The badlands of Parshat Hukkat
Parshat Hukkat. Sigh. Once again, the Israelites complain at God through Moses. Once again, God’s kavod (glory) appears. Once again, people die.
We’ve grown accustomed to this pattern, so the details (red cow ashes, burning snakes, water from a rock, the deaths of Miriam and Aaron, foreign travels) tend to get lost among the generalities. In most years, we read this portion in tandem with Balak (quite a straightforward and folksy story), so our portion can easily be ignored.
But this year, thank God, Hukkat is forced to stand alone. It’s quite a stunner, actually. As mentioned, Moses’ older sister dies. The people complain about their food (manna) and the scarcity of water, for them and their cattle. While following God’s command to take his stick and speak to a stone, Moses seems to lose his temper, calling the Israelites “rebels” and hitting the rock, twice. Out flows copious water, and (hooray) the people and their herds are saved.
But that’s not how the Torah spins it. In the desert (Bamidbar), nothing is quite so simple. Forty years of desert trekking (which for readers happens in the blink of an eye over the past two weeks since Sh’lach Lecha) do not prepare us for the bombshell: Moses and Aaron are told explicitly that they will die without setting foot in the promised land. This begins immediately, with Aaron taken away to retire/perish atop the mysterious “mountainous” mountain, “Hor ha-Har.”
The text then fractures. Israelites are denied passage, over and over again, through the Edomite and Amorite territory east of the Jordan river, despite their offer to stick to the highways and pay for any food and water they consume. This sets the stage for the Haftara from the Book of Judges. Diplomacy fails, and war ensues. The Israelites wander around and between mountains and valleys, passing through towns none of us will ever visit.
Because of our propensity to focus on human stories, we miss what was miraculous to the original audience: discovering water in the thirsty, barren trans-Jordanian badlands. The Torah text is as jumbled as the topography. Snippets of poetry and advertising jingles (“Come visit Cheshbon!”), quotes from disappeared books (the Book of the Wars of God) and trip-tiks (ask your parents). All that’s missing are Burma Shave signs (again, ask your parents). Because this region is not on a main route (Pixar’s “Cars” comes to mind), readers ignore the local color that was 100% essential to our ancestors, dwarfing next week’s talking donkey.
For later readers of the Bible, Hukkat’s landscape exists within the page, playing out on the flat dun-colored stage of “somewhere.” But to see the magnificence of this section of Torah, you must visualize the ground, the relentless Moabite sun baking the parched badlands, the dry wadis beckoning with false promises of security and water. Much like the Painted Desert in the American Southwest, sprawling over the corners of four states and encompassing a large swath of the Navajo Nation, the topography described in Parshat Hukkat is wild, empty, craggy, colorful and — most of all — dry. Look at a map or zoom in with Google Earth, and you’ll see what untamed territory looks like: not a place of crops or figs, grapevines or pomegranates, and there is no water to drink (Num 20:5). Take a drive beyond the forested eastern edge of the Grand Canyon. Listen to Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite” (the movement called “Painted Desert”) and hear the forbidding and powerful musical motifs that have become the sound of desolation in everything from “The Twilight Zone” to Martian landscapes. You’ll enter 93,000 acres that are both gorgeous AND deadly, unless you (like Moses) are able to find a rock formation that will yield water in the fractured, folded, and subsided terrain.
For all the tools we have, the greatest single determinant of the difference between life and death in countless miles of desert is the imagination to picture water below. Thinking only horizontally, you will most assuredly find death. Here, there’s no getting out by going through (Sorry, Nietzsche!). But think vertically, and you might just have a chance. As Rod Serling used to say: “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it lies another dimension, a dimension of sight and sound, a dimension of mind. It lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” Just last week, the earth opened up for Korach to descend, a “new creation” that hinted at a deep third dimension. If, in your travels, you can find where tilted strata of porous water-containing rock touch the surface, you will be able to live.
Only by using the imaginative faculty, says Maimonides, will you learn from Torah texts like ours. Escape the thicket of details, and you will begin to see this final movement. Pushed by seemingly random events, the people come at the promised land not from the gradual rising of the south, where enemies can see you from afar. They instead approach from the east, from Pisgah (“pinnacle”) to the very lowest point on the earth. With Miriam (and her well), Aaron (and his clouds of glory), and Moses (with his manna) leaving the scene, the next generation will have to fend for themselves, says the Kedushat Levi (R’ Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev). Everything is nearly in place, even as Moses peers out over the face of the Yeshimon (terrifyingly forbidding escarpment) (Num 21:20). Does it portend death and oblivion, or a new and expansive chapter in an ongoing story? Has Joshua learned enough to carry on, to lead the people to their destiny?
We hold our breaths at the strange new vistas beyond.
comments