(reposted from Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin's blog dated Oct. 4, 2012: http://blog.bjen.org/)
If ever there were an opposite of Eden it would be the Wilderness - the desert of Sinai.
Eden is a world of lush greenery, radical abundance, food for the picking, a thousand-fold return for a modicum of work, good weather, beauty all around, unity of body and spirit in a bounded place.
Wilderness is barren landscape, scratchings of life, threat of hunger and thirst, soil that will not yield even with the greatest of toil, the fearsome vulnerability of boundlessness ...
