January 30th: Beshallach
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
“The length of time that the Israelites lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years; at the end of the four hundred and thirtieth year, to the very day, all the ranks of the Lord departed from the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 12.40-41).
This passage from last week’s Torah portion seems to mark the end of our very tragic experience with the Egyptians, but it is not. Though we leave Egypt proper, the Egyptians come chasing after us, and God’s miraculous rescue of the Israelites at the Red Sea is the stuff of legends—and songs of victory:
“I will sing to the Lord, Who has triumphed gloriously;
Horse and driver have been hurled into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and might, and has become my deliverance.
This is my God Whom I will enshrine, The God of my family, and I will exalt!” (Exodus 15.1-2)
There are lots of theological teachings that come of out of the Exodus story, but Psalm 114 provides us a very curious perspective. When we chant this Psalm during Hallel or at the Passover Seder, I usually focus on the humorous taunting of the water and hills:
“When Israel came forth out of Egypt, the House of Jacob from a foreign people,
Judah became the place of God’s holiness, Israel the place of God’s power.
The sea saw it and fled; the River Jordan turned backwards.
The mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs.
What’s the matter, sea, that you flee away, you Jordan that you flow backwards;
You mountains who skip like rams, you hills like young sheep?
Tremble, O Earth, at the Presence of the Lord, at the Presence of the God of Jacob!
Who turns the rock into a pool of water, flint into a fountain of waters!” (Psalm 114)
The enormity of God’s miracles impresses everyone—even the topography!
However, a closer look at the first two verses yields a slightly different message—one about God’s location:
“When Israel came forth out of Egypt, the House of Jacob from a foreign people,
Judah became the place of God’s holiness, Israel the place of God’s power.”
After manifesting miracles in and around Egypt, God now seems to be present in and among our people. Not in a specific place, but in the midst of the Israelite People, Am Yisrael.
Many stories in the Scripture focus on the places God is present and available. Jonah thinks that God is only in the Land of Israel—and that taking a ship from Israel to Spain will get him away from God’s Presence. The exiles in Babylonia wonder if God can still hear their voices so far away from Jerusalem’s Temple.
“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, when we thought of Zion.
There on the poplars we hung up our lyres,
For our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement:
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
How can we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil?!
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.
Let my tongue stick to my palate.
If I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.” (Psalm 137)
Judah Halevi continues this thinking in his classic poem of yearning (c.1141).
“My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west—
How can I find savour in food? How shall it be sweet to me?
How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet
Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains?
A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain—
Seeing how precious in mine eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.”
(Translation from the Hebrew by Nina Salaman, 1924)
As Hatikvah summarizes it, the preciousness of our Land and of the spiritual and national possibilities there are defining themes of our Judaism:
As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope—the 2000 year-old hope—will not be lost:
To be a free people in the Land of Zion and Jerusalem.”
And yet. And yet, there has been a flourishing of the Jewish spirit in many places. Israel is wonderful and worth supporting. We should prize what is possible in a Jewish country, but some of the greatest cultural and spiritual accomplishments of our people have taken place in the Galut, the Diaspora. The Babylonian Talmud, the Halachic and philosophical work of Maimonides (in Spain and Egypt), the Commentaries of Rashi (in France and Germany), and the Halachic works of Sages in Babylonia, Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq, as well as Poland and Russia and Germany are all examples of where the people of “Judah became the place of God’s holiness,” and the People of “Israel the place of God’s power.” We could go on and on with the spiritual insights of Eastern European Hassidism, the philosophical clarity of Baruch Spinoza (Holland) and Moses Mendelsohn (Germany), and the cultural greatness of Jews throughout the Galut. In fact, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus, the dean of American Jewish historians, would often talk about the ways that Jewish civilizations are judged and then conclude that the two greatest Jewish civilizations were both in the Diaspora: (1) The Golden Age of Spain/Al-Andalus (8th-15th Centuries), and (2) Modern America’s Jewish Civilization.
The point is not to de-emphasize the Land of Israel but to remind us that, wherever we are, the Presence of God is with us—a Presence that makes possible both holiness and power.
“When Israel came forth out of Egypt, the House of Jacob from a foreign people,
Judah became the place of God’s holiness, Israel the place of God’s power.” (Psalm 114)