Question: What do you personally feel when you go from a noisy city into the desert?

Answer: You could find yourself in the taiga that stretches for thousands of kilometers in all directions, surrounded only by trees, or in a vast valley. But the desert is the most natural and expressive place for a person seeking an answer to the question of life’s meaning.

In the desert, the earth (“Eretz” in Hebrew), which means desire (“Ratzon“), is bare; it is not covered or masked by grass or trees. The desert is raw, open egoistic desire in its purest form, and it is clear that nothing can grow from it.

When I see such a desert, I actually draw great strength and confidence that it is precisely from this point that we can rise. It inspires the search for a solution, for a goal. Other coverings on the earth’s surface hide the truth from us, and conceal our egoistic desire beneath them, which is the same desire that prevents anything fruitful from growing. That is why the desert speaks to a person much more directly.

Question: What do you mean by egoistic desire?

Answer: It is the desire to receive everything for oneself that is incapable of connecting with others, incapable of giving life to someone or receiving life from someone. In other words, it is a completely dead desire. A person’s desire for pleasure is so self-contained that it keeps itself in a completely dried-out state. It does not allow anything living to grow within it.

This is a very important point of realization because it is precisely from this awareness that one can begin to dig inward in search of the source of their life and its reason. Why do I exist? For what purpose? Who created me? The desert usually pushes a person to such essential, existential questions by its very nature.

I really love being in the desert because everything is revealed there. I have been in different deserts in Turkmenistan, in Arizona, but the Israeli desert gives the strongest impression. It has tremendous power. It is not a large desert by size, but it is incredibly intense.
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From KabTV’s “New Life – 924,” 11/28/2017

Related Material:
The Desert, Part 4
The Desert, Part 3
The Desert, Part 2

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