Shirat Hayam

The Shira HaYam is difficult to think about. Reading just the first three verses literally:

we are left with no other conclusion than that of our ancestors chanting wildly into the wind at the annihilation of the Egyptians. God, our deity, is a warrior God. This picture of our ancestors and God is very foreign to our modern sensibilities. But, lets go through a little history and see how we came so far from the slaves that escaped Egypt just seven days before we crossed the Sea of Reeds.

History as recorded in the Torah before this is quite short, and I will make the history since this story also quite short. Keep in mind that it is a good deal more involved but the basic story line is that we have grown as a people a lot and that our relationship to God and our understanding of God is still a work in progress.

Our scholars have given appellations to several of our most important personalities:

• Abraham our Father,
• Moses our Teacher,
• Ezra the Scribe.

Our relationship to God changed in each era and these people truly personify that relationship.

The Torah starts with the story of Creation, including Adam and Eve. The beginnings were not really auspicious, Cain kills Abel and his descendant Lamech is a truly horrifying individual. Ten generations on, God has quite literally had enough and wants to start over. However, he finds one righteous person, Noah, and God instructs Noah how to save humankind and all of the creatures from the Flood. Because of what Noah did and the horror of what God did, God made a promise never to destroy all of humankind again and we have a rainbow as a concrete sign

At this point in our history, God's relationship to man is one on one at God's choosing. Very intimate if it is there at all.

Ten generations more, and we meet Abraham our Father. God was not generally present to all people during Abraham's lifetime, but God did have a very personal relationship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and also interacted directly with Hagar. At the Akedah, God tests Abraham and we enter into a covenant together.

In one sense, this is the beginning of the Jewish people. Abraham travels widely and builds many alters and sacrifices many animals. But, we still do not have any law; no sense of being Jewish. We segregate ourselves by circumcision but that is about it.

The relationship with God is still personal and intimate but not widely shared.

Fast forward a bit and we are facing an existential threat and relocate to Egypt because of a famine.

The total number of Jacob’s children and grandchildren who came down to Egypt was just 70 plus wives. 400 years later, we numbered 600,000. And now we are crossing into the wilderness with Moshe Rabeinu. As we know, Moshe knew God best, but God was very much present physically to the Israelites as they made their way from Egypt to Canaan.

God was present in the Cloud by day and Fire by night. God provided manna every morning, six days a week for food. In this very parasha, God provides potable water at Marah.

God during our time in the wilderness was known as well as anyone has ever known God by Moses but God was also a presence to the whole of the community.

Now we are going to fast forward over our establishment as a People in Canaan. We continued the war begun against the Egyptians and dispossessed many peoples from their land. We established a kingdom and built the first Temple. That kingdom then split into two and the northern kingdom of Ten Tribes was annihilated. Ultimately, Judah, the southern Kingdom, was defeated and we were marched off to Babylon in Exile. Prophets are screaming at us the whole time, to no avail. Our relationship to God, when we had one, was through the Priests and through sacrifice. Gods relationship to us reverted to individual Prophets and they largely ranted into the wind. No one listened. Then exile.

70 years later, Ezra haSofer leads us with Nachmaniah back to Israel under Persian rule. We will not be independent again until 1948. Ezra finds that Jews have become horribly uneducated and sets about a program to fix this. He establishes regular Torah readings on Shabbat morning, Shabbat afternoon, and Monday and Thursday mornings. But he goes further. He realizes that we are just one more calamity away from losing everything in our history. So he and others form the Great Assembly and begin a couple hundred year effort to completely codify the Tanakh and Jewish ritual practice.

Ezra the Scribe is really, in one sense, the father of rabbinic Judaism. Over the next 1000 years or so, Rabbis like Hillel made rulings. Meanwhile, the Jewish laity forgot more and more, assimilated into the Hellenistic and then Roman dominant culture, until later Rabbis decided they had to go even further and write down the Oral Law. First the Mishnah was redacted – basically the crib notes. By about 500 CE, the law book discussion, the Gemara was written down. Together the Mishnah and the Gemara make up what we call the Talmud. The next 1000 years would see many commentaries written on the Talmud, so much so that there are standardized Dafs with Talmud in the center ringed by commentary.

Our relationship to God is now completely through our own hearts and our own learning from the books that these Rabbis wrote and that we engage with and create new teaching today. But our Judaism looks very different from what the Israelites on the banks of the Sea of Reeds may ever have imagined.

Our version of God, shows Rachum – Compassion, Chanun – Grace, is slow to anger, and shows great lovingkindness.

But this is not what our ancestors believed at the time. They lived in a world with idol worship, where gods changed from place to place and from time to time. While we warred on the ground, gods warred with us. We read Mi Chamocha after the Shema every morning and every evening. This comes straight from the Shirat HaYom and is literally translated:

So when we read a bloodthirsty song praising an all powerful god, we are not reading about God. We are learning about those who sang it.

Our vision of God will change in six weeks when we get to Sinai, and as we have seen, our relationship and understanding of God will continue to evolve for the next 3000 years. I suspect that we have more growth and evolution yet to come. On the one hand we can rightly celebrate along with our ancestors their introduction to the power of God, without celebrating a slaughter. I would hope that our descendants 3000 years hence will be able to appreciate the problems that we wrestled with and the ways that we sought wisdom from our liturgy and guidance, in a prayerful way, from our version of God.

God, I believe also changes and learns from us, the other, not anywhere close to half of the relationship. I would hope that with sufficient maturation, we will never have a need for the warrior god again.