A Date in the Wilderness
The wilderness is both biblical memory and contemporary parody. Israel’s desert becomes the archetypal place where possessions, distractions, and false securities are stripped away so that the relationship with God may begin again. Yet modern humanity attempts to carry civilization into the desert (television, radio, news, commerce, connectivity) until silence gradually dismantles those defenses. The poem eventually evokes the wilderness as a place of betrothal (Hosea 2), where the self is simultaneously lost and recovered. In the audiovisual imagination, that divine-human courtship becomes playfully embodied in the encounter of a yeshiva student and a young Palestinian woman: ancient sacred geography becomes the improbable meeting place of two contemporary human beings whom history might otherwise keep apart.