Be-Shalach

Be-Shalach

Exodus

Time and Social Transformation

“The context in which it is discussed is deeply controversial. In The Guide, Maimonides poses a fundamental question. Why, if the sacrificial system is so central to Judaism, were the prophets so critical of it?2 He does not ask a second question, but we should: if sacrifices are the primary form of worshipping God, how did Judaism survive without them for twenty centuries from the destruction of the Second Temple until today?

Maimonides’ answer is that sacrifices are secondary; prayer – the uniting of the soul of the individual with the mind of God – is primary. Judaism could thus survive the loss of the outer form of worship, because the inner form – prayer – remained intact.

“This leads Maimonides to his fundamental assertion.3 There is no such thing as sudden, drastic, revolutionary change in the world we inhabit. Trees take time to grow. The seasons shade imperceptibly into one another. Day fades into night. Processes take time, and there are no shortcuts.”

“Why did God not circumvent human nature? Why did He not simply intervene and make the Israelites of Moses’ day see that various practices of the ancient world were wrong? Here, Maimonides states a truth he saw as fundamental to Judaism. God sometimes intervenes to change nature. We call these interventions miracles. But God never intervenes to change human nature. To do so would be to compromise human free will. That is something God, on principle, never does”

“Freedom of the will is not accidental to human existence as Judaism conceives it. It is of its very essence. Worship is not worship if it is coerced. Virtue is not virtue if we are compelled by inner or outer forces over which we have no control. In creating humanity, God, as it were, placed Himself under a statute of self limitation. He had to be patient. He could not force the pace of the moral development of mankind without destroying the very thing He had created. This self limitation – what the kabbalists called tzimtzum – was God’s greatest act of love. He gave humanity the freedom to grow. But that inevitably meant that change in the affairs of mankind would be slow.

“It is hard to overemphasise the importance of this insight. The modern world was formed through four revolutions: the British (1640), the American (1776), the French (1789) and the Russian (1917). Two – the British and the American – led to a slow but genuine transformation towards democracy, universal franchise, and respect for human dignity. The French and Russian revolutions, however, led to regimes that were even worse than those they replaced: the “Terror” in France, and Stalinist communism in Russia.6

The difference was that the British and American revolutions, led by the Puritans, were inspired by the Hebrew Bible. The French and Russian revolutions were inspired by philosophy: Rousseau’s in the first, Karl Marx’s in the second. Tanakh understands the role of time in human affairs. Change is slow and evolutionary. Philosophy lacks that understanding of time, and tends to promote revolution. What makes revolutions fail is the belief that by changing structures of power, you can change human behaviour. There is some truth in this, but also a significant falsehood. Political change can be rapid. Changing human nature is very slow indeed. It takes generations, even centuries and millennia.

One of the major differences was that the English and American revolutions focused on the limits of state action and governmental power. The French and Russian aimed at a total transformation of society, through the instrumentality of the state.

The Divided Sea: Natural or Supernatural

“We have here two ways of seeing the same events: one natural, the other supernatural. The supernatural explanation – that the waters stood upright – is immensely powerful, and so it entered Jewish memory. But the natural explanation is no less compelling. The Egyptians’ strength proved to be their weakness. The weakness of the Israelites became their strength. On this reading, what was significant was less the supernatural, than the moral dimension of what happened. God visits the sins on the sinners. He mocks those who mock Him. He showed the Egyptian army, which revelled in its might, that the weak were stronger than they – just as He later did with the pagan prophet Bilaam, who prided himself in his prophetic powers and was then shown that his donkey (who could see the angel Bilaam could not see) was a better prophet than he was.”

“To put it another way: a miracle is not necessarily something that suspends natural law. It is, rather, an event for which there may be a natural explanation, but which – happening when, where and how it did – evokes wonder, such that even the most hardened sceptic senses that God has intervened in history.”

“According to Abbaye, greater are those to whom good things happen without the need for miracles. The genius of the biblical narrative of the crossing of the Reed Sea is that it does not resolve the issue one way or another. It gives us both perspectives. To some, the miracle was the suspension of the laws of nature. To others, the fact that there was a naturalistic explanation did not make the event any less miraculous. That the Israelites should arrive at the sea precisely where the waters were unexpectedly shallow, that a strong east wind should blow when and how it did, and that the Egyptians’ greatest military asset should have proved their undoing – all these things were wonders, and we have never forgotten them.”

Four Models of Leadership

“Each of these people exercises a leadership role: parent to child, teacher to disciple, Nasi to the community and king to the nation. Analysed in depth, the passages makes it clear that these four roles occupy different places on the spectrum between authority predicated on the person, and authority vested in the holder of an office.6 The more the relationship is personal, the more easily honour can be renounced. At one extreme is the role of a parent (intensely personal), at the other that of king (wholly official).”

“Judaism is a complex faith. There is no one Torah model of leadership. We are each called on to fill a number of leadership roles: as parents, teachers, friends, team members and team leaders. There is no doubt, however, that Judaism favours as an ideal the role of parent, encouraging those we lead to continue the journey we have begun, and go further than we did.10 A good leader creates followers. A great leader creates leaders. That was Moses’ greatest achievement – that he left behind him a people willing, in each generation, to accept responsibility for taking further the great task he had begun.”

