VENTURING INTO THE DESERT

There’s a question that has haunted philosophers and poets – and parents of teenagers, especially Jewish parents – for millennia, and it goes something like this: how do you prepare someone for a journey when you don’t know the destination?

This morning Alex read Parshas Bamidbar. And if you listen carefully to the first words of the parsha, you hear something amazing. It doesn’t open with a commandment, or a miracle. It doesn’t even open with a destination. It opens with a location: “Bamidbar” — “in the wilderness.” In the desert. In the empty, uncharted, middle-of-nowhere desert.

The Jewish people left Egypt. They experienced the greatest exodus in human history. They witnessed amazing miracles. And where does God take them? Not straight to the Promised Land. Not to a five-star hotel with complimentary breakfast. He takes them to the desert. The midbar.

Do you know what a desert is? It’s not just hot and sandy — though it is certainly that. A desert is the complete absence of infrastructure.

There’s no roads. There’s no signs. There’s no Apple store. You can’t Google “how to survive in the wilderness” because there’s no WiFi and you’re busy actually trying to survive in the wilderness.

The desert is pure uncertainty. It is the ultimate leap into the unknown.

And here’s the remarkable thing: that’s exactly where God wanted them to be.

The desert wasn’t a detour, and it wasn’t a punishment. The desert is the curriculum. It’s where a nation of slaves learns to become a nation of free people. In Egypt, everything was decided for them — when to wake up, when to work, when to eat, when to breathe.

The midbar is the opposite. In the midbar, they have to figure it out. They have to build from nothing. They have to learn resilience, and adaptability, and faith — faith in God, yes, but also faith in themselves.

The midbar is where you discover who you are when nobody is telling you who to be. And that, I want to suggest, is also the great transition of becoming bar mitzvah.

Childhood is like Egypt. Not in a bad way — but in a structural way. When you’re a child, the world is made for you. Your parents build the schedule. Your teachers set the curriculum. Your older brother shows you which cereal to eat.

Everything is provided, everything is structured, everything has rails. And those rails are beautiful, and necessary, and protective.

But growing up means gradually leaving that Egypt and entering your own midbar. It means making decisions yourself. Discovering who you are. Finding your own confidence. Taking ownership of your own life and your own choices. It means stepping into territory where the path isn’t clearly marked — and then you walk forward anyway.

Now here’s the extraordinary thing about Alex Fenner. And I say this having done my research – which is to say: I spoke to his father, Adam, which is basically the Jewish version of peer-reviewed academic scholarship.

Alex is not someone who shrinks from the unknown. Alex seems, in the best possible way, to be unusually comfortable exploring unfamiliar territory.

Consider the evidence. When most kids his age are scrolling through TikTok or arguing about which video game is the best one, Alex decided, on his own – with no assignment, no grade, no external incentive whatsoever – to teach himself Japanese. Online classes. By himself. Because he wanted to.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find this astonishing. Japanese is not a language you pick up casually. It has three writing systems. It has levels of formality that make British etiquette look like a casual text message.

And Alex just… decided to learn it. That, it is fair to say, is a real ‘midbar move.’ Alex is someone who looks at the vast, trackless wilderness of a foreign language and says: “I’m going for it.”

Or consider this: Alex writes stories. And not the kind of stories you’d expect from a twelve-year-old.

For example, he wrote a story about an elderly man developing Alzheimer’s. A boy his age, sitting down to write about memory loss, about the slow erosion of identity, about what it means to lose yourself, and the impact it has on those around that person — and writing about it with insight and sensitivity and maturity that his father tells me is well beyond his years.

That requires something rare. It’s truly amazing. It requires the ability to step outside yourself, to enter someone else’s experience, to inhabit an emotional world that is completely unfamiliar. It is stepping into a midbar. It is walking into the desert of another person’s reality and finding your way around. It’s incredible.

And then there’s the trumpet — Alex learnt to play the trumpet. Except it’s not a trumpet, it’s a euphonium. And if you don’t know the difference, Alex will happily explain it to you – probably in Japanese.

And let me tell you one more thing about Alex, something from when he was just four years old. Little Alex sat down and wrote pages and pages of words — page after page after page. But here’s the thing: there were no spaces between the words. No gaps. Just a continuous stream of letters, like a code waiting to be cracked, like a word puzzle stretched across the page.

