Look Up and See the Miracle

 

Monet's Morning on the Seine in the Rain

Look Up and See the Miracle

I remember once, in a village in India, watching old men playing cards together on the street. It was an impossibly sweet visual until I was told they were the farmers, and the rain had not come that year. No water meant no work, and no work meant no crops, and no crops meant no money and no food. But the horror of the future was folded into the calmness of the moment, of sitting together and playing cards while waiting for something terrible. 

I’m a little obsessed with water. 

I’m convinced that something buried in the human consciousness knows that we came from the water. Water is not only the sustaining force in religious myth - it is at the heart of creation narratives. Genesis starts out with a watery abyss, with God splitting the waters to create the sea and the sky. This is a common theme in Middle Eastern creation stories - in Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, it is the god Marduk who tears apart the water goddess Tiamat to begin the process of creation. No matter how far we travel, we keep finding the notion that we come from the primordial ocean: gods dive into a watery abyss, or goddesses cry rivers, and from the water comes life. 

So it’s not just me who is a little obsessed with water. 

Thirst is one of our greatest dangers. It is a terrible irony that the majority of the world is water, and yet it is possible to be stranded in water and still die of thirst. But when you live like we do, it’s so easy to take for granted. Water comes from the taps as if by magic. We are utterly dependent on it, and we treat it as if its presence is a guarantee. 

And even beyond lack of water being deadly, we are also reminded in the great texts of our tradition that water is a destructive symbol, too. The Flood of Noah resets the entire world; the Sea of Reeds destroys an Egyptian army; the ocean is the place of the great sea monsters.

The Israelites in the wilderness have been dealing with water scarcity since they left the split sea behind them. And now, they are waiting on the other side of the Jordan, ready to enter into the Promised Land and rediscover life on solid ground. There is a lot of anxiety in our parashah about what we will be like in a world of abundance. Will we forget about our ultimate dependence on God? Will we run off after other gods? Will we oppress the stranger because we have forgotten what it is like to be the stranger? 

One of the manifestations of this anxiety, one of the designs of the Divine, is about how we access water. 

The beginning of the sixth aliyah, just before the second paragraph of the Shema, says this: “For the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your foot like a vegetable garden.” This is understood to mean that when in Egypt, the soil was so water-rich that you would only need to tread the ground and the waters would rise up. “But,” it goes on, “the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven.” 

It actually tells us why this is important in the next verse: “It is a land which the LORD your God looks after, on which the LORD your God always keeps an eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end.”

The plain meaning of this text is that we are more directly dependent on God, and this is important for the reward-and-punishment theology described in Parashat Eikev. But it also requires us to be looking in a different physical direction to Egypt. In Egypt, we looked down at our feet - and yes, experienced the immediate gratification of the water welling around our feet. But in that quote I just read, God is looking down upon us, and we are told to look where? Where do the waters come from? We are took to look up. 

If one universal aspect of human consciousness is our understanding that life came from the water, another is our tendency to gaze upwards with wonder. Creation goes so much further than our needs; we are dwarfed in comparison with the stars in the sky. Even the very act of gazing at the stars holds within it the implication of all we cannot see, of the limitations of our ability to perceive Creation. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel would call that feeling “radical amazement”.

Water in the Promised Land is not going to be like water by the Nile. We will be encouraged to look up when we are waiting for the rain.

There are two other stories on my mind about looking up at the water. 

The first is the story of the split waters of the sea, the great miracle of our escape from Egyptian slavery. It looked like the edge of the waters would be where we would die, with the Egyptian army closing in on us, but then - miracle of miracles - the water opened and we passed through. It’s the birthing canal moment of the Jewish people. It’s the moment of the Song at the Sea, the most ancient song of our tradition.

And then there are two Israelites named Shimon and Reuven. A midrash is recounted in Sh’mot Rabbah 24:1, a piece of creative rabbinic commentary, about two Israelites who are looking in a different direction. While their brothers and sisters are gazing at the walls of the water on either side of them, Shimon and Reuven are looking at the mud on their shoes. Egypt had mud, they say, and the sea has mud. What’s so special about that? 

Shimon and Reuven are so busy looking in the wrong direction that they manage to miss the miracle of the water. 

Look up. Don’t miss the miracle. 

And here’s a final story of looking in the wrong direction, away from the water: Hagar in the wilderness. Hagar, the handmaid of Abraham and Sarah, is cast into the wilderness in Sefer B’reishit (the Book of Genesis), along with her son Ishmael. We’ll encounter her story again on Rosh Hashanah. When she runs out of water, she sets the boy on the ground under a bush, and she sits away from him and cries. And God calls out to Hagar and tells her not to be afraid. And then something extraordinary happens in the text, which is easily overlooked. It says this:

וַיִּפְקַ֤ח אֱלֹקים֙ אֶת־עֵינֶ֔יהָ וַתֵּ֖רֶא בְּאֵ֣ר מָ֑יִם

“God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.”

There is no miracle here. The water was not created at that moment for Hagar. God simply helped her to see what was already there. 

That is to say, Hagar fell to her knees and cried, and in her overwhelming despair, she failed to see the water that was already there. Rabbi Sharon Brous reads this story as saying: How can we save ourselves if we live with such a blinding fear that it prevents us from seeing redemption when it sits squarely in front of us? 

Look up. We cannot afford to be looking in the wrong direction and miss the possibility of peace, miss the possibility of redemption. 

וּשְׁאַבְתֶּם־מַ֖יִם בְּשָׂשׂ֑וֹן מִמַּעַיְנֵ֖י הַיְשׁוּעָֽה׃

And you shall draw water with joy, says the Prophet Isaiah (12:3), from the wells of salvation. 

The truth is, I think that wonder is a natural human reaction. I think that we know, deep down, that we come from the water; I think the stars call out to us in their beauty; I think that gratitude is innate in the human condition. But we get trained out of these things. We get trained to look at the mud on our shoes instead of the miracle of life; we get taught to take water for granted because we are told that the mundane is more important than the miraculous. Or worse: we get taught that the logical perspective is that nothing is miraculous instead of that everything is miraculous. 

Wonder and gratitude are natural to us.

They are also an act of resistance against a cold society. 

So resist. Look up and take note of the miracle. Allow moments for radical amazement and for radical gratitude. We need it. It makes us better as people, and it makes us better as a society. 

Shabbat shalom.