This reflection is, it seems to me, well suited for the period of reflection during the Sefirat ha-Omer, as we are now in the Midbar, and well on our way to who-knows-what (a theophany!) and it was in the Midbar that Mosheh had insistingly requested of Pharaoh that we depart to experience, through freedom, a divine Nature otherwise hidden behind the constraints, conventions, and familiar expectations of servitude. Are we free yet? How will we know? And what constraints must we accede to willingly to best appreciate this freedom, together, and safely so.

Note: I have added emphasis to Emma Goldman’s references to “the cause” after the convention of Isaac Gantwerk Mayer to substitute “the cause” as a circumlocution for the tetragrammaton,^[1] The note on the idiosyncratic circumlocution reads as follows: “The CAUSE” is used to translate the Divine Name YHVH, based on the philosophical idea of God as the Prime Mover and on the interpretation of the Name as a causative form of the copula – “causes to be.”  and after the Open Siddur Project’s style guide suggestion to style divine names and epithets in unicase. This is not to misrepresent Goldman’s dedication to anarchism as something else. Rather, I do this suggestively to highlight what seems to me to be two inescapable truths: 1) that the experience of divinity (or its proxy: divine authority) will reassert itself under a new name and guise, in any place people imagine that the delusion of divinity has been undone or abandoned, and 2) that experiencing “beautiful, radiant things” is a consequence of embracing the freedom of our lives with kind consideration of each other’s mutual needs in “the midbar” — the wilderness, in the myriad ways we encounter its mysteries.