Restoring intuition with zoom
The elements of the משל as formulated in abstract terms or d'varim of "human domain" are remote, without the sense of intuition the particulars of the story-like משל originally had. How are we, as moderns, to understand the experience of inaccessible water, outside of our domain? Our domain is vast, encompassing the whole Earth and encroaching on space! We bring oil from great depths, from all kinds of environments ranging from jungles to deep seas. Water is not something remote, that we strive to get, it comes from pipes, who even needs to think about it?
What we need to do to restore intuition, is to zoom in on a particular case, in which water is naturally seen as outside the human domain. To do so let us journey to a tiny village in Africa, where an ancient well, legend says was made long ago by the Ancients, lies dusty and unused. Bold children come over, peer into the depths, throw in a rock and await. After a seemingly endless time an eerie "plunk" reaches their ears, coming from a faraway world, remote and utterly disconnected from their village. The children run away, fear overcoming their natural curiosity and boldness at the encounter with "the deep". No one in the village knows how the Ancients drew water from the well, it is a mystery. How could anyone from the village dare even try to access water from the deep? Who knows what lives in that other world? Perhaps magical fish or a troll? It is not for simple villagers to deal with distant worlds, is there not enough work to do tending the cows and goats? Why waste time imagining drawing water from the deep?
The questions
1) Given our new intuition, why would any "hero" arise, who would dare engage "the deep"?
2) What would differentiate this person?
3) What is the significance of the great number of ropes used by the "hero"?
4) What is the significance of the villagers imitating the hero, also drinking water from "the deep"?
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3 comments:
We shouldn't ignore the goodness of the water. The legends would speak of the water of this well being worthy of the gods. Telling of its purity, its sweetness and its other special properties.
Exactly Yaakov. This is the meaning of the water being " cold, sweet and good". The value or "good" of the water is somehow immense, beyond that in the yishuv part of the Earthly domain.
My first thought was that such a hero would be driven by honor. I pictured him sitting around, planning a way to finally prove to all how truly great he is.
But, then I realized that such a person would probably be too scared to dare try something like this. To break free of this fearful perspective, I think the person would need to be the kind of person who isn't involved primarily in this social/mythical frame of mind. He is more of an eccentric kind of person, who doesn't care that much about these things and, instead, is involved in his own thoughts about how things work. He may have all kinds of strange inventions and contraptions scattered about his house. The mythical creatures some say lurk in those depths have no reality to him. He is curious about the nature of the deep water. It occurs to him that, just as workers sometimes tie 2 ropes together for certrain unusual building projects, perhaps many ropes could be joined to access this deep water. He has the patience to tie together many ropes, one after the other, for this project, as a means to seeing and drinking this water. (Perhaps relevant to the nimshal: Each rope was already produced and seen as useful by the people. His job is to connect them to each other, one by one.)Perhaps, once the rest of the people see that this man accessed the water and drank from it, with only positive results, they no longer feared it. Instead, they, too, drank, using this man's long rope.
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