ברוך המקום, ברוך הוא. ברוך שנתן תורה לאמו ישראל, ברוך הוא.
Blessed be the Omnipresent, blessed be He! Blessed be the one who gave the Torah to His people Israel, blessed be He!
Allow me to begin with an aside. What I am about to say has nothing to do with my sermon topic, but is, rather, an appreciation of the greatness of Torah. The Talmudic sage Ben Bag Bag observed as the reward of continued Torah study, הֲפֹך בָּהּ, וְהַפֵּך בָּהּ דְכֹלָה בהּ - Turn it over and turn it over, because everything is in it. The genius of holding something as an eternal gift from God is that you keeps you turning it over and it keeps you amazed by what you find in it. I have been turning over Torah every Shabbat morning for close to 20 years, and every year I challenge myself to find something new in it. The wonderful members of this community who join me in this study both push me to deepen my own understand of this difficult text and make the task of doing so as rewarding an experience as I have known.
Sometimes, the task of finding something new in a text you have read 20 times before means digging all the deeper into its language. Here we Jews are blessed with thousands of years of written commentary by some of the most brilliant minds who, like us, have turned this text over and over seeking insight, understanding, and the contentment that they bring. But sometimes, indeed more often then not, that new thing for which you are looking is hiding in plain sight - there all along, like a Pokemon - just waiting for you to see it.
Such is the case for me with today’s Torah reading. For as long as I have been reading this text, particularly in the context of this day, I have been focused on its first three aliyot, which tell the story of Abraham’s abandonment of his first son Ishmael. I have always viewed this story as the counterpoint to tomorrow’s reading, Genesis 22 which tells of the binding and near sacrifice of his second son, Isaac. Reading it thus, I have completely ignored the contents of the last two aliyot of today’s reading. These sections deal with dispute over water rights between Abraham and the Philistine chieftain Avimelech. Avimelech’s servants have seized a well that Abraham dug and Abraham wants the well back. He presents Avimelech with seven lambs, whose acceptance of the gift ratifies Abraham’s claim to the well. Hence the place becomes known as באר שבע from the Hebrew words באר meaning well and שבע meaning seven. The well of the seven.
This story touches on a deeper truth about the land of Canaan - the land Abraham’s descendents will inherit and land we call the modern state of Israel. It is a dry land; a land in which water is a precious commodity. This idea is touched on in Deuteronomy as Moses, who will never, in fact, enter the land himself, nonetheless describes it for his people. The land, he tells them, is not like Egypt where the Nile supplies a constant source of irrigation. Rather, the land is completely dependent on the rain that falls upon it in its season. אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ דֹּרֵשׁ אֹתָהּ תָּמִיד עֵינֵי יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בָּהּ מֵרֵשִׁית הַשָּׁנָה וְעַד אַחֲרִית שָׁנָה: - it is a land that the Lord your God looks after continually - God’s eyes are upon it from the beginning of the year until its end. For us, for whom it would never cross our minds to turn off the shower while we soap up, failure to appreciate the preciousness of water is an impediment to understanding Abraham’s dispute with Avimelech over possession of a well.
I drove past Beersheva last December. The city just kind of pops up on you, situated as it is on the edge of the Negev desert. Its home now to 200,000 people and its growing quickly. Israel is developing it as yet another world-wide technology site, this time with an emphasis on cyber-security. Its also sight to major facilities of the Israel Defense Forces and the home of Ben Gurion University.
We drove past Beersheva on our way to S’de Boker, the kibbutz on which Israel’s most noted founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion lived and is buried. S’de Boker is now the sight of Ben Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research. There, in one of its laboratories, we witnessed an ongoing experiment in which fish were being grown in various mixtures of fresh and highly treated wastewater. The experiment is showing promising results and if all ultimately goes well, the plan is to use the wastewater generated by the city of Beersheva to farm fish. Imagine that! Farming fish in the desert, on a piece of land which is named for a fight over water rights.
Israel is an extraordinary land in so many ways. But in its championing of water technology, it may well be creating tools that can save the world. This from a land that, from the time of the patriarchs until just a couple of years ago, depended entirely on a good rainy season for its existence. Our prayers reflect this basic truth. From the end of Sukkoth to the beginning of Pesach - the rainy season in Israel - a prayer for rain is part of our daily liturgy. The rest of the year we pray for dew - the only source of water during the summer months. Eighty years ago, the British restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine, condemning thousands if not millions of Jews to death in Nazi concentration camps, partly on the justification that the land's water resources could support no more then two million people. Now it is home to ten million Jews and Arabs and Israel actually exports water intensive crops like melons to the rest of the world. When I was there ten years ago, the water level of the Kineret - the Sea of Galilee - was a part of every newscast. Since that time, Israel has lined its Mediterranean Sea Coast with with a string of desalination plants - one of which is the largest in the world - that collectively provide the country with 785 million cubic yards of potable water per year. The revolution was made possible by technology developed and refined in Israel to make desalination cheap. In a part of the world where all the surrounding countries are parched, Israel actually has a surplus of water.
