Just as it took my ancestors forty years in the desert to evolve from slaves into free people, that’s how long it took me to experience the desert’s magic.
When we first met, I only saw its dry, colorless landscape and felt oppressed by its heat. At my second visit in the New Mexican desert, I battled dehydration and inflammation. Years later in the California desert, I was drawn to the snowcapped mountains beyond the palm trees, but was unmoved by the plant life and terrain.
Until Arizona’s Sonoran Desert.
There, the ground expanded, the sky parted and the lines of communication opened. The desert beckoned as if it had something important to convey, sending the saguaros as knotty messengers. Their 40-foot height and prickly skin signaled stay away but their thorny arms seemed to wave me in closer. I saw patterns appearing as skulls, suggesting death, always a possibility in the desert. But at twilight, against the periwinkle, orange and yellow sunsets, they stood very much alive, majestic and inky black against the abstracted sky.
Here I am, hineni, I said, out loud, to no one as I took some photographs. I am a Jew in the desert. Being there demanded my attention, my energy, my resources. There was no place to hide. It occurred to me that my ancestors had not just survived for decades in these harsh conditions, they transformed into better version of themselves in a place like this. They thrived. Like saguaros with their tough exteriors on which flowers still bloom  – and their soft interiors designed to hold necessary water – the saguaros illustrated what flourishing in an unforgiving environment could look like.
This Passover, we find ourselves, once again, in harsh times. The saguaros will be on my mind as images of tolerance, thickened skin, adjusted temperature, managed resources and finding the beauty in the midst of it all.
It isn’t an accident that the word we use to describe a Jew born in Israel – sabra – derives from the Hebrew word for a cactus, the prickly pear cactus. Like their bristly casing and spongy insides, a sabra is often characterized as outwardly tough but inwardly gentle. Qualities needed to move through harsh times.
The desert took it’s time with me, as it did with my ancestors; the saguaros waiting patiently for the right moment to pierce me with their truth.
Photographs by Ellen Blum Barish, March 2026
