Passover: Opening Up to Change

Reb Shlomo Carlebach: The Splitting of the Red Sea: Change as a Sign of Love

The Torah tells us that, after the Jews crossed through the Red Sea, “the Sea returned to its strength.” The Midrash says do not read it as “strength” but as “condition.” The Red Sea returned to its original condition.

G-d, when [Ze] created the Red Sea, made a condition with it that, on the seventh night of Pesach (Passover), when the Jews will be by the shores of the Red Sea, the Sea should split open and allow them to pass through.

So, everybody asks, wasn’t it when the Sea split open that it went back to its original condition, when it fulfilled the condition G-d made with it and not when it became water again?

G-d makes conditions, not only with the Sea. G-d makes a condition with every person in the world. G-d tells each person, “There will be one moment in your life when you can save somebody else’s life, there will be a moment when you can do the greatest thing, which I created you for, but – you have to be ready to be something else. To go out of your way. Water, to become dry land, to become anything in the world. The deepest secret of life is that I always have to be what I am, but there are moments I have to be not what I am also.

[...]

When you love somebody very much, what is the acid test? If you really love somebody – are you ready to change for that person, even for just a moment?

The Gemara says that finding your soul mate is like crossing the Red Sea. Everybody asks, why does G-d call out, forty days before a person is born, who their soul mate is? Because, for two people to find each other and live together, everybody living on their schedule all the time, they will never make it, right? I am I, and you are you. Unless they are like the Red Sea. When G-d created the Red Sea, at that time, [Ze] put in the condition that there will come a moment that it will have to stop being a sea and become dry land. But this is a heavenly power. You cannot do it after you have been created (i.e. with the power of ‘this world’). It must come from before. Because, change is the hardest thing in the world. That kind of change is not from ‘this world.’ It’s as deep as when G-d created the world. Therefore when a person is born, a condition is already made that you will marry this Chanale, but, for this Chanale, I want you to change a thousand times.

Now I want to go one step deeper. Why does the Torah say that the Red Sea went back to its original condition? Here is the deepest Torah in the world. What happens to you if you refuse to change? You know what happens to you? You might say: “Okay, at least I am what I am.” But, really, you are nothing. You know what the Torah says? When was the Red Sea really a sea? After it was ready to change. When are you really what you are? Only if you can be anything for somebody you love. And, when the Sea returned to its original condition, suddenly, it was really a sea, a real sea. Now its water was really water. When Moshiach is coming, “kamayim layam mechasim” (as water covers the sea) – the waters of the Red Sea, such deep waters, waters that are ready to change to save peoples lives.

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

[After Siddhartha loses his son] Siddhartha gazed into the water, and as the water moved images came to him: his father appeared, alone, sorrowing over his son; he himself appeared, alone, also bound with the bands of longing for his distant son; his son appeared, he too alone, the boy, desirous, raging on the burning track of his young wishes, each one of them aiming for his goal, each one possessed by his goal, each one suffering.

[...] Siddhartha took pains to listen harder. The image of his father, his own image, the image of his son flowed into one another...and other images, and they all flowed into and over one another, all of them became the river...the river was made of him and his kin and every human being he had ever seen, all the waves and waters made haste, suffering, toward destinations, many of them, to the waterfall, to the lake, to the rapids, to the sea, and all the goals were reached, and a new one followed each, and out of the water came vapor and rose into the heavens, came rain and plummeted down from the sky, came wellspring, came brook, came river, striving anew, flowing anew. But the ardent voice had changed. It still resounded, full of suffering, full of seeking, but other voices joined in, voices of joy and of pain, voices of good and ill, laughing and sorrowing, hundreds of voices, thousands of voices.

[...] He could no longer distinguish the many voices, not the [joyous] from the weeping, not the childish from the [strong], they all belonged together, lamentation of longing and laughter of the wise, outcry of rage and moaning on the deathbed, everything was one, everything was interwoven and intricately knotted, a thousandfold. And everything together, all the voices, all the goals, all the yearning, all the suffering, all the desire, everything good and evil, everything all together was the world. Everything all together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And if Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices, if he did not listen to the pain or the laughter, if he did not bind his soul to any one voice and enter into it with his I, but rather listened to all, the entirety, perceiving the unity, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of one single word, and the word was OM: perfection.