Parashat Toledot Genesis 25:19-28:9
Dear TBE Community,
One of the first scenes in David Lean’s movie Lawrence of Arabia left a lasting impression on me when I first saw it as a ten-year-old girl. I became fascinated and curious to go experience the desert. And once I had satisfied that curiosity many years later, the pull of a silent, beautiful yet indifferent landscape of mountains and sand never left me.
The scene takes place in the desert, at a well. The British officer T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and his Bedouin guide Tafas reach a place of rest after a long camel ride through the vast desert (the scene was filmed in Wadi Rum, in Jordan). But the well does not belong to Tafas’ people. Rather, it belongs to the Harith – “dirty people,” Tafas says disparagingly when the Englishman finds the water only acceptable, and he spits the precious resource into the sand to prove his point.
The camera lingers on Lawrence playing with his compass when suddenly, the sound of the goat-skin bag hitting the water deep inside the well stirs up the quiet. In a long shot, the two men turn their eyes toward the glinting, glittering horizon, from where a black rider emerges like out of a mirage of water and dust. He is coming straight toward the camera and the two men at the well. Tafas, recognizing the rider as a Harith, runs to his camel, pulls a pistol – but before he can fire, he is shot and falls to the ground, his blood red on the sand. When the rider finally arrives, he gets off his camel, looks disparagingly at the Bedouin – and the first words Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali speaks are: “He is dead” — soon followed by “This is my well.”
I learned several lessons from this scene: Water is a precious resource. People in the desert might fight over wells, sometimes bitterly. I wouldn’t have put it in those words as a ten-year old, but I became aware that scarcity of water causes violence, enmity.
“The well is everything,” Sherif Ali proclaims. Because wells provide water. Wells are property, and territory. As I wrote a few Shabbatot ago, wells are the Department of Water and Power of the desert, and of Torah. In Parashat Toledot, the wells that Abraham dug in Parashat Vayera, have now been stopped up:
All the wells which his (Isaac’s) father had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped them up and filled them with earth. (Genesis 26:15)
The oath of the seven ewes at the well in Be’er Sheba that Abraham and Abimelech made has been violated. The fervor to claim sole ownership of the precious water was so intense that, rather than grudgingly accept that a different tribe also uses the well, the Philistines preferred to stop up the source of life – thus barring not only Abraham’s family from access to water, but also themselves.
Isaac’s role as the second patriarch is to be the link between immigrant generation and settled second generation, which his son Jacob will come to represent. Isaac must dig his heels into the soil of his new country and continue his father’s work. In fact, more than continuing, Isaac is there to repeat his father’s work:
Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham and which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death; and he gave them the same names that his father had given them. But when Isaac’s servants, digging in the wadi, found there a well of spring water, the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s herdsmen, saying, “The water is ours.” He named that well Esek, because they contended with him. And when they dug another well, they disputed over that one also; so he named it Sitnah. He moved from there and dug yet another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, “Now at last Adonai has granted us ample space to increase in the land.”(Genesis 26:18-22)
I don’t want to give undue credit to Lawrence of Arabia – much as it instilled in me my fascination for the desert, it has not aged well because of its broad and often painful ethnic stereotypes – but Torah here in Parashat Toledot does teach a lesson similar to the lessons I learned from the movie: Humans should live, increase, and not die because of wells. Pride and territorial claims can blind people’s eyes like a glinting, glittering mirage. Sharing water even with one’s enemy is better than stopping it up. The wells are everything, and humans in the desert are nothing without them. So long as tribe fights against tribe over the same wells, so long the land – and either tribe – will not prosper.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch