This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored by Oren Gertner.
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Addressing an audience of some 100 people at Harvard University’s Memorial Hall on November 16, 1972, Thomas Parker—known as Sakokwenonkwas among his fellow Mohawks—warned that American culture was threatening his people to abandon their values. “Our religion isn’t industry,” he said. “We are just thankful to nature and Mother Earth for giving us… the light we need.” An indebtedness to our planet’s bounty and fragility instilled within Sakokwenonkas a certain ecological consciousness that he feared was all too absent across the globe. “Someday,” he warned, “President Nixon and the other world leaders are going to find out that once they catch the last fish, once they cut down the last tree, they won’t be able to eat all the money they have in the banks,
It seems that Nixon and Moses may have shared this lack of environmental foresight.
Because the Hebrew language originated several millennia ago and arose in a land far from where many Jews had settled in their Diasporic homes—Jews regularly read sacred books filled with words that even those who speak Hebrew fluently struggle to understand. Over those thousands of miles and years, we have kept most of these Hebrew words in use one way or another, but we have also allowed these words to take on new meanings. English speakers experience this in their own language when they read literature composed only a few centuries earlier. Describing someone as “nice” is a compliment nowadays, but in the year 1477, Thomas Norton (c. 1436–c. 1503) knew that this word was an insult meaning “foolish.” He thus wrote in his poem “Ordinal of Alchemy:”
He that is not a grete clerke
Is nyse & lewde to medle with that werke.
(He that is not a great clerk
Is nice and lewd to meddle with that work.)
This week’s Torah portion, Chukkat, describes the events leading up to God’s declaring that Moses will not merit to enter the Land of Israel (towards which Moses had allegedly been leading the Israelites for a good stretch of his lifetime). The story that our sages have usually told matches the story as it is commonly translated. The Israelites were in the wilderness when Miriam died and was buried (Numbers 20:1), after which it was realized that the people had no water (20:2). The nation approached Moses and Aaron (20:2) and fought with Moses (20:3), arguing that they should have died rather than allow Moses and Aaron to take them to a place where there was nothing to drink (20:3–5). Moses and Aaron departed from the Israelites to bow down before God’s presence (20:6). In turn, God instructed Moses to take his staff, to gather the nation, to bring Aaron along, and for Aaron and Moses to speak jointly to a certain rock that—as the nation would see—would release water, enabling Moses to quench the thirst of the nation (20:7–8). Moses subsequently took his staff (20:9) and, with Aaron, gathered the nation in front of this rock and addressed the people (20:10). After Moses lifted his hand and struck the rock with his staff two times, water came forth from the rock, and the nation drank (20:11). After all this, God told Moses and Aaron that they did not have faith in God and would therefore not merit to bring their congregation into the land God had given them (20:12).
A rock large enough to contain enough water to feed an entire people must have been some rock—or maybe it was not a rock at all.
In his book Water in the Wilderness, Dr. William Henry Propp (1957–present) argued that the Hebrew word sela (סֶלַֽע), commonly translated as “rock,” in this story constitutes something much bigger than a pebble, a stone, or even a boulder. Dr. Propp has suggested that, if we use the word “rock” to think of that sela, we should think of a rock formation, such as a mountain (p. 21). The Hebrew Bible, he argued, regularly exchanged the word sela with the words צוּר (tzur) and חַלָּמִישׁ (challamish), as if they mean the same thing (p. 21).
The ancient authors of Hebrew poems often employed a literary device we call “parallelism”—offering two different poetic expressions of the same idea. We can see the connection between sela and tzur in Psalm 18:3:
יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ סַ֥לְעִ֥י וּמְצוּדָתִ֗י
וּמְפַ֫לְטִ֥י אֵלִ֣י צ֭וּרִי אֶֽחֱסֶה־בּ֑וֹ
Adonai is my sela and my fortress;
And my place of refuge is my God, my tzur in whom I may take shelter.
If a tzur is a place of refuge, a tzur has got to be a lot bigger than any old rock—and if a sela is a fortress, a sela has got to be a lot bigger than any old rock. But how does one take shelter inside a rock? The Hebrew word sela relates to the Arabic words sal‘ (سلع, meaning “fissure” or “rift”) and sali‘a (سلع, meaning “split”). The refugee finds safety in the shelter of a mountain by looking for where the mountain splits into crevices, crags, and even caves. Despite how many translations have insisted that the Hebrew word tzur means “rock,” Dr. Propp has highlighted that Aramaic speakers identified the word tzur as a match with their word טוּר (tur), meaning “mountain.”
