The Well at Haran Was a Synagogue, Sinai, and the Road Home

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Fourteen Years Without Lying Down

Jacob was seventy-seven years old when he walked out of his father's house, and by then he had a habit of not sleeping.

Rabbi Yehuda counted fourteen years hidden in the house of Ever without once lying down. Rabbi Nechemia counted the twenty years in Laban's country the same way. What he did with those nights was recite. Fifteen songs of ascent, the ones that climb one on top of another through the middle of the book of Psalms. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman said it was the whole book, start to finish, every night.

The well went ahead of him when he left. Two days of road, up from Beersheba to Mount Moriah, and the water travelled in front of him the entire way.

Lie Down in This Place

He reached the mountain at midday and God met him on it.

"Jacob. The bread is in your bag and the well is in front of you. Eat, drink. Lie down here."

"Master of the world. The sun is a fifth of the way down. Am I supposed to lie down at the wrong hour?"

The sun went over into the west while he was standing there arguing. He looked up at it and lay down.

He took twelve stones for his head, and they were not ordinary field stones. They came off the altar where Isaac had been bound. Twelve of them under one head, to tell him twelve tribes were coming out of him. Overnight they closed into a single rock, to tell him the twelve would be one nation in one land.

They call God the Place. The reason has nothing to do with geography. Wherever a righteous man happens to be standing, that is where He turns out to be.

The Stone on the Well at Haran

Further up the road there was a field with a well in it, three flocks lying around the mouth of it waiting, and a stone across the opening too heavy for one shepherd to move alone.

Read the field once and it is a synagogue. The three flocks are the three men called up to the reading. The water is what the congregation comes in to drink. The stone across the mouth is the pull inside a person that wants the whole thing kept shut.

The choreography matches exactly. The congregation gathers. The stone comes off. The scroll rolls open and everyone drinks. Then the reading ends, the scroll rolls closed, the people go out through the door, and the stone slides back over the mouth of the well. The weight that was rolled away is sitting there again, exactly as heavy as it was before anybody came in.

The Same Well Was the Mountain

Rabbi Yochanan read the field as Sinai. The three flocks are priests, Levites, and Israelites. The water is the Ten Words. The stone on the mouth of the well is the Presence itself.

The detail he would not let go of is the gathering. All the flocks. Not most of them. If one Israelite had been missing from the foot of that mountain, the Torah would not have been given at all. The count had to be complete before the stone came off.

What the elders found under His feet when they went up was a pavement of sapphire, and the tablets were cut out of the same stone. Rabbi Sheila read the material as a calendar of suffering. The vision that belongs to Egypt is sapphire shaped into bricks. The vision that belongs to Babylon is sapphire stone. Stone is harder than brick, and so was the servitude.

Rachel Came Over the Rise

Rabbi Yose bar Hanina read the small talk at the well as the exiles talking.

"Brothers, where are you from?" Jacob asks the shepherds. "From Haran," they say, and sitting inside that place-name is the word for burning anger. What they are answering is that they are running from the wrath of the Place.

"Do you know Laban son of Nahor?" Sitting inside that name is the word for whitening. The question underneath it is whether they know the One who will one day make their sins white as snow.

"We know Him."

"Is it well with Him?"

"It is well." And on what merit? "Look. Rachel his daughter is coming with the sheep."

That is the answer to the question, and the answer turns out to be a girl walking over a rise with her father's animals. Centuries after, a voice comes up out of Ramah, wailing, bitter weeping, Rachel crying over her children and refusing to be comforted, and the reply she gets is the one that was already standing in the field at Haran. "Hold your voice back from weeping and your eyes from tears. There is a wage for the work you did. The children come back to their own border."

Jacob rolled the stone off the mouth of the well, and watered the flock, and kissed her, and wept.