Parshat Chukat: Water Consciousness

This week's Torah portion, Chukat, can be viewed as a narrative about the Jewish people and water. Mayim (water in Hebrew) is mentioned twenty-two times. The portion begins with G-d’s command to mix water with the ashes of a red cow for purification. Next, Miriam dies, and the well which provided the Israelites with water (based on Miriam’s merit) disappears.[1] The Jewish people quarrel with Moses, kvetching, “There is no water to drink!" [2] Moses and Aaron then strike the rock and G-d brings forth water. Next, Moses asks the Edomites to pass through their land, with a promise not to drink their water, [3] or alternately, to buy it from them. [4] Then the Jewish people travel by way of the Sea of Reeds (where G-d had split the sea for them) and on their desert journey complain again about lacking water. They arrive in modern-day Jordan and sing an exultant song about their appreciation to G-d for water. Finally, the Torah portion ends with them encamped on the eastern bank of the Jordan River.

 

What is G-d teaching us through the Torah's water narrative? The Jews’ experiences with water in the desert can be understood as a spiritual training to cultivate appreciation for G-d's goodness. G-d takes the essential tangible resource of water (without which we cannot live for more than a few days) and gives it to us in an environment where we do not have it. We learn to appreciate water and to know who really provides it through the process described here of taking water for granted, losing it and then being given it by G-d. In an ultimate sense, water does not nourish us. G-d does. Water is one of the chief means by which G-d provides life to us every day. The see-saw experience of having water and then losing it is the means to develop the spiritual muscles of appreciating G-d.

 

Yet, always being on the positive side of having water leads a person to take it for granted. Today, piped water is incredibly convenient; it relieves us from shlepping our water from streams and cisterns to our homes. Today, people in the West tend to lack an appreciation of where water comes from, and they end up wasting and polluting it. Where appreciation ends, misuse begins.

 

That explains how much of the western and southeastern United States could experience water scarcity and need government agencies to call for conservation.[5] Or how we could lose sight of how much energy goes into bringing every gallon to our faucet. In many areas of the United States and the world, electricity-producing generators power pumps that raise water hundreds or even over a thousand feet from the underground aquifer to the water tanks at the top of local mountain ranges, so that gravity can then take it to our homes.[6] That is, if we use 230 gallons of water a day, we are raising almost 2,000 pounds in weight every day up the vertical height of a 60 story skyscraper. Over an entire lifetime, this is a lot of energy used and a lot of carbon put into the atmosphere. Thus misusing water is also wasting energy and unnecessarily causing global climate change. [7] 

 

Scientists predict that climate change is likely to cause sea levels to rise, impacting sandbars like Long BeachIsland and New Jersey, and islands like Manhattan, as well as causing more intense storms and floods. [8] 

 

Environmental problems are not problems of the environment. They are not problems of air pollution or global warming or species extinction or water scarcity. Those are merely symptoms. As long as we only treat the symptoms, the problems will continue popping up and getting bigger. Henry David Thoreau said, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."[9]  Today we generally hack at the branches: in many counties we spend significant amounts on wastewater treatment and desalinization plants to produce more usable water, and in some states we enact Draconian measures like water rationing when the aquifer just gets too low.[10]

           

Environmental problems at their root are spiritual problems; they stem from a lack of awareness of the Source of all Existence. Once we come to that awareness, we can address environmental problems in very different ways, i.e. from their roots. Since beneath every environmental problem is a spiritual problem, awaiting every environmental problem is a spiritual solution. Drop a stone in the pond and the ripples will reach far beyond you.

 

In conclusion, the Torah is a blueprint for spiritual living on this planet. It enables us to transform our daily, mundane ways into holy acts. If we can preserve our connection to G-d’s sustaining power in our world of great abundance, we can transform our lives and the world in holy ways. This is our challenge, and in light of mounting global environmental issues, what I might also call a revolutionary moment in our history. The great Sage of Talmudic times, Rabbi Tarfon, teaches that “The day is short, the work is much, the workers are lazy, the reward is great and the Master is pressing."[11]  I might add: the climate is changing, the seas are rising, the glaciers are melting. We can address environmental issues at their roots if we live according to the Torah’s call. And when we get at the roots, we’re going to deal with many of the branches as well. When we finally embrace this path as a people and shine it to the world, our spiritual problems masquerading as environmental problems will make their way down the drain.