Parashat Chukat 5784
It may not surprise some of you to learn that I went to a very hippie college for undergrad. I got my (real, I promise) bachelor's degree in religious studies from Naropa University, a small Buddhist liberal arts school in Boulder, Colorado. Founded by a Tibetan Monk and featuring founders and teachers such as Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Allen Ginsburg and Anne Waldman, it’s not surprising that some of my classes included Meditation (which was a requirement), herbal medicine and, my personal favorite, Ikebana.
Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arranging, and is a spiritual practice in itself. Each arrangement is supposed to embody the relationship between heaven, humans and earth. In our class, we learned how to create a mindful and striking flower arrangement from start to finish. The start was going out and gathering materials, but not just picking flowers without abandon. When you see something that is beautiful to you, whether it be a branch, a reed or a flower, you start by asking. Asking for permission, or at least pausing for a moment of gratitude and reverence, for this living thing which you are about to take in order to enhance beauty in your life and in the world.
This may seem strange, or at the very least “not very Jewish,” to have a two-way relationship with these plants, to acknowledge their sentience and ability to communicate with us. However, our tradition and our parsha are full of this type of sentience.
This week, the Israelite people are without water in the wilderness. G!d commands Moshe and Aaron to speak to the rock in order that it may flow with water. Moshe, frustrated and tired, exclaims
שִׁמְעוּ־נָא֙ הַמֹּרִ֔ים הֲמִן־הַסֶּ֣לַע הַזֶּ֔ה נוֹצִ֥יא לָכֶ֖ם מָֽיִם׃
Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?
And, in his frustration, Moshe strikes the rock twice with the staff.
We also, in our parsha, have the Israelites singing the song of the well, which begins with,
אָ֚ז יָשִׁ֣יר יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶת־הַשִּׁירָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את עֲלִ֥י בְאֵ֖ר עֱנוּ־לָֽהּ׃
Then Israel sang this song:
Spring up, O well—sing to it—
Hinted at in the song of the well is the well that appeared to Hagar when she fled from Sarai, which she named Be’er l’chai roi, “the living well, the one who sees me”.
In my weekly study with a congregant, we have been learning the famous story of the Oven of Achnai, in which Rebbe Eliezer brings proofs for his case from carob trees, streams, walls and even a voice from heaven. One could deduce from this story that his relationship with the natural world is two-directional, that there was sentience there.
And yet, if I said to you today that I have a two-directional relationship with this well, with this rock, with this carob tree–you may look at me as if I was crazy, or at the very least not so Jewish. But, what do we lose when we view only human beings, or at best breathing beings, as alive?
When Moshe hit the rock in his anger and upset, his lost connection to the natural world. Nevertheless, copious water emerged, but G!d was not pleased, saying: “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.”
The punishment for this act of anger–after years of listening to these people complain mercilessly, after years of leading these people on his own without much support–is painfully severe. But/and, perhaps as a leader, he was supposed to be modeling a type of reverence and two-way relationship with the land that the Israelites didn’t know of in their scarcity slave mentality.
How can we learn from this devastating story, and be trusting of Hashem and each other even in our most worn down and exhausted moments? How can we remember, even in Brooklyn, to treat every living thing as the image of God and not only as a tool for meeting our own needs?
I feel like Moshe could have paused and taken wisdom from Buber, when he writes, “I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself. I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life… In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.
It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness…Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.
Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.”
May we be blessed to build a two-way relationship with the natural world, coming closer to ourselves and the divine as a result.
