This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Helena Dryjanski, has been sponsored anonymously.
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One of the most profound sequences of The Torah is, of course, the Song of the Sea. As per Exodus 14:27-29:
Moses held out his arm over the sea, and at daybreak the sea returned to its normal state, and the Egyptians fled at its approach. But יהוה hurled the Egyptians into the sea. The waters turned back and covered the chariots and the riders—Pharaoh’s entire army that followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. But the Israelites had marched through the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. (All Torah translations borrowed or adapted from The Contemporary Torah.)
This epic moment parallels a scene in the ancient midrashic collection Mekhileta DeRabbi Yishma’el, where Nachshon—brother-in-law to Moses’ brother Aaron—walked into the waters before Moses was able to part the sea:
וזה אומר אין אני יורד תחלה לים… קפץ נחשון בן עמינדב ונפל לים עליו הכתוב אומר הושעני אלקים כי באו מים עד נפש…
Each was saying, “I will not descend first into the sea…” Nachshon ben Amminadav leapt forward and landed in the sea. Of him, Scripture says [as if in his voice], “Save me, God, for water has come up to my throat” (Psalm 69:2). (Beshallach, Vaychi 5.)
But how can faith and fear coexist in a world with love not only of God, but with each other? How can we, as humans, depart rationality to put faith into a God that shows a capacity for boundless love and incredible feats of destruction?
To begin with, we should note that Nachshon, as a representative of the tribe of Judah, appears again in the Torah as the first among tribal heads to offer a sacrifice upon the dedication of the Tabernacle (Numbers 7:12). Further, as the Book of Ruth delineates, Nachshon’s line bore David, the future king of Israel. The Chasidic Rabbi Levi Yitchak of Berditchev (1740-1809) taught:
Entering the sea may have been prompted by one of two considerations. 1) Seeing God had commanded Moses to order the Israelites to proceed forward, he felt that it was his duty to risk his life in order to fulfill God’s commandment. He knew that it was his duty to proceed even if it were to cost him his life. 2) His act was simply a demonstration of his faith in God; he jumped into the sea, convinced that God would save him.” (Kedushat Levi on Beshallach; translation by Rabbi Eliyahu Munk.)
Of course, this moment is followed by the Israelites crossing the sea and singing such words of praise as Mi Chamocha (“מִֽי־כָמֹ֤כָה,” lit. “Who Is Like You?” in Exodus 15:11), extolling God’s name and God’s awesome power in saving them from Pharaoh’s army. This is where a seeming wrinkle appears: Why would Israelites celebrate the deaths of their many Egyptian enemies? After an innumerable number of years in bondage, the Israelites might have still doubted God’s power, even after the plagues of Egypt. Their reaction was part of their natural journey to accepting and loving the God that saved them. Although anachronistic, this seems antithetical to what the Torah actually teaches us. From Exodus 15:3-4:
יהוה, the Warrior—
יהוה is God’s name!
Pharaoh’s chariots and his army
He has cast into the sea;
And the pick of his officers
Are drowned in the Sea of Reeds.
The sages in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 39b, argue that God was displeased in their rejoicing of the violence the Israelites had just witnessed:
אָמַר לָהֶן הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא: מַעֲשֵׂה יָדַי טוֹבְעִין בַּיָּם וְאַתֶּם אוֹמְרִים שִׁירָה לְפָנַי?
The Holy Blessed One said to them, “My handiwork, i.e., the Egyptians, are drowning in the sea, and you are reciting a song before Me?”
Apparently, God is not gladdened by the downfall of the wicked. How can these two worlds coexist? How can we inhabit a world where the ancient Israelites were overjoyed at the death of others while a vengeful God watched on, and a world where we should always remain in fear of God’s power with no room for anything besides piety? Crossing the Sea is a perfect example of what God wants of us In that moment at the Sea of Reeds, Nachshon abandoned the logic of the rational world for this irrational faith, placing his trust in God because he diminished the small voice that told him he would die drowning, and Nachshon, of noble lineage, is rewarded.
Although death would have been close at hand if he had not waded into the water, Nachshon nonetheless ignored his inclination to save himself by avoiding any risk of drowning and thusly demonstrated his faith. When Moses finally channels God and parts the water, we have a didactic image of what God intends us to do; to wade into the unknown waters of reality and the future and be shown the way to freedom.
In an open letter to The New York Review—published December 21, 1967—the poet Robert Bly spoke about a fundamental fracture in the American world, and I believe we can extrapolate this to speak about our Jewish community. Bly observed that his peers, spurred by the protests surrounding the Vietnam War, were nonetheless receiving and accepting grants from the American government while there was an active war going on. Bly meditates on this rupture between the “inner” and “outer” worlds, where the inner world of moral consciousness dissociates from an outer world driven by rampant consumerism, close-mindedness, and individualism. Bly describes a disastrous split between the American’s inner and outer worlds:
[The American] does not aim to use his life to make himself whole, to join the two worlds in himself. On the contrary, he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds. The businessman gives up the inner world, and clings to the outer as his way…he is letting the world split—he lets the outer world go by him with just a wave of his hand, and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world to him.
Bly was speaking about the role of writers in the face of the Vietnam War, but I find these words particularly impactful when discussing our own troubled times. Such a ‘split’ is a narrowing of the self, our own Mitzrayim (מִצְרַיִם, “Egypt,” or, more literally, “narrow place”), where we are strangers to ourselves and to God. This is our dialectic. Bly refers to the splitting of the inner (the spiritual) and the outer (ethical and rational world) as an unfortunate by-product of living in an individualistic world, a world where most live without that ideological suspension of fear and love. In fact, leaning too far into one world without adjoining the two worlds creates a dissonance. There is room in this world for both fear and love. In fact, it is incumbent upon us to find meaning as fear and love reside inside each of us all at once. As reflected in the way we reference this Shabbat as Shabbat Shirah, the word Shirah (שִׁירָה, literally “song” or “poem”) reflects the many facets of our faith. Sometimes, the song is sung in fear of the Almighty’s power, and sometimes, it is joyous and is one of boundless love. When the voices of this song ring out in harmonious rhapsody, we can once again move forward with God at our side.
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