Why 28 Years Around the World—and 40 Across a Desert?
Twenty-Eight Years to Get Home. Forty Years to Become a People.
In November 1998, a former British paratrooper named Karl Bushby set out from southern Chile on an extraordinary mission: to walk back to his home in England. Twenty-eight years later, on November 2, 2026, he finally embraced his mother outside her home in Hull. His journey covered approximately 31,000 miles across four continents and thirty countries. Dangerous crossings, financial setbacks, border restrictions, and the pandemic stretched the expedition across nearly three decades.
That is quite a long way to come home. Most of us get impatient when the GPS adds twelve minutes!
His remarkable perseverance brings to mind another long journey: the Jewish people’s forty years in the wilderness.
But the comparison raises a question. Bushby crossed continents. The Jewish people were traveling toward a land that could have been reached far sooner. Why did their journey take an entire generation?
The Torah gives the historical reason: the sin of the spies. Yet a mystical reading invites us to consider what those years accomplished within the people.
Egypt—Mitzrayim—is associated in Chassidic teaching with meitzarim, the boundaries that confine us. These include the inner limitations of fear, habit, and a diminished sense of what we can become.
Leaving Egypt could happen in a night. Learning to live as free people required a journey.
A former slave can cross a border while still carrying slavery within. The wilderness became a place to develop trust, accept responsibility, and learn that freedom carries a Divine purpose.
There is a suggestive parallel in the number forty. Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai receiving Torah; a mikvah requires forty se’ah of water. Both evoke transformation. We might picture the forty wilderness years as a national immersion: a people gradually emerging with a new identity and calling.
And their destination mattered. They were meant to enter the Land of Israel, cultivate fields, build homes, conduct business honestly, and care for those in need. The spiritual lessons of the wilderness had to become the daily life of a society.
In Chassidic language, their task was to make this physical world a dwelling place for G‑d.
Bushby’s story gives us a striking image of the determination needed to reach home. The Torah’s journey invites us to ask what kind of home we are building—and who we are becoming along the way.
Our own miles may run between home and work, the hospital and the synagogue, familiar responsibilities and unexpected difficulties. Every stretch offers an opportunity to become more patient, more faithful, more generous.
The deepest journey brings us closer to the person G‑d calls us to become.
