THE WATER & THE WELL: AN ELUL STORY

I’m so glad to be back on this bimah with you all tonight, after a summer that gave me some time to step away and breathe a little.

One of the gifts of that time away was more time to read…there’s that saying, “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I think there’s a similar phenomenon that happens when you’re a rabbi at this time of year: everything looks like the start of a sermon. So naturally, in addition to some great novels that I gobbled up, I couldn’t resist going back to some of my favorite Anne Lamott books.

In Bird by Bird, her wonderful book about writing, Lamott says:

“There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.”

I love that. Ecstasy in paying attention. 

There is something about this time of year that helps me understand what she means. The month of Elul asks us to pay attention. We begin to look back over the year we've just lived, and sometimes what we see is not particularly comfortable.

But paying attention is where we have to begin.

Our Torah portion for this week, Parashat Ki Teitzei, offers a powerful phrase which gives this idea some more dimension. 

Our portion this week asks the question- what do you do when you find something that belongs to someone else? 

Part of the answer includes the phrase: לֹא תוּכַל לְהִתְעַלֵּם — lo tuchal lehit'alem.

The phrase is usually translated, “You must not ignore it.”

But that's not quite what the Hebrew says.

The root of lehit'alem has to do with hiding or concealing. In this form, it means to hide oneself.

So the Torah is saying something more like:

You cannot hide yourself from what you see. 

Whether it’s your next door neighbor’s missing oxen, or something even more precious:  you cannot simply cover your eyes and pretend not to see.

And that brings me to a story that Anne Lamott recounts in her book, Hallelujah Anyway.  Lamott shares this story she learned from Lynne Twist, a fundraiser and activist who spent years working with the Hunger Project.

Twist writes about a trip she took with eighteen other Hunger Project volunteers and leaders to a village in the desert in Senegal, on the western tip of Africa.

Someone from the Hunger Project had arranged a meeting with the tribal leaders. The presenting issue was that the village's water supplies were nearly gone. Their shallow well was dry and there was no government help. The village wasn't even counted in the census, so they had no vote and very little access to outside resources.

The village was several hours into the desert, in what Twist describes as an extraordinarily harsh environment. They drove for miles across silty orange sand that stung their eyes and parched their throats. There was almost nothing growing except baobab trees, their long branches offering what little shade there was.

They set out expecting to find hopeless, hungry people, but as they approached the village, they began to hear drums.

And when they pulled up in their jeeps, they were greeted by children, women in beautiful tribal dresses, and men drumming. People danced around a fire.

Twist writes that everyone was too thin, but they weren't starving.

And the message of the welcome was essentially: the partners have arrived.

The tribal leaders sat in a circle with the Hunger Project representatives, right there in the baking orange sand.

The leaders were all men. They were all Muslim.

And around them, the women sat in another circle.

The men explained their situation: their water was running out and the wells of sixteen other villages to the east were nearly dry as well.

The Hunger Project had come prepared with two proposals: either, to help them find another source of water, or perhaps help them relocate to somewhere less harsh.

After a while, Twist noticed the women sitting behind the men, who seemed anxious to communicate something.

So she asked if she could speak with them.

The mullahs agreed. The women from the Hunger Project were allowed to meet with the tribal women, with one of the men translating.

And that's all it took.

The women told Twist that they had seen a vision.

There was an underground lake beneath the sand.

They were certain of it.

They had seen it.

But the men would not let them dig for it.

Digging wasn't women's work–  tribal decisions weren't women's work. The women were expected to weave, farm, and care for the children. And the men didn't want to waste their time digging for something that existed only in the women's visions.

But Twist and the other Hunger Project workers kept talking with the mullahs.

Eventually, the men agreed to let the women try.

They weren't convinced, nor were they particularly happy about it. But they said yes.

And so the women began to dig.

They dug for a year.

They dug in that orange sand with what Twist describes as utter conviction. They scooped out bucket after bucket of sand. They sang and drummed as they worked. They took care of each other's children.

Meanwhile, the men watched from a distance.

They rationed the village's remaining water. They went about their own work, and much of the women's work as well.

I imagine there was some eye-rolling. Some muttering.

Some version of, We'll see how this turns out.

And still the women dug.

Deeper and deeper.

For months, there was nothing but sand.

But they kept going.

And then, after more than a year, they reached the water.

The underground lake they had seen in their visions was there.

The women had been right.

And that lake didn't just save their village. It became a source of life for sixteen villages in the region.

The water made agriculture possible. It gave people enough stability to think beyond the next day's survival. Eventually there was room for education, for planning, for a future that had seemed impossible when the Hunger Project first arrived.

It's an extraordinary story.

But what stays with me isn't only the lake.

It's that first moment when Lynne Twist looked beyond the circle of tribal leaders and noticed the women sitting behind them.

They had been there the whole time.

She didn't know what they knew.

She didn't know whether they had anything to offer.

She simply noticed that they were there—and that they seemed to have something they wanted to say.

And she asked to listen.

I keep thinking about that in relation to lo tuchal lehit'alem.

You cannot hide yourself from what you see.

Sometimes we don't literally close our eyes. We just decide that something isn't ours to deal with.

We tell ourselves that it's someone else's problem.

Or we get used to seeing something and eventually stop noticing it.

I suspect most of us know what that feels like.

There are things in our lives that we have learned not to see.

Elul is a good time to look again.

Not because we're supposed to spend the next month beating ourselves up, but because teshuvah requires some honesty about what is actually happening.

And sometimes honesty begins with noticing the thing we've been avoiding.

There's another reason I love this story for Elul.

The women didn't just see something. They trusted what they saw enough to act on it, which I think is much harder. 

For months, all the evidence seemed to say they were wrong, but they kept digging anyway.

I'm not suggesting that persistence always means we're right. Sometimes the right thing to do  is to recognize that we were mistaken.

But sometimes we give up on something because we can't see the outcome yet.

We decide that a relationship can't be repaired or that a person won't change.

We decide a community can't become what we hope it could be.

We decide something about ourselves and then live as though that decision is permanent.

The women in this story didn't know that the lake was really there, but crucial to this story is the fact that they believed it was.

And they were willing to work without knowing.

For me, this is what faith looks like. Not certainty.

Just enough trust to keep digging.

And I love that the community begins to change before the water is found.

The men begin helping.

The roles begin to shift.

The women discover what they can accomplish together.

By the time the water appears, something else has already happened.

The community has begun to imagine itself differently.

That feels like Elul to me.

We don't need to wait until Rosh Hashanah to become the people we want to be.

Sometimes the work is much smaller: 

We notice something. We admit that we notice it. 

We stop pretending we didn't notice it before. 

Then- we ask a question.

We listen to the answer.

And we see what happens next.

Anne Lamott says there is “ecstasy in paying attention.”

The Torah puts it more bluntly:

לֹא תוּכַל לְהִתְעַלֵּם.

You cannot hide yourself from what you see.

As we move through Elul, maybe that's enough of an assignment.

Don't cover your eyes.

Look again.

Especially at the things you've gotten used to not seeing.

And maybe, if we're lucky, we'll discover that paying attention doesn't just reveal what's wrong.

Sometimes it reveals what's possible.

Sometimes, beneath what looks like a desert, there is water.

Shabbat Shalom.