You Can Be Anything? The Truth Bamidbar Tells Better

(Printable PDF below)

Scroll through any podcast app and a single cultural promise dominates. Mel Robbins, host of the world’s most-listened-to self-improvement podcast, frames her show in a single line: “You can change your life and Mel Robbins will show you how.” Jay Shetty’s On Purpose, the world’s most-listened-to mental health podcast, invites you to “live life today on purpose” — to uncover the best version of yourself. The content may vary but the message does not: The self is infinitely revisable. Its highest value is its fullest self-expression. The deepest liberation is the freedom to be the author of every dimension of our lives.

Full disclosure: I listen to many of these podcasts and find genuine value in them. But I also question the subtext — rarely noticed for what it is, and even more rarely traced to its origins. Because this position has a biblical origin.

The Bible is famous for the revolution of polytheism to monotheism. But there is a second revolution running beneath the first, quieter and arguably more radical. It is anthropological. The ancient world said your identity was fixed by birth — you were what your father was, where your tribe placed you, what the gods had decreed. The Bible protests this outlook. Avraham is told “leave your land, your birthplace, your father’s house” (Bereishit 12:1). Moshe walks out of Pharaoh’s palace. The slaves walk out of Egypt. To be created b’tzelem Elokim — in the image of God — is to be like God in one specific way: to be a creature of becoming. To be subjects, authors of our own destiny rather than objects of our fate.

The current culture of radical self-expression is not new. It has biblical roots — only today’s version has been cut from its anchors and lost its context. To recover its authentic wisdom, we must return to those roots. The Bible does not say we can become anything. It says we are summoned. Summoned to become — and most importantly, summoned to belong. We are born into a story we did not author but called to become a subject, an author within it. We are born into covenant, into responsibilities we did not choose, into a family and a people whose history places real claims on us. And at the same time within that framework we are granted the freedom to become. It is through this bounded becoming, the Torah suggests, that we find who we are and our identity is formed.

Sefer Bamidbar is the workshop of this idea. And the workshop has a location: the wilderness.

Why the wilderness? Because it is, at once, both a tabula rasa — an empty canvas on which we can become who we need to be, as individuals and as a nation — and the place that lets us consider the contours of our identity and our priorities. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places self-actualisation — the ability to find purpose and self-expression — at the peak of the pyramid, possible only when the basic needs beneath it are met. The wilderness is the place where God provides both: the empty canvas and the basic needs Maslow names. It is the perfect liminal space to become and to belong. Maslow named the structure; the Torah names what the peak is for.

The first to experience this is Moshe. He is the Torah’s first wilderness moment of identity formation. He is raised at the apex of the ancient world — Pharaoh’s palace, the political and architectural peak of human civilisation. He has every identity money and power can confer. And he walks out. vayifen ko vacho vayar ki ein ish — he turns this way and that, and sees no man (Shemot 2:12). The verse is usually read as practical: he is checking for witnesses before he strikes the Egyptian. But I believe there is a deeper psychological reading. Moshe looks toward the Egyptians and toward the Israelites and sees ein ish – there is no man – no version of himself in either. Not the prince. Not the slave. The wilderness is where he asks the question the structures of fixed identity in the ancient world will not let him ask: who am I? He does not find the answer in Pharaoh’s court or in the slave quarters. He retreats into the wilderness — and there he discovers both his identity and his calling, and with them the Biblical revolution: humans are, like God, creatures of becoming.

At the Bush, God summons him: Go to Pharaoh. I cannot speak, Moshe protests — kvad peh u’khvad lashon — I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue (Shemot 4:10). God answers: I will be with your mouth. You will speak. You will become other than the person you are. The man who begins as someone who cannot speak ends his life giving the longest sustained speech in the Torah — the entire book of Devarim, Words. From silence to speech. From flight to leadership. From displacement to mission. He becomes the one they needed him to be, the one God called him to be, within the covenantal frame he did not author. Moshe is the Bible’s anthropological revolution in a single life. He is bounded becoming.

What Moshe undergoes individually, his people undergo collectively. They leave the apex of civilisation but are not yet ready to enter the land . They must go through the liminal space of the wilderness. The Mekhilta is sharp about why: if I bring them in immediately, each will seize his field and each his vineyard and they will neglect Torah. Rather, I will keep them in the desert forty years, eating manna and drinking from the well, and the Torah will be absorbed in their bodies (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael on Shemot 13:17). Yuval Levin reads this exactly: “untutored and unformed, confronted too quickly with the costs and burdens of liberty, they might choose slavery” (Levin, Taking the Long Way, First Things, 2014). Individuals become slaves to the self rather than servants of purpose. The wilderness is the long way. And the long way is the only way our identity can take its true contours.

The wilderness does its work through paradox. It is the most boundary-less of spaces — no walls, no borders, no fences. And yet it is in this expanse that the Torah teaches us to build boundaries. The camp is structured around the Mishkan. The tribes are arranged in formation around it. The people are counted by family and by name. The book that opens with a census is also called Bamidbar — in the wilderness — and both titles are true. Order. Wilderness. Numbers. Anarchy. Erica Brown puts it precisely: “the space that isn’t defines the space that is” (Brown, Leadership in the Wilderness, Maggid 2013). Negative space is not the absence of form. It is what makes form possible.

The Sages glimpsed something similar. “Anyone who does not make themselves ownerless like the wilderness cannot acquire wisdom and Torah” (Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7). The wilderness is the condition for receiving — and what is received is Torah, the very structure of bounded life. Only when you are like a wilderness, untouched and uncultivated, are you ready for God’s presence and the light of Torah. The wilderness empties so that the covenant can fill.

What it means to be a human in covenant is not the limitless self-expression of contemporary culture, but the bounded becoming of a creature who knows what she was given and what she was called to do with it.

Wilderness, finally, is a passageway. We are not meant to live there forever. Sefer Bamidbar ends with the people on the banks of the Jordan — about to take their given responsibilities seriously, to live inside the boundaries the desert taught them to draw, to be the people they were formed to become.

At every stage of our personal and national lives we oscillate between the order of the known and the chaos of the unknown, between the geography that is familiar and the wilderness of what is not. Since October 7th it has felt, in some ways, as though we have returned to the wilderness. We are in unknown territory — historically, politically, psychologically, religiously. Certainties have ruptured. The temptation is to rush — back to what was before, like the generation of the desert who longed to return to Egypt, or forward into the unknown too quickly, like those who pressed on after the episode of the spies. The Torah teaches a third way. The long way. The wilderness does its work, and then we leave it — not as the people we were, and not as people unmoored from all givens, but as a people formed for the land we are summoned to enter, with another layer of our identity shaped by what the wilderness has given us.

The prophet Hoshea understood this. hineh anokhi mefateha veholakhtiha hamidbar vedibarti al liba — “Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak to her heart” (Hoshea 2:16). The wilderness is not abandonment. It is the place where God speaks to us most intimately. Have faith that He is with us there.

Summoned to become. Summoned to belong.

Shabbat Shalom.

For a printable PDF:

Bamidbar Bounded Becoming 2026.pdf

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To listen to my podcast episode focusing on the Jewish self click here: Books and Beyond Podcast