O Torrent
O Lover,
In my memory’s repository I am on the Harám esh-Sharíf (aka the Temple Mound) in Jerusalem. Retracing the vision of the prophet Ezekiel (47:1-12) set on this spot is colored by my having been repeatedly at the same place more than a half century ago. From my perch on the spine of Palestine I am looking east across the Kidron Valley into the vista of the Mount of Olives behind which is the severe descent into the Arabah Rift (including the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea) beyond which are the opposing heights of ancient Moab. Where I stand is holy ground for all of Your Abrahamics. Thus Jerusalem’s name for Jews is Yerushaláyim (“Abode of Peace”), for Moslims Al-Quds (“The Holy”).
Again in my mind’s eye, one of Your guides is escorting me from the door of the temple’s facade eastward into its inner court. I notice water trickling out from under the southern side of the sanctuary, and it is flowing to the east. After leaving via the north gate and then the outer court I follow Your guide eastward where the water from the temple is flowing into the Kidron. At some point he uses a line to measure out 1,500 feet farther where the water is found to be ankle-deep. Subsequent such measurements find the water at our knees, then our waists, after which it becomes an unfordable river, its flow ever increasing and requiring swimming. Your escort turns to me: “Are you seeing this?”
We continue eastward and sharply downward along the river both banks of which are now verdantly foliaged. I am told that the torrent will continue to rush down into the Arabah and then southward where it will freshen the Dead Sea with its salinity ten times that of the ocean. And in this riparian corridor coursing down every living species will thrive. The trees along the torrent will be heavy with fruits—“They will bear every month because their water flows from The Holy” (12)—and their leaves will be for healing. In places along the Dead Sea like Ein Gedi fishermen will spread their nets for many kinds of fish as they do by the Mediterranean.
O Lover, YOU ARE THE TORRENT! How is it that I have been so captured by the vision You generated in Ezekiel that, to reference Annie Dillard’s tree, I am momentarily full of light? What is it that so seizes me?
As starters, the vision, augmented by my own experience, is topographically, aesthetically, and mystically jaw-dropping. From the mountain with its mystical pedigree, water, less plentiful in its cisterns than in its poetic literature, is ever more bountifully coursing down c. 3,885 feet of arid elevation to the surface of the Dead Sea but 25 miles away. This vision crowded with evocations of Your power, beauty, dynamism, and indomitability has ambushed me. To borrow from Eckhart, You do indeed “boil over” (ebullítio)!
Furthermore, Ezekiel’s vision overflows with intimations of Your transformative fecundity. You, Living Water (see Jn 4:1-14), ubiquitously foster and nurture life so that “everything will live where the river goes” (47:9). The riparian zone is lush with many creatures, trees bearing fruit monthly, and leaves “for the healing of the nations” (see Apoc 22:2). Moreover, the sea’s desalination and the thriving of its aquatics accentuate the fructivity of Your dream for the cosmos. Life—varied, lavish, gorgeous—signs Your presence!
Finally, it is the historical context which makes this vision particularly powerful for me. Ezekiel, a priest, received it while living in the resettlement village of Tel Abib on the River Chebar SE of Babylon City in about 593 BCE. He had been part of the removal of many religious and political leaders of Judah during Nebuchadnezzar’s second Judah campaign four years earlier. He lived out his exiled life in the shadow of the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem, the site of Your glory in the temple. He surely embodied exilic queries: “How do we sing [Your] song in a strange land?” (Ps 137:4) Do You not reside in the temple cultus, now reduced to ashes? Are You tethered to Jerusalem or are You mobile? Does exile mean abandonment? And yet, it is precisely in this setting that You image the flowering of Your irrepressible dream of tikkún olám (“repair of the world”).
O Torrent, in this present dark time many of us are also in exile, in Babylon. In our grieving, confusion, and fear we sometimes experience You as distant and absent, and we pine for the stability of an earlier and seemingly more secure time and place. It is thus for us that Ezekiel responds to the question whether You also reside in Babylon: “The LORD is there” (48:35).
