Why Some People Cannot See the Good in Their Lives

The 19th century Rabbi, Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, offers an astonishing insight into the mysteries of the human psyche in his commentary on the prelude to the romantic meeting between Jacob and Rachel. On his escape from his brother, Esau, Jacob stopped by the local well, and to his dismay he sees the local shepherds standing idly instead of watering their flock. When he asked the reason for their bizarre behavior, they pointed at a big stone covering the well. They couldn’t move the stone until more shepherds arrived, they told him. Despite their claim, Jacob tried and ultimately succeeded in removing the huge rock all by himself.

Rabbi Alter reads the story metaphorically. The concept of a well, a source of life in the midst of a barren field, exists in all aspects of the universe. Everything and everyone contains a life-giving element that sustains it. Even that which appears to be as deserted as a field has such a hidden place, a well, within it.

As for humans, the well represents the source of what enables life and makes it worth living. The boulder symbolizes what obscures our vision and obstructs our access to the spring of life. Life is God’s most cherished gift to which we must show eternal gratitude, but too often the stone muddles our reality and instead of life, we feel despair. While the shepherds succumbed to the boulder, Jacob used his mental and physical strength to overcome the obstacle.

So often we are like the shepherds. We stand at the mouth of the well, knowing what’s inside and how much we can benefit from it, but we perceive the stone to be too heavy for us to lift and keep waiting for the right time (that may never arrive).

The stone is the negative emotions we harbor. It is our anger at life that didn’t unfold the way we envisioned it in our youth; it is our disappointment with our children who failed to provide us the future we always dreamed of; it is our fury at friends who didn’t live up to our lofty standards of loyalty and support or our envy of their success, and the rock is blaming God for allowing the world to be so far removed from perfection.

The High Holy Days give us the opportunity to identify the forces that pull the stone down and make it unmovable, and when we muster the strength to begin to move the stone, God, just like He did for Jacob, will push it with us, until the lifegiving water of the well is fully exposed and we are able to quench our spiritual thirst.