rocks and things

[David Seidenberg]

Hi all,

Here's some teaching about this week's Torah reading, about animism and the living world and speaking to rocks. Part of it will be familiar to avid readers of this list, and part will be new. 

shabbat shalom,

David Seidenberg

R’ Yaakov Lainer, the son of the Izhbitser Rebbe, teaches that the soul-spark of a rock is attached more directly to God's throne than the soul-spark of a human being. He wrote:

"And [the soul-sparks of] the silent ones (rocks) in this world branch off from a very high place. Here is a parable: One who stands very close to the throne, facing the king, voids themself completely because of the awe they feel – because of this, there is no movement in them. And one who looks at them from behind, it appears that there is no life in this person, but in truth there is true life there."

“Whoever is closer to God, their back is seen" by those further away. If we imagine ourselves facing God's throne, as it were, all we see of rocks is their backs, no matter what angle we look at them from, because they are even closer to that place then we are. So when God told Moshe to speak to the rock, instead of striking it, God was inviting Moshe to see the rock from a "God's-eye" view, to understand its inner reality -- "that there is true life there" -- and to show the people that that was the truth throughout all Creation.

Moshe was supposed to demonstrate to the people that everything is alive, even rocks, and that we can be in dialogue with the world around us, rather than just taking from it and using it. He was certainly capable of seeing the rock this way -- after all, he had rightly seen the divine life burning in the bush. So why couldn’t he do it?

Well, Moshe and Ahron’s sister Miriam had just died. According to midrash, the reason the people were desperate for water is that after Miriam died, the magical well that followed her wherever she went dried up.

God expects Moshe not only to be the perfect leader, the perfect visionary, and the perfect executor of God's will -- Moshe also has to do all this while in deep mourning for his sister. It seems like it would be impossible for any human to live up to that task. How can Moshe speak to a rock when all he can think about is how he can no longer speak to his sister, the one who saved his life when he was a baby, before he could even speak?

When someone is in the first days of mourning, we even say that their mouth is closed — as if they had no mouth to speak with, because of their grief.

According to Rashi and the midrash, this is the reason why Jacob cooked a stew of lentils to serve to Isaac after Abraham died. "Lentils are shaped like a wheel, and mourning is a wheel that revolves through the world", touching everyone and everything one by one by one. And just as a mourner “has no mouth” so to a lentil, unlike other legumes, "has no indents" or concavities. Facing mourning, one becomes, so to speak, faceless. One loses a sense of oneself, and not just a sense of the person who has been lost. Like a rolling stone, one might quip.

That’s why after Ahron’s two oldest sons die by fire at the altar, the Torah says, “Vayidom Ahron” — “and Ahron was silent”. That word for being silent, vayidom, is the same as the medieval word for the “mineral kingdom” — rocks were called "domim" -- “the silent ones” — as you see in the quote from R’ Lainer. Ahron’s tongue, his lips, were stilled, his mouth struck dumb, by his grief. He was petrified in the literal sense, rendered speechless like a rock. The Torah doesn’t say it, but perhaps he was also petrified in the sense of terrified, by the wild power of the altar that had just struck down his sons.

The practical meaning of saying that a mourner has no mouth is this: a mourner at the beginning of shiva is not supposed to greet others or to respond when they greet her or him. And if that’s the case, should Moshe have to speak to a rock, to greet a rock, in the depths of his mourning, in the face of his own silence confronting Miriam’s death?

If Moshe had been able, if he had had the composure to speak to that rock, the history of our people and our planet might be different. Instead, he struck the rock, and we humans mostly continue to strike the rocks, and all the other beings of this planet, instead of speaking, instead of being in dialogue with the world around us. We cannot see that “there is true life there” and so we act in a way to snuff out life. 

May we learn to speak with the rocks, and more importantly, to listen.