Parashat Hukat: On Seeing the Well

“We don’t have water. We don’t have food. We don’t have. We want. We need. Give us.” Complaints. Whining. A feeling of insufficiency, of worry about the present and about the future, of not being sure where the next drink or meal will come from. This is the mood of the Israelites during their desert stay. They remind me of very young children, infants or toddlers, who, when hungry or thirsty, cry because they have not yet learned that their needs will be taken care of, are not yet secure in their sense that the world provides.

The response to such complaints is two-fold. First, the absent necessities must be provided. Second, there needs to be some response to the sense of insecurity, the outlook of absence. There is a difference between someone who, though hungry after a long day’s travel, looks forward to the meal that awaits him at home, and someone who, equally hungry but also destitute and penniless, is not sure there will be any food at home for him to eat. The two may be equally hungry but their perspectives on their future create entirely different sets of emotions regarding their present predicament.

Moshe’s failed task in this parsha was to turn the Israelites’ hunger from the one type to the other, to provide them not just with water, but also with a sense of security about their future water provisions. The Sefat Emet points out that God wanted Moshe to speak to the rock le’eyneyhem, “before their eyes,” to open their eyes, he suggests, to the abundant water that already exists for them in this world, hidden beneath the exterior of a seemingly dry rock. Hagar, too, was blind to the existence of such water, and sat crying in the desert until God “opened her eyes” and allowed her “to see” the well that apparently had already existed. This teaches us, says the Sefat Emet, that we are all like blind people until God opens our eyes for us. Moshe’s mistake was in not opening the people’s eyes to the infinite bounty that God has provided in the world, in not providing them with a perspective of fullness and calm. Yes, he gave them water, but it was a one-time miraculous extraction of water dependent on his own hitting of the rock. God wanted him to show the people that the water is always there for them.

In God’s explanation of Moshe’s wrong-doing he uses the word he’emantem, from emunah, or belief. “You did not believe” or, better “you did not make others believe” in Me. The people needed a sense of emunah, of trust and faith in the future, a sense of security that Moshe was not able to teach them. We often think of emunah as something that only the very pious possess, but the truth is no one can live without some amount of it. Without it, we would be a constant bundle of nerves, worrying that tomorrow there would no longer be air to breathe, that the earth would stop giving forth produce and the water sources dry up. We have to live with some amount of faith that our needs will be provided. It gives us a sense of calm, a feeling of fullness even in the face of occasional insufficiencies.

The Israelites are in a state of major transition in this parsha. Two of their three leaders die in the parsha, and the third’s term-end is foretold. After 38 years of wondering in the desert, they are also now for the first time beginning to fight the various peoples who surround the land of Israel, the Edomites, the Canaanites, and the Emorites. They are leaving the sheltered world of desert miracles and approaching a land-based reality. One-time miracles like Moshe’s hitting of the rock to provide water are no longer what the people need. Such miracles simply increase a sense of dependency and anxiety about the future. The people need to learn to see and rely not on miracles that defy nature, but on the natural miracles of the everyday, the rain and the sun, the rivers and the plants.

This transition is epitomized by the two songs that mark the beginning and end of the people’s time in the desert. The first is quite famous – the song that Moshe and the people sing at the parting of the Red Sea. The other appears in this week’s parsha and begins with the same phrase, az yashir. Here, however, the song is sung not in praise of an awesome one-time water miracle, but in praise of the daily provision of water by a simple well. “Then Israel sang this song: Spring up, O well – sing to it – the well which the chieftains dug” (21:17). At this stage what the people need – both physically and emotionally -- is a well, a continual source of water, a sense of security and sufficiency, of deep flowing reserves that will not dry up. From here on they will indeed no longer voice complaints, no longer exist in this insecure state, but instead begin to see clearly what Hagar saw – that there are wells even in the desert, that we need not fret over our future, because God has provided a world rich with all that we need. Such a perspective is not a fact, but a kind of faith, a way of looking at the world with confidence, security and a sense of wholeness.