California is in its third (or fourth, depending on how rainfall is measured) year of drought; it is one of six states experiencing extreme drought conditions in the US. Relief costs add an increased burden to the troubled national economy. Worldwide drought is harder to parse, since one nation’s drought is another’s floodstage. Even so, China, Australia, South America, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East are hard hit. Drought directly affects food production; famine always follows in its wake.

I have never been more than momentarily thirsty. Only on camping trips have I gone without showering. In my lifetime, this water-fat lifestyle will change. I remember reading the Science Fiction classic DUNE by Frank Herbert, and being profoundly affected by the Fremen, nomadic desert-dwellers with matriarchal religious leaders and a zealous penchant for Messiahs. [I set aside the plot for you to research on your own. Better yet, read the book; the commentary decrying the merging of politics and religion alone is worth the cost of the book, and there’s so much more there for a progressive Jew to love.]

I want to focus on one aspect of the Fremen: water was precious to them. Spitting at someone was high praise. Shedding tears was an offering of the Water of Life. Dead bodies were dehydrated, and the water given back to the Tribe. Fremen wore carefully fitted “stillsuits” that captured and recycled every drop of the body’s moisture. In the open desert, carefully husbanded, the reclaimed and purified water from one’s own body could sustain a traveler for days. But what I think of now, in context to our own California drought, is the dew collectors. Forests of dew collectors.

The Fremen had a dream of converting their barren wasteland of a planet into a water-rich oasis. They started the process by making forests of dew catchers and funneling the water collected every morning underground into large rock-walled catchment chambers. Do we have dew catchers, or was that a figment of Mr. Herbert’s ecological foresightedness? I Googled [is there a blessing for Google?] to find out, and located much information about water management in arid regions of the world, including the use of dew catchers.

All of this lead me to the parashat ha shavua. How did ancient desert dwellers on our own planet cope with water scarcity?

For one thing, they paid attention to clouds.

On the day the Tabernacle was set up, the cloud covered the Tabernacle, the Tent of the Pact; and in the evening it rested over the Tabernacle in the likeness of fire until morning. It was always so: the cloud covered it, appearing as fire by night. And whenever the cloud lifted from the Tent, the Israelites would set out accordingly; and at the spot where the cloud settled, there the Israelites would make camp. (Numbers 9:15-17).

I know what clouds mean to me. But for these wandering tribespersons, our tradition tells us, a cloud meant something different. The cloud indicated the glory of God’s presence with Moses (Exodus 16:10, 19:9, 19:16), at Sinai (Exodus 24:15-18) and at the tent of meeting (Ex 33:9-10; Num 12:4-6.) It protected Israel (Exodus 14:19-20) and lead Israel through the desert (Exodus 13:20-22).

The cloud is a visible sign of God’s glory and of Israel’s obedience. But the why of this miraculous explanation doesn’t convince me: why would God say, “Camp when the cloud covers the Mishkan, move when it lifts?” Carpice? An inscrutable Divine power trip? The story that has grown up around the origins of the Jewish people is strengthened by the miraculous, but what’s underneath the story? From what foundation did the myth emerge?

Maybe the cloud wasn’t supernatural. Perhaps instead, “Nature communicated God’s greatness and presence to the Israelites, who would dwell wherever they sensed the divine presence.” (From a Dvar on Beh’alotecha by Rabbi Matt Berkowitz, from the website of the Jewish Theological Seminary) One theory suggests the Israelites carried fire aloft, like the army of Alexander the Great. Such a fire would create what might be seen by day as a pillar of “cloud” (but really is smoke) and a pillar of fire by night. I am fond of practical solutions to the miraculous, but I’d like to suggest one less wasteful of combustible resources than a continuously burning fire. Besides, the Hebrew is anan (ayin, nun, nun), or “cloud,” and not ashan (ayin shin nun), or “smoke.”

Of course the Hebrews stayed encamped when a cloud was present! Of course they followed a cloud! What is sacred to a desert dweller? What naturally occurs in a cloud? Water! A cloud barren of water would prove God’s impotence; all sound (smoke) and fury (fire), signifying nothing. But Israel would be foolish to ignore an overt indicator of water.

Today’s ruins show that two thousand years ago, employing technology that is still used in the Negev, the Hebrew settlers of Israel constructed traps out of rock to catch the dew when a cloud hung in the air. [See note 1 below.] If the cloud lingered, and our parasha tells us it sometimes lingered for a year or more, the Hebrews dug trenches and reinforced them with stone to trap water and grow crops. Surely they learned this technology on their desert wanderings.

If a cloud is the work of a supernatural Deity, then God is far from us and we are thirsting. If a cloud is the result of water held as miniscule droplets in air, God is in our midst, and, like our desert dwelling, dew collecting forebears, we may gather and drink Divine Presence in the waters of dawn. L’chayim!

And now for the question of relevance of this reading of Beha’alotecha to Queer Torah. Conservation is a human issue, relevant to every carbon-based lifeform on the planet. Recognizing the Divine Presence in water vapor is also a human issue, relevant to everyone who has a stake in reconnecting humanity to the planet whose molecules give our souls form and substance. Even the task of reading these things – conservation and sacred nature – into Torah is not entirely the purview of queer interpreters. Perhaps the “queer” of this reading of the parasha is the simple audacity of making a connection (cloud = rain) that seems at once so obvious and yet remains so absolutely unspoken in the texts of our tradition. While audacity itself [e.g., “The Emperor is wearing no clothes!” ] is certainly not the proprietary material of queers [see Our Current President for more information], reading Torah audaciously might be one way to circumscribe the category of Jewish queers.

_ Note 1 Ancient water catchment techniques for proper management of Mediterranean ecosystems P. Laureanod, IPOGEA,Vico Conservatorio s.n.,75100 Matera, Italy (E-mail: ipogea@ipogea.org). Water Science & Technology: Water Supply Vol 7 No 1 pp 237–244 Q IWA Publishing 2007

Noach Dzmura is the editor of Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community an anthology (due to be released in June 2010) about the encounter of transgender bodies and identities with Jewish ritual and social space. Since March of 2008 he has edited Jewish Mosaic’s Torah Queeries. A recent graduate of the Richard S Dinner Center for Jewish Studies of the Graduate Theological Union, Mr Dzmura is a teacher, writer, web maven and instructional- design consultant. Noach maintains a website for transgender Jews here and has been published in the Forward, Sh’ma, the Jewish Chronicle (UK) and Zeek: A Journal of Jewish Thought and Culture. He has taught at recent events sponsored by Nehirim: A Spiritual Initiative for GLBT Jews. He is a founding member of Kol Tzedek, a community initiative to identify and act to fulfill the needs of the transgender Jewish community in the Bay Area, co-sponsored with the Progressive Jewish Alliance, Jewish Mosaic, and the San Francisco Jewish Federation’s GLBT Alliance.