The Turning Point

“Once across the sea, however, the Israelites have traversed a boundary. They are now in no-man’s-land, the desert. Again it is no accident that here, where no king rules, they can experience with pristine clarity the sovereignty of God. Israel becomes the first – historically, the only – people to be ruled directly by God. The Reed Sea is what anthropologist Victor Turner called “liminal space,” a boundary between two domains that must be traversed if one is to enter into a new mode of being1 – in this case the boundary between human and divine rule. Once crossed, there is no going back.”

“The battle against the Egyptians was a divine act, not a human one.

Not so the Amalekites, a battle that was fought after the crossing. Here the battle is fought by the Israelites themselves:”

“The book of Exodus teaches this lesson in the form of three narratives, of which the division of the Reed Sea is the first. The others are the epiphany of God at Mount Sinai and later in the Tabernacle, and the first and second tablets Moses brings down from the mountain. In all three cases we have a double narrative, a before and after. In each, the first is an act performed entirely by God – the drowning of the Egyptians, the revelation at Sinai, and the first tablets. The second involves a partnership between God and human beings (the battle against the Amalekites, the construction of the Tabernacle, and the second tablets, carved by Moses and inscribed by God). The difference is immense. In the first of each pair of events, what is evident is the power of God and the passivity of man. In the second, what counts is the will of God internalised by man. God is transformed from doer to teacher. In the process, human beings are transformed from dependency to interdependency.”

“The “anger” of God, so often expressed in the Hebrew Bible, is actually not anger but anguish: the anguish of a parent who sees a child do wrong but knows that he or she may not intervene if the child is ever to grow, to learn, to mature, to change, to become responsible.”

Excerpt From

Covenent & Conversation

Jonathan Sacks

Leaving Slavery Behind

This month is for you head of months. The reasonable inference of many scholars is that this calendric announcement reflects a moment in early Israelite history when there was at least one other competing system that designated a different month as the beginning of the year. (The Talmud later would speak of four different new years, and subsequent Jewish practice sets the beginning of the year in the early fall month of Tishrei, evidently making the calendar correspond to the agricultural cycle rather than to a historical event.) The point of beginning the annual sequence of months with the one in which the Exodus occurred is to coordinate the annual cycle with the event of liberation that is construed as the foundational act for the nation.”

“This continued until Nahshon the son of Aminadav [the prince of the tribe of Judah] sprang forward and descended into the sea first.”

“the Torah places tremendous emphasis on human beings taking the first step. God will not save the Israelites unless and until they are willing to go forward into the unknown. The sea will not split until someone is intrepid enough to proceed. It is only once the Israelites act, boldly and dauntlessly, that God’s miraculous intervention sets in.”

Bread From the Sky

“Long after liberation, the lingering effects of dehumanization endure. For the people of Israel, a long and tortuous road lies “between bondage and well-being.”73 One of the many things Pharaoh has taken from them is the ability to trust. God’s provision of manna (and Shabbat) is intended to restore that ability to the people, and thus to open them to the possibility of healthy dependence and real relationship.”

“More convincing, I think, are the words of R. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1167), who maintains that God is testing Israel’s ability to tolerate “needing [God] each and every day” (commentary to Exod. 16:4).83 Dependence can be difficult, Ibn Ezra realizes, especially when one has heretofore been dependent upon a merciless tyrant. But God wants to teach the people trust, and genuine trust will require the embrace of healthy dependence”

“Religion is about many things—one of them is the aspiration to surrender the illusion of self-sufficiency. We need God, and we need other people. Because we are human, and therefore embodied and fragile, the question, ultimately, is not whether we will be dependent, but on whom.

The Torah is, in part, a story about leaving destructive dependency (and the toxic memories that keep us in its thrall) and discovering life-affirming dependency as a radical alternative.”

Excerpt From

The Heart of Torah, Volume 1

Shai Held

Torah Portion by Portion

The word Pharaoh actually means the “Great House”—that is, the palace of the king. Calling the king of Egypt “Pharaoh” is like calling the president of the United States “White House”. Of course, we do just that. Newspapers, radio, and television often state that “the White House said …” or “the White House announced.…” Perhaps it began this way in Egypt, too. Following the time of Rameses, the king of Egypt was officially called “Pharaoh”

Excerpt From

The Torah: Portion-by-Portion

Seymour Rossel

Kaplan - Reuben

“Kaplan’s Insight

The human mind can be impelled not only by compulsive fears and anxieties, but also by propulsive hopes and assurances.”

Excerpt From

A Year with Mordecai Kaplan

Steven Carr Reuben

WBT - Leder

Exodus 14:15-17

Syntax

go forward, to where?

Do it now! Don’t wait.

Midrash

Nachshom

Moses raises his arm and nothing happens, x2

Nachshom alas into the sea. up to his knees, nothing happens, waist, nothing happens, when he goes in up to his nostrils (the point of no return) THEN the sea parts.

We only fully receive the benefits of something when we fully commit to something

First you walk, and THEN the seas part.