Exodus Cycle Three Beshalach 13:17 to 17:16

Beshalach


In Beshalach there are moments that ring with familiarity. Here’s one. Moses has convinced (some) of the Israelites to follow him. Pharaoh says out you go. So after hundreds of years of servitude they leave Mitzrayim. Then they come to the Reed Sea. And they think this. Move forward and we drown. Move backward and we are trampled by Pharaohs armies who approach fast.

Reality, for the Israelites, has become a vast dark sea. We later learn that within water there are distinct sparks of light…mayim chaim. The question is how do we turn that sea into those sparks? How do we perform that alchemy? How do we find the radiance within a solid wall of certain death and chaos?

Let’s get back to that moment. The Pharaoh’s armies are behind us. The sea in front. It’s a sea filled with the dead locusts of the plague (Ex. 10:19). It’s a moment that lasts years, a lifetime, a blink of the eye. Our whole existence revolves around it. It’s the point-of-breath between exhale and inhale, stopped in the reality of potential. Of course, every moment is such. What can be is real, joyous, terrifying. The Reed Sea moment therefore is an exponential reflection of now and stands as a metaphor of each and every human experience (Sfas Emes).

Let’s look at this in greater detail. First, Pharaoh ejects the Israelites. We are beshelach-ed…sent out. There’s a propulsion resulting from the continual inoculation of the plagues into Mitzrayim. It’s a cleansing. The plagues scrape us out from the darkness. But they also scrape the darkness out of us and land it at our feet. Midrash says that there are 6 days of darkness in Egypt and the 7th is the darkness of the sea. It’s Shabbat in that everything done before has led to a heightened pause. Meanwhile, God has deliberately turned us away from the known path to avoid war. But what do we find here? A totally different battle…the war within ourselves.

We find our own stuff right there blocking us. And Torah can only be received if we break the darkness and move through. This poses a new problem though. Discernement.

Let’s look at one line in the parasha itself. In Exodus 14:20 we read and there was the cloud and the darkness and light all night….

What I see here is a parallel grammatical structure. These vibrations are grouped together. Light and dark on this earth have more in common than we think. Isaiah expresses this with his original writing of the Yotzer Or in which he includes rah (or evil). They are both God. They are us. And there’s an amorphous quality of these emanations that we don’t have the power to control through thought. So how do we discern one from the other? We do so by moving within, taking a path less known and facing the light-twin, the darkness of soul.

This means developing the courage and faith to move through the rough waters. This means that discernment and moving through are one and the same.

According to midrash even Moses doesn’t move forward. God says to him: My beloved ones are drowning in the sea and you prolong prayer before me? Moses responds: What then is in my power to do? And this is when God says (Exodus 14:15-16) speak to the children of Israel that they go forward. And lift your rod and stretch your hand over the sea and divide it and the children shall go in the midst on dry ground….

There are moments, God is saying, in the continual mating of light and darkness that they are so inter-wound on earth that prayer ( in order to remain pure) must evolve into solid action. Here, at the Reed Sea this solid prayer moves us through a whole history of darkness-servitude…with lifted rod and outstretched hand it moves us through the wall within ourselves. So just as the Sfas Emes says they purified their hearts (by faith…and the splitting of the sea) and then sang…and began to pray…the act of splitting the sea is itself a prayer crucial to our ability to bear witness to the Creator (Sfas Emes). It is a prayer that enables us to discern, move through and rise into the oneness inferred by Isaiah.

So, may we all turn our prayer into solid actions of faith and may we all split the waters of darkness within our soul and stand on solid ground holding Torah right at the center of the breakage. May we then sing, chant, and be blessed with what it means to turn a chaos of darkness into mayim chaim, sparks of light. And may we have the compassion and love to be Torah even as we are finding Torah. May we rise into oneness and truly have faith in God.