By Our Own Hand: B'shallach

By Our Own Hand

D’var Torah for Parashat B’shallach

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Parashat B’shallach (Exodus 13:17—17:16) has some of the most breathtaking imagery in the entire Torah.  This is the portion of the Parting of the Red Sea.

Filmed, animated, featured in scores of comics and cartoons and lampooned—Hollywood’s highest compliment—in the Jim Carrey comedy “Bruce Almighty,“ this scene is visually magnificent.  As well it should be.  For it represents the birth of our people, the Israelites, our collective immersion in—and coming out of—a mikveh of living waters, mayyim hayyim. This vision captures our imagination and lets it fly unfettered. 

Yet the parted sea also closes shut behind us.  The Israelites find themselves forever more on this shore of time and history; the past is gone forever.  Not gone from our memory, of course.  In the previous portion, Bo (Ex. 10:1—13:16), Moses has just commanded the Israelites to commemorate this event forever, throughout the generations.  To this day, at every Passover we remind ourselves of our 400 years in slavery.  Diminishing our cup of happiness at having survived oppression, we remember also the plagues that punished the Egyptians, many of which afflicted us as well.  We remember the many deaths; of our children; of their children.

Certainly at points during those four centuries, particularly in the beginning, we thought of ourselves as fortunate.  Living in the Land of Goshen, free of the indentured servitude to Pharaoh that every other Egyptian found himself in, for us there was food, comfort and rest.  But as they always do, times turned and fortunes turned.  Now we were the slaves, oppressed, pursued and persecuted.

On promises of hope and redemption, our people began our historic journey with shouts of exultation.  Our song, the Song of Miriam, rose to the very heavens in fervor and faith.

A pillar of smoke behind us, a pillar of fire before us, we faced the future with such optimistic—perhaps naïve—confidence, that what we didn’t notice is what lay ahead.  In fact, all around us.

When the song was done, we found ourselves lost in a wilderness. 

From the heights of the ancient world’s most exulted culture, from the pinnacle of glory and luxe that was Egypt, we became transplanted to a desolate and forbidding desert.  Water, food and shade were scarce, as was protection from marauding tribes and wild animals.

No one foresaw the many trials that lay ahead, taxing Moses’s and God’s patience time and again.  No one could imagine the lust for meat and fresh water after months and years of dry matzah and mannah.  No one anticipated the bitterness, the quarrels, or the dismal failure at the incident of the Golden Calf.  All this lay ahead yet, as did the Ten Commandments and the building of the Tabernacle.  No one, in their darkest dreams, expected the journey to last more than a couple of weeks, perhaps a month at the most. 

Certainly not forty years.  A whole generation.

Blinded by the astonishing visions they had just seen, the Israelites could be forgiven for this failure of imagination.  Wouldn’t the Hand of God—indeed, the very Finger of God—which slew Pharaoh and all his best charioteers—carry them the rest of the way to the Promised Land, the Land of Milk and Honey?

Some call it The Lost Generation.  M’tei Midbar—those who died in the desert, that first generation of Jews who could do nothing but complain, question and quarrel.

I call it the Tested Generation.

What lay ahead was not only a physical wilderness.  It was a spiritual morass as well.  It was life in all its gritty reality.

This was a lesson God had tried once before, when God expelled Adam and Eve from Paradise.  From a true land of milk and honey, God thrust humanity into a chaotic and barbaric world, where there were no rules.  Take what you needed, when you needed it, from anyone who might have had it first.

It was a world of brute strength.  Survival was only guaranteed for the fittest.  And sometimes the lucky.

That first experiment ended badly.  Cain killed Abel.  By Noah’s time, ten generations later, the entire world was full of violence and corruption, down to its core.

Now God was trying it yet again, and this time on a much bigger scale.  This time the experiment involved a whole people, cultured and sophisticated, not only two naked, childlike, naïve individuals. 

Thrust into a new world of anarchy and harsh survival, the Israelites had to learn everything from the beginning.  They needed rules if they were going to overcome the obstacles that lay ahead.

But before all else, they needed to discover their trust.

In Egypt, as slaves, they knew all the rules.  They were told when to get up, what they must do and when they could rest.   The only leadership they knew was that of their taskmasters, Egyptian and Hebrew alike.  They trusted none of them, just they didn’t question any of them.

In fact, trust is all about questioning, about inquiring of purpose, method and direction.  It’s about discovering and determining a path through the desert not only for oneself but also for the whole group.  As the Israelites begin their journey on the path of history, they must learn to trust their leaders.  They have to learn the extent of their own strength while maintaining faith in a higher vision and power.  This could not be blind trust, not if they were going to become the people they were destined to be.  Greatness requires testing, trial and error, failure and success.  Learning to overcome obstacles is the true test, the proof of one’s independence and mettle.

As the book of Exodus begins, all Egypt views the Hebrews with scorn, as just so much vermin.  And perhaps we were.  But no more, not at this point.   In Egypt, at God’s command, Moses stood tall and spoke historical truth to Pharaoh.  Now on this shore of the Red Sea, it became the task of all Israel to learn how to stand tall.  In order to do that, however, we could not rely only on God’s helping Hand.  We also had to learn how to help ourselves.  We had to find the core of our own inner strength.  Faith in God was essential, but no less so was the lesson of reliance on our own strength.

That is why God didn’t lead us to the Promised Land by the sure, quick and known road.  We had to find the way ourselves.  That first generation of liberated survivors was far from m’tei midbar, a hopeless generation destined to die in the desert.  They were the first to chart the wilderness, first to discover the route through it and then teach it to all future generations.  Like commanders in today’s IDF, the modern State of Israel’s Defense Force, whose battle cry is “Acharai!”—after me!—that first generation of liberated Jews set the example for all those who would follow, for all time.

The lesson of B’shallach is that curiosity and courage, faith in the Hand God and reliance on the strength of our own hand is an unbeatable combination.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman