In the sands of the Talmud, where dream and revelation walk hand in hand, where truth wears the veil of symbol, there is a vision—a fragment of aggadic fire—preserved in the name of Rabbah bar bar Ḥana, a sage whose teachings are not halachic directives, but visions drawn from the wellsprings of the soul. He speaks of deserts, of ghosts, of silent giants, of boundaries blurred between the living and the dead.

Here is his story:

רָאִיתִי הַהוּא דְּהֲוָה גַּחֵין וְקָא דָרֵי כַּרְעֵיהּ וְרָכִיב גַּבֵּי גְּמַלָּא…
“I saw one (a corpse) who was lying on his back with his knee bent upward… and he was riding upon a camel, holding a reed in his hand and gazing at the sky… ‘Come,’ said the guide, ‘and I will show you one of the dead of the generation of the wilderness (dor de’ah)… were he not lying flat, his head would reach the heavens…’”
(Bava Batra 73b)

This is no ordinary corpse.

It is a glimpse into the mythic anatomy of the soul of a generation—the dor de’ah, the “Generation of Knowledge,” the children of the Exodus, the ones who stood at Sinai and trembled beneath the voice that spoke creation anew. These were not common men. Their limbs are too large, their silence too loud, their death too filled with life. One of them lies before Rabbah, knee raised, body stretched on its back—not face-down in defeat, but face-up in yearning, gazing still into heaven, as if waiting for a light that never came.

Let us walk through the wilderness of this image, guided by Rav Kook, whose own soul burned with longing to reconcile the shattered past with the redemptive future, whose vision reached into the desert to speak with the dead.

We begin not with conquest, but with collapse.

The Egel........

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