Wells in the Wilderness
Rabbi Deborah Wechsler
When you drive south from Jerusalem you go through the Judean desert. A Biblical wilderness that calls to mind David’s flight from King Saul, mass suicide on Masada and years of aimless wandering. When you cross through midbar yehudah you come to what would seem to be respite, a large body of water in the distance, cerulean blue, a break from the desert all around. Instead, that water turns out to be a wilderness of a different kind, the Dead Sea, salty and sterile.
But if you travel a short distance to the west, even after hours of unrelenting wilderness you might just happen to come upon Ein Gedi. A lush, fecund well of water in the distance. Water that is sufficient to banish the wilderness around it and bring the desert to life.
In the most heartrending of stories, this morning’s Rosh Hashanah Torah reading takes Hagar and Ishmael, and casts them out of the sanctuary of the tent of Abraham and Sarah. A place of prosperity, a place of beauty and security and promise. A place that feels familiar and like home. Yet in an instant Hagar and Ishmael find that it is also a place which has vanished for them. The reality, or mirage as it may have been, drastically changes and the home of wealth and comfort has become endless wandering through an unfamiliar wilderness.
Sustained for a short time by the resources they had brought with them from that previous reality, Hagar and Ishmael are soon left wandering and bereft. They have eaten all their food, drunk all their water, and Hagar’s audacity to hope that a great nation might come from her is as desiccated as the landscape around her. So she leaves her son under a bush that he might find some comfort in the little bit of shade in the wilderness and she walks away. Unwilling, unable to see the death of her child, the loss of her hope and the end of her dreams for a different future for her and for him -- she bursts into tears.
In Hagar’s landscape it is the cries of her son, parched and starving that God hears and that move God to action. At God’s command Hagar picks up her son, takes him by the hand and in that one small gesture of hope, her eyes are opened and she sees a well of water in the distance.
The landscape of today is wilderness. The wilderness is a place where you see no future. It is parched and dry. It is blisteringly hot during the day and freezing cold at night. Sand is everywhere. You feel lonely there and afraid. You see nothing on the horizon and there is no end in sight.
Our wilderness reaches far and wide. All around us, in our homes, in our communities, our schools, our country and our global world there is this feeling of being mired in something barren. The old tent of home, which held promise and security, beauty and prosperity, whether it was real or not, has given way, many would say to a place without hope; where people are so overwhelmed at the thought that their future might be different than they imagined it would be, that they put aside what it most precious to them and weep from afar.
For some the wilderness is being faced with chronic pain, for others it is being a caregiver for an ailing loved one. For some the wilderness is being without a job, for others it is living out your years with a lowered standard of living. For some the wilderness is being in relationship with difficult family members, for others it is living with grief that does not abate. For some the wilderness is living with addiction, for others it is seeing no future for children and grandchildren.
There is a great melancholy that has come to pervade our nation and in doing so has filtered down to every community and every person. This sense of wilderness that has become the common outlook among young and old alike.
As we confront the loss of an imagined future, who among us does not want to see a well in the distance right now? How do we realize an ideal that we are not currently able to see?
Last month I asked you to consider three questions in preparation for the New Year. The first was to ask what significant things you were going to bring with you to the New Year. Hagar brought from her old home that which was most important to her – her knowledge that she would be the mother of a great nation, her strength based on God’s hand in her life, and her commitment to a better future for herself and her son. Those crucial tools allowed her to imagine a future beyond what she could presently see.
What tools do you already have within you that might help you make your way through your wilderness?
The magic in Hagar’s story was not that a well instantly appeared in the moment that she so desperately thirsted for water. The magic was in her ability to see that which wasn’t apparent to her eyes. The solutions are already present it is a matter of knowing what to do with them.
These two weeks of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about looking inward. Pausing from the whirlwind around us, stepping out of it and looking down at ourselves. We see the harsh truth of our lives and like Hagar it is sometimes too painful to bear, so we put it aside and walk away. But when we are paralyzed by fear, or despair, or our own sense of powerlessness we close ourselves off to the unseen possibilities of life, [1] the creation of a new imagined future.
Of all the people we meet on Rosh Hashanah - Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Ishmael, Hannah and Samuel, Hagar is the least likely person to see a well in the distance. She is foreign born, a slave, a concubine, and a woman. The quintessential outsider whom our tradition generally goes out of its way to protect since people like Hagar are disenfranchised and quite literally not counted. Not in a minyan, not in a census, not counted. Yet she is presented to us as the visionary.
We have traveled through many wildernesses in our time. Midbar Par’an, midbar Sinai. They loom large in our history and our people’s story. We read last week in the synagogue lo ba shamayim hi, Torah is not in heaven. It was not given in the Garden of Eden or even the land of Israel, it is given in the middle of the desert. Our sages ask why the Torah was given in the wilderness and they answer - because the desert is hefker, ownerless. So that no one should claim that they have the exclusive right to truth or to divinity.
The same answer could be given when we ask why wells are found in the wilderness; because living water is ownerless, no one person, no one nation, no one religion has exclusive access to it. Rosh Hashanah is a communal day, we celebrate the world’s beginning with all humanity. Every human being, every one of us has the same opportunity to look up and behold the possibilities in front of us.
Torah comes from the wilderness because we live so much of our lives there. Every one of us will spend a part of our lives in one wilderness or another. You know the name of your own wilderness just as I know the deserts I have traversed. Chances are that there will be others in our lives which we can not even imagine yet. But in the midst of that wilderness there is always a well in the distance. Each of us here today , no matter our station, no matter our background can imagine a different future. We brought the tools with us from our past years and homes. Those tools give us the ability to see what might not be apparent to others.
There is a life threatening situation taking place even as we sit here. While we celebrate the birth of the world in Baltimore, 5000 miles away in Northern Chile, 33 miners are trapped half a mile underground. They have been there since August 5 and are expected to remain there until close to Christmas. Water comes to them from a thin tube snaked down from the surface. Their food has long ago run out. But they’ve set up a shrine with their religious icons, they write letters to loved ones and have heard recorded messages of support.
It is beyond anything we could imagine and in their place we might likely find a corner to curl up, burst into tears and wait to die. How can they survive what seems unsurvivable?
They are surviving because while they are not blind to what’s gong on around them, they believe that their present reality isn’t the only possible reality.
What makes people extraordinary, what makes us extraordinary is the ability to envision water as we stand in a wilderness. To dare to hope that things could be different, better, greener, healthier, more prosperous, more comfortable, more joyous, and more alive.
We are blessed to be part of a people who have always dared to dream. We have been in so many wildernesses in the course of our history. But there have always been those among us who were able to find meaning in the desert, find Torah in the desert and eventually find their way out.
This afternoon immediately after we finish our festive lunch we go to Tashlikh. We find flowing water, usually in places we had no idea that it existed – behind a friend’s house, in front of a neighboring synagogue, and we cast out the crumbs from our pockets. We are literally taken by the hand and led to water so that our tradition might make glaringly clear that whatever wilderness in which we have found ourselves this year, water is just up ahead.
What makes us human is our ability to hope. To look up, and even while living in a wilderness to see water ahead. With strength and with joy and the belief that unseen possibilities are before us in every moment, like Hagar we too might be able to restore an imagined future and see a well in the distance.
[1] Reena Spicehandler from Mahzor Kol Haneshamah p.488
