The Longer the Journey, the Better the Blues

To travel from Mount Sinai to the edge of the Promised Land takes eleven days. (Deuteronomy 1)

Why did the Israelites take nearly 40 years? Because they doubted God. If they had faith, their journey from slavery to freedom, from subjugation by Pharaoh to ruling their own lives, would have been a brief trip.

Instead, it was a lengthy journey filled with struggle and loss. No one who left Egypt entered the land of Israel, save Joshua and Caleb.

It is not the direct path that writes history. It is the unplanned, and circuitous routes that provide us with the stories, and turns, and meaning that comprise our Torah.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her beautiful book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange…. The music called the blues is as good an example as any of the unlikely, the evolution of African music in the southeastern American landscape, inflected by slavery and exposure to the English language, European instruments and perhaps Scottish, and English ballads—the passionate melancholy of murder ballads and songs about abandoned maidens and bloody revenges.

Had the journey only taken eleven days, had the Israelites not spent so much time losing faith and getting lost, there would be no Torah.

Willie Dixon adds, and as Howlin’ Wolf made famous:

It could be a spoonful of diamond
It could be a spoonful of gold
Just a little spoon of your precious love
Satisfy my soul

From every struggle comes some great Torah—and some wonderful music.