When the people cried out for water at Rephidim, Moses did not simply strike any rock. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan insists on a precise geography: God said, "Behold, I will stand before thee there, on the spot where thou sawest the impress of the foot on Horeb" (Exodus 17:6). The rock was not chosen at random. It was marked.
The Aramaic reading teaches that when Moses had ascended Horeb to receive the burning-bush commission, he saw the imprint of a divine presence pressed into the stone. That place was bookmarked in his memory. Now, months later, with a mutinous nation ready to riot, God tells him to return to the exact spot. Strike that rock, and the water will answer.
There is a quiet theology here. Miracles do not happen everywhere; they happen where sanctity has already landed. Moses is not bullying nature into producing water. He is returning to a site where God had already declared His nearness, and the rock remembers.
And so, the Targum concludes, "Moses did so before the elders of Israel" — publicly, before witnesses, so that no one could later claim it was a trick. The takeaway: sometimes the way forward is to return to the place where you first met God, and to speak there again.