining room table of my rented Jerusalem apartment that afternoon, I wasn’t thinking about any of these things, just feeling and knowing them, blank soul humming into the frequency of a background rumble thundering up from deep in the earth. Quiet storm of pure vibration, the sound before sound. It’s the first time I can remember ever having been free of thought, free of needing its ceaseless buzz of up-to-date validations, excuses, distractions, fears. I disappeared and felt more present than at any other moment in my life.

Why was this happening?

“Here begins the journey of Lekh-Lekha,” writes the great contemporary Torah teacher Aviva Zornberg. “For the first time, a journey is undertaken not as an act of exile and diminution (Adam, Cain, and the dispersed generation of Babel), but as a response to a divine imperative that articulates and emphasizes displacement as its crucial experience. For what is most striking here is the indeterminacy of the journey…” (Beginning of Desire, p. 74; emphasis in original)

Or was not knowing the point? 

Do you have a favorite story about wandering? Please share in the comments!