The Song of Freedom
D’var Torah for
Parashat B’Shallach
By Rabbi Boaz D.
Heilman
This week’s Torah portion, B’shallach (Exodus 13:17—17:16) holds up one of the most
spectacular images for us all to behold.
It is the parting of the Red Sea.
Every year we retell this wondrous story, and between the
illustrations in the Haggadah that we use, and the movie versions we’ve
watched, the imagery comes alive in our imagination. The sight of the walls of water rearing
backwards and upwards, the mighty current roaring its anger at being stopped
mid-wave, combine with the crying and screaming of the Israelites, a sound that
clashes with the clatter of the chariots, the yells of the charioteers and the
snorting and whinnying of Pharaoh’s horses charging up from behind to create a
moment unparalleled in history.
But did it really happen?
Biblical scholars, archeologists, historians and others have
tried to chart the way of the Israelites as they left Egypt. Perhaps their path took them through
swamplands, or perhaps it was a narrow passage that only Moses (who, you
remember, herded his father-in-law’s sheep through the desert and thus knew
every pathway through it) recognized?
Not only scholars ask.
Just a couple of Friday evenings ago, when I was sitting down to a
Shabbat meal with my family in Israel, one of the 9 year old twins asked her
father: “Abba, did the stories of the
Torah really happen?” Without a moment’s
hesitation, the child’s father answered, “Of course.”
Yet this wasn’t the first time a child asked this
question. In fact, it has become
ritualized in our Passover Seder, in the section we call The Four Questions,
usually recited or chanted by the youngest person seated at the table.
It turns out that questioning the veracity of miracles is
not only permitted—it is encouraged. Not
so that another, negative, answer can be given, however. No!
Rather, we ask so that the answer will always remain fresh, new, full of
life’s force and energy.
It really doesn’t matter whether the Red Sea parted exactly
as described in our Torah portion. What
matters is that something
happened. Something enormous and
magnificent, something that turned around not only the course of the sea, but
of all history.
The emergence of the Israelite People unto the world’s stage
was not a mere trifle. It went contrary
to all ordinary laws and rules of nature.
The earliest extant evidence of the existence of the
Israelites comes in the form of two documents.
One is the Mesha Stele—an inscribed stone set up by a Moabite king in
the 9th century BCE—describing how Israel was destroyed
forever. The other document—this time
from Egypt—refers to the annihilation of a people called Israel by an attacking
Pharaoh in the year 1205 BCE.
By all historical evidence, logic and reason, Israel and its
people should have disappeared thousands of years ago. Victorious empires made it their practice to slaughter
whole populations, to move peoples around from one part of the empire to
another so as to erase their natural roots and memories. In the year 135 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian
destroyed the last vestige of the Judean revolt, killed hundreds of thousands
of Jews and exiled at least as many to other parts of the Roman Empire. To cap it all off, he renamed Israel
“Palestine.”
That is the normal course of history, sadly repeated over
and over again.
Yet, despite all claims to the contrary, Israel is still
here—its land, people and God still vibrant and well, still a force to contend
with after all these years.
Is that not a miracle?
That a people who emerged like the legendary phoenix from
the ashes of the Holocaust could recreate themselves and become who we have
become—is that not a true miracle?
The survivors of the concentration camps had nothing to
their name. Their homes and all their
possessions had been taken away. They
were torn away from their past and future generations. The tatters they were wearing on the day they
were liberated constituted their only possession on this earth. Yet, they arose and came home, home to their
own land, to the only land they could call their own, to the only spot on earth
where they could live as an independent people.
They came from all corners of Europe and, later, from all other parts of
the world. In our own age we have
witnessed an exodus unparalleled in the annals of human existence.
No sea could stop the people’s progress; no mountain stood
in our way. History parted to let us
through.
A similar miracle happened in this week’s portion. Some three and a half thousand years ago, too,
a people emerged from a great holocaust.
Slavery, oppression and genocide (the drowning of all new-born baby
boys) were left behind as the Israelites departed en masse, overnight.
With God in our souls, showing us the way to freedom, with
an eternal promise of safe haven to look forward to—and with a song of triumph
on our lips—the Red Sea didn’t stand a chance.
Its growl turned into a whimper, and then even that was gone.
Only once we reached the other shore, forever free, did the
sea roar again, as it closed in one last time on our oppressors.
Did it really happen?
Yes. Time and time
again.
It’s a story that never grows old.
© 2013 by Boaz D. Heilman
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