Believing the words of the Psalms to have been penned before the words of the Torah were finalized, Dr. Propp turned his readers to Psalm 114:8, which may be the Hebrew Bible’s earliest description of God as releasing water from giant rock formations (p. 23):
הַהֹפְכִ֣י הַצּ֣וּר אֲגַם־מָ֑יִם חַ֝לָּמִ֗ישׁ לְמַעְיְנוֹ־מָֽיִם׃
The One who has turned the tzur into a lake of water: a hard rock into a spring of water.
When we notice that the Psalmist references here הַצּ֣וּר (hatzur, “the tzur”) and not just any tzur, we might reconsider that God and the Torah’s narrator in Numbers 20:8–11 consistently spoke of a specific sela, using the words הַסָּֽלַע (hassala) or הַסֶּֽלַע, (hassela)—both meaning “the rock [formation].” ‘The mountain’ that turned into water appears to have had a life of its own.
Around the 3rd century C.E., Rabbi Yoseh son of Rabbi Yehudah concluded that, upon Miriam’s death (Numbers 20:1), the Israelites were suddenly cut off from a miraculous well that had followed her from place to place—thus leading to the very thirsty Israelites in Numbers 20:2 (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 9a). When this well disappeared—according to the medieval rabbinic anthology Midrash Aggadah—‘the sela’ transported itself and sat down amidst the other rock formations within the periphery of the Israelite nation (20:10:3). According to this same midrash, Moses asked the Israelites if they believed this sela would yield water and—upon gaining their consent—struck the sela, which then began to bleed. As Midrash Aggadah imagines, it was only after Moses struck a second time that water shot forth from the sela.
The rabbinic imagination suggests that Moses did not show mercy for whatever biomatter resided in that sela. (Why strike a bleeding being?) It seems that Moses—in this moment—had little pity for any of the mountains in the wilderness. In the late 1st millennium C.E., the author of Tanchuma Bemidbar, Chukkat 9:1 understood the fuller story of our portion to be revealed through the words of Psalm 78:15, describing a certain holy entity as
יְבַקַּ֣ע צֻ֭רִים בַּמִּדְבָּ֑ר וַ֝יַּ֗שְׁקְ כִּתְהֹמ֥וֹת רַבָּֽה׃
having split tzurim [the plural of tzur] in the wilderness and having given drink as if from the great waters of the deep.
According to Tanchuma Bemidbar, every tzur—every mountain—in the wilderness burst forth with water, splitting open, pouring out their insides, compromising the structural integrity and natural beauty of the wilderness. Tanchuma Bemidbar, recognizing Moses’ greed in the moment, tells us “מֹשֶׁה כְּבָר הָיָה בְּיָדוֹ אֶת שֶׁלּוֹ” (“Moses had already had in his possession his portion”). Digging its claws into Moses’ flaws here, Tanchuma Bemidbar paints Moses and Aaron as modeling no sense of gratitude amidst this gluttonous deprivation of natural resources. Tanchuma Bemidbar tells us that “עַל שֶׁשָּׁתְקוּ וְלֹא אָמְרוּ שִׁירָה, לָכֵן נִתְפָּשׂוּ” (“for their having gone quiet [completely in this moment of overconsumption] and having not recited a song [of praise to God, thanking them for their nourishment], they were therefore caught [by God and prevented from entering the Land of Israel]”).
We rely on nature for our sustenance. Human beings cannot exist without a healthy earth that, when tended to thoughtfully, can provide us with the resources we need. This is a lesson that Moses forgot; instead, he took advantage of nature to satisfy the Israelites, at least temporarily. All too often, leaders forget or ignore this truth. The moral and scientific import of protecting this planet has been recently sidestepped by an American Congress who—on the eve of the United States’ 249th birthday—voted to strike from the national budget more than $387 billion previously allocated towards Americans transitioning to cleaner and renewable forms of energy and sustainable living. God had assigned a nearly natural consequence to Aaron and Moses: their inability to treat the land mercifully deprived them of the right to reside in the land that had been promised to them.
If we truly wish for life on this planet, we cannot turn away from an earth that bleeds. We have a responsibility to demonstrate care and concern that prove that we wish to stay here for the long term.
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