The Mystery Of The Drinking Stone

In Jerusalem there is a stone whose name is אבן השתייה — the Drinking Stone, or the Foundation Stone. According to the oldest traditions, the entire world is built upon it.

And here, one can immediately notice an oxymoron: how can a stone — עצם דומם, an inanimate noun, a still and silent thing — also be a drinking source and the very foundation on which all of existence stands? In other words: how can life be still and moving, streaming and watering, at the same time? Is life motionless, or is it in constant movement? Can it be both?

We can say logically that neither man nor animal can drink from a stone. So what is אבן השתייה inside us? If our world is founded on it, where is it? What is our foundation — and what does it mean that this word, shet, is also the name of the third son of Adam and Eve?

When the third son is born, Eve names him Shet, saying: God has given me another seed in place of Abel, for Cain killed him. The name Shet — שׁת, shin-tav, 300–400, or in their small numbers 3 and 4 — carries the movement from the hidden into the manifest. The number 3 points to what is concealed, and 4 to what is expressed in time. Shet is the foundation of life, the passage from there (שָׁם) — from the place where Abel was unformed mist, source, and origin — to here: into form, into matter, into the world. From spirit into substance. The spirit longs to love, to express, to experience — through the river of time, through the dreaming we call life. And that foundation cannot be stopped.

The Hebrew word for stone is אבן — even — a combination of av (אב, father) and ben (בן, son). The father is the source; the son is the expression in time. This means there is always a living connection between the source and its unfolding in time, and the stone is a testimony to that relationship. From this bond between source and time, everyone can drink and live. אבן השתייה is the foundation of life here: the source and the expression in time on which the world is built — not only the universe as a cosmic expression, but the life of humans, birds, trees, and plants. Within each of us there is both the source and the unfolding in time.

When someone takes a photograph, it is a still moment — a frozen capture of time and space, of the matrix of life in which we exist at a particular instant. But a photograph is not who we are. We are adam, drawn from adamah le’elyon (אדמה לעליון) — earth reaching upward. A photograph is like cutting the water out of the river, away from the brook, severing it from the inheritance — נחלה. You cannot hold up a photograph and say: this is me. To do so is to disconnect yourself from the streaming, from the brook, from נחלת יהוה

Are we only our appearance — a body that surfaces at a certain moment in time? What about the dreams, the hopes, the longing, the searching, the singing? Are those also “caught” in the camera? Are we those who are seen — or is the greater part of us something that can never be seen and can never be captured?

And perhaps this is exactly what connects us all. This is what is considered the foundation of the world: the hidden, the secret — the sod — upon which everything is built.