Wells

The meaning behind Yitzhak's wells -- the symbolic meaning, that is -- seemed to be so obvious that I myself was surprised when I had to look further into the Zohar to help me flesh it out.  It was only in doing so that another meaning, obvious or not, in fact became apparent.

The story of Yitzhak's wells has an interesting twist to it in that there is only one side doing the digging whereas the other -- the Philistim -- are simply "stopping them up," as our Torah conveys.  Although Rambam's commentary states otherwise, it is not as if the Philistim are digging competing wells nearby Yitzhak's and there is somewhat of a legitimate fight over a scarce and necessary resource -- water.  Instead, in an act of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, the Philistim seek to stop up the wells so that everyone -- themselves included -- are unable to drink of the fresh springs beneath.

Perhaps one allegorical interpretation -- an interpretation arguably set forth in the Zohar -- is that the wells are the supernal wells of faith which the righteous must dig.  And that for whatever reason, HaShem has placed other individuals in this world who seek, and in fact actively seek, to quash the wellsprings of faith, either because they themselves are not believers, take some sort of perverse pleasure in persecuting believers, or simply believe in some other source of power (in fitting with the metaphor, drinking water from a river but not from a dug well).

Indeed, the allegory works in terms of opposing forces.  But, what if the digging and the filling and the quarreling and the final call for an answer of peace and plenty -- of Rehovoth, the third well -- is the internal struggle more explicitly fleshed out in Yaakov's tale with the "angel"?  That we dig and pray and meditate and study and find insight only to fill in the inspiration moments later, either consciously or unconsciously.  That these wells of spiritual seeking must constantly be dug, re-dug, re-located, and dug yet again until -- thankfully -- one day the well is deep enough and wide enough and spacious enough that its water gush forth mightily and unceasingly.  Or that we can re-claim the spiritual enlightenment previously discovered and taught by our familiar and spiritual ancestors -- the wells they dug.  In fact, I once read that either Buddha or one of Buddha's students described enlightenment as such -- something along the lines of that once the dam had been opened, it would be impossible to close it up again, imagery I always found equally powerful and beautiful.  Perhaps the Torah alludes to this understanding in the fact that once Yitzhak's third well is dug and explicitly not stopped up -- by anyone -- the text can, without warning, zoom forward in time to his death, as if to say that his struggle was over and Yitzhak could live out his days in peace and enlightenment before passing along his spiritual energy to the next generation.  

The fact that his end-of-life intentions may have been thwarted by Rivkah's own spiritual well-digging is perhaps a topic for another time...