And desalination is only a part of that story. Since the founding of the state, Israel has treated water as a precious economic good that cannot be wasted. In Israel, every drop of water - even the water that falls on your own private roof - belongs to the state and must be purchased by the end user at its actual cost. This early decision by Israel’s leaders to treat water as an economic good instilled in Israelis a sense of its value. And like all people faced with real economic choices, Israelis didn’t just conserve water, they discovered ways to make it cheaper and go farther.
Israel created drip irrigation which is vastly more water efficient then either sprinkler or flood irrigation. Israel has pioneered the development of seeds and fertilizers that produce more crops on less land and using fewer resources, including water. And - at a time when many major cities are losing a third or more of their fresh water to leaks in their systems - Israel has created a water infrastructure that can trace every drop.
Israel’s mastery of water technology is beginning to change how the world sees this tiny country. Most of the nations of Africa severed their ties to Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But just this summer, Prime Minister Netanyahu was greeted warmly on a tour of four East African countries. Each of them - and many more across that continent - want something Israel can provide better than any other nation - expertise in confronting terrorism and technology for managing water.
But perhaps the most dramatic example of how Israel’s expertise in water is changing the shape of the world and relations across the Middle East is the Red Sea-to-Dead Sea Conveyance Project. Israel’s neighbor Jordan, with whom it concluded a peace treaty in 1994, is in desperate need of water. But unlike Israel with its long Mediterranean coast on which to build desalination plants, Jordan’s only access to the sea is in the south, at the Gulf of Aqaba. In the meantime, the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth relative to sea level, is quickly disappearing as both Israelis and Arabs have diverted water from its source - the Jordan River - into agricultural uses.
There are two major problems the Jordanians face in trying to build a desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba. First, the gulf’s ecosystem - filled as it is with many coral reefs - is too fragile to be able to sustain the discharge of highly saline sludge which is the natural byproduct of desalination. Second, Jordan’s population and agricultural centers, and hence the place where it needs the water, are far to the north, around the capital city of Amman. And Amman is a 3000 foot climb from the sea. The need to push that much water that far and that far uphill make the costs of a desalination plant prohibitive.
Enter Israel. Israel has a growing agricultural industry in the desert and can always use more water. So instead of pushing it all uphill, the water from Jordan’s desalination plant will be sent to Israel. Israel in turn will compensate Jordan by allowing it to draw water from the Sea of Galilee, right near Amman. The water will flow through the West Bank and thus increase Palestinian access to fresh water. And that highly saline sludge from the plant? Instead of pumping it into the Gulf of Aqaba, it gets pumped into the Dead Sea to help replenish that struggling body of water.
My visit to the Zuckerberg Water Institute was easily the highlight of my trip to Israel. Driving back, again passing Beersheva, that city where 4000 years ago Abraham struggled to hold on to a single well of water, I needed to share my excitement. I called my father-in-law and told him about all that I had seen and learned. His reaction? “What do you expect from the Israelis?” And then he said something that really got me thinking. He said, “the Israelis understand that human beings are the one inexhaustible resource.”
In a few moments, this service will end and we will all reassemble downstairs to see the model of our proposed renovation of this building unveiled. As David Stein’s long range planning committee has brought us to this point, my own emotions have run the gamut from excitement to terror. On the one hand, revitalizing this building and, more importantly, this community, is the one great goal I have set for myself. On the other, I know that attempting a project this big, this challenging, this daunting may well threaten a community that has achieved a quiet stasis, living modestly off its small inheritance.
Can we achieve the ambitious goals that are about to be put before you all? My more rational brain is quite sure we cannot. The times we live in - times where religious affiliation in general and Jewish affiliation in particular are declining - seem to be against us.
Is it that our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were more pious then we are? I actually don’t think so. I suspect that their willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to build a shul and a Jewish community reflected the constraints the larger community put on them as Jews. This is what we have always done: build for ourselves that which has been denied us by others. It is why this country is filled with Jewish hospitals and Jewish country clubs and Jewish colleges. It is why Jews have been such technological and cultural pioneers - because they have been shut out of all the established paths into our society. It is why the Arab boycott of the nascent State of Israel actually made the country stronger and more powerful.
But these are no longer times when Jews feel particularly marginalized by the larger society. They are, indeed, well wrapped up in it - including its trend toward secularization. For that small number of Jews for whom their religion is a large part of their lives, the tendency is not necessarily to join the shul that is in their town, but to find the one whose practices and programming best meets their needs. A committed Jew in Wallingford cannot be faulted for seeking a spiritual home in the much larger religious communities in places like Hamden or Cheshire.
For all these reasons, then - the seamless integration of Jews into the wider culture, the growing secularism of that culture, and the freedom that religiously committed Jews have to seek out even distant communities - leaves me feeling very dubious that the plans we are about to reveal will ever become anything more then that.
But I cannot help but see in my mind’s eye the skyline of modern day Beersheva. No doubt the desert that surrounds this oasis would look far more familiar to the man who dug its first well which, along with his seven sheep, gave it its name; a city in the middle of the desert that will soon be farming fish.
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