The symbol of the well is returned to repeatedly in this week’s parashah. We start with the famous midrash of Miriam’s well when her death spells thirst for the Israelites. Later, Moses provides water in a place named “Well”, and the Israelites sing the Song of the Well.
And twice, Moses gives a promise about wells to a foreign king: if you allow us to pass through your lands, he says, we will not drink well-water.
The surface-level reading of this promise is that the Israelites require passage and nothing else. It will be as if they were never there. They won’t take anything from the Edomites (and later, the Amorites), even water.
However, the wording of the promise proves puzzling. Moses promises that the Israelites will not drink meiy-v’eir, literally “water of well”, formulating “well” in the singular and apparently failing to mention other water resources such as cisterns.
Midrash Tanchuma suggests that this wording seems strange because we are reading the promise incorrectly. Moses was not promising to leave the resources alone; on the contrary, he was promising to interact with them. The well that Moses promised the Israelites would avoid was their own well: the miraculous portable well mentioned above.
This midrash reimagines Moses as saying: “We have our own well, and we have our own manna. But if you allow us to pass through your land, we will not feed ourselves. Instead, we will participate in community with you.”
The midrash subverts the text to provide a lesson about social relationships. We are meant to engage with one another. We are meant to try our best to be good neighbours, both as individuals and as people groups. Humans are not made to walk through the world looking after only ourselves. And while the foreign kings ultimately reject this offer, they are portrayed as wrong to do so.
What the Israelites are learning, and the foreign kings do not understand, is that relationship is a back-and-forth. Sometimes we are giving more; sometimes we are taking more. Sometimes what we give is not the same as what we take. Community is messy. But the messiness is not a flaw; it reflects the messiness of the human condition.