Now, you could look at that and say: well, he was four, he hadn’t learned about spaces yet. Fair enough. But I think there’s something deeper there. I think even at four years old, Alex had something to say, and he wasn’t going to wait for the rules of formatting to get in his way. He had content. He had something inside him that needed to come out. The spaces could come later. But the message couldn’t wait.

Alex has the midbar spirit. You don’t wait until everything is perfectly laid out, until the road signs are up, and the GPS has a signal. You start moving. You start creating. You start building. You can figure out the spaces later.

And this, of course, brings me to Adam and Debby. Because the apple, as they say, does not fall far from the tree. And in this case, the tree knows a thing or two about the midbar.

Adam is British. In London, he was a partner at Olswang — one of the top law firms. His life was set out before him, a path to success in his chosen field of law.

And then, in 2009, Adam married Debby, and left all of it. He moved to Los Angeles. Together, Debby and Adam, started from scratch. They started a construction company, building luxury homes.

Adam told me that when he left Olswang, one of the other partners asked him: “Why are you leaving? What are you going to do in LA?”

In other words, “Are you nuts, heading off into a desert?” I imagine the tone was somewhere between genuine curiosity and professional bewilderment. Why would you leave a position like that? Why would you walk away from certainty?

But Adam understood something that the Jewish people understood at the beginning of their history, and that his son Alex seems to understand as well: the most important journeys don’t come with an itinerary. Sometimes you have to leap into the unknown. And the wilderness is not something to fear — it’s something to enter, and navigate, and make your own.

Adam told me that he also read the whole parsha when he became bar mitzvah in the UK. Alex’s older brother, Aaron also did the whole parsha a couple of years ago, and he did a great job. And now Alex has done the whole parsha. That’s a family tradition of setting out into the midbar, and making sense out of the wilderness you encounter along the way.

Now, I want to say something, one more thing, directly to Alex, because the haftara that you read — Machar Chodesh — gives us one final, crucial piece of this puzzle.

The haftara of Machar Chodesh is from the first book of Samuel, and it tells one of the most powerful stories of friendship and loyalty in all of Tanach. David is in hiding. He is a fugitive. King Saul wants him dead. And Yonatan — Saul’s son, the crown prince, the heir to the throne — must make an impossible choice.

Does he stay loyal to his manic father, to the establishment, to the path that has been laid out for him since birth? Or does he stand by his friend, anointed by Samuel and his rival for the throne, the friend whose soul is bound to his own – does he stay loyal to him even though it means stepping into the unknown?

You know what Yonatan chooses? He chooses David. He chooses the leap. And think about what that leap costs him. Yonatan is giving up certainty. He is giving up the throne. He is choosing a future he cannot see over a future that is guaranteed. He is going into a midbar. And in fact, in the end, as things unfolded, it cost him his life.

Alex, there will be many times in life when you will be faced with difficult choices. Hopefully never as tough as the choice faced by Yonatan.

And often, when faced with such a choice, one naturally gravitates toward the easy option, the comfortable option. Because the other option is too tough, it’s a leap into the dark, it’s risky.

The lesson we learn from Yonatan is that we need to have the courage to make those tough choices, because the outcome is going to be for the greater good. Our job is not to stay safe, to stay static. Our job in life is to be willing to take the more challenging path, and succeed in that journey.

Alex – that’s what it means to be barmitzva. You’ve prepared well for it so far. You’ve chosen the right parsha for this exact message – or maybe it chose you.

And you have a family background that is well developed to give you the foundation to become exactly what you need to be by going into that midbar, and following the path to your promised land.

So, Alex – continue speaking and learning Japanese, continue making music on the euphonium, and continue being the brilliant son to your parents, who pursues his interests in so many unique things and distinctive hobbies.

My blessing to you, and it is from all of us in the community, not just me – may you always have the courage to enter the midbar — to explore the unknown, to chase your curiosity, to write your stories in whatever format you choose, with or without spaces. May you build beautiful things, in whatever desert you find yourself, just as your parents and grandparents built beautiful things before you.

And may this day, the day you take your place in the chain that stretches back to Mount Sinai — may this day not be not an ending, but a beginning. The beginning of your own journey through the midbar. The beginning of your own leap into the unknown.

Mazal tov, Alex, and to the whole Fenner family. And mazal tov to all of us, because we get to watch this wonderful young man step into his wilderness and make it bloom.