Creating The Conditions For A Miracle

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on February 7th, when we celebrated Shabbat Shira, the joyful Shabbos when we sing extra songs to recall the Splitting of the Sea. Rabbi Lizzi connected the momentous but rather frightening first step toward freedom across the Red Sea to the courageous steps toward liberation taken by civil rights activists. How can we follow in their footsteps? 

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Here’s a joke, thank you to 6th grader Ben Hirschberg for sharing it:

How did Moses comb his hair?He parted it!

This is the week for that joke — the week we celebrate the iconic parting of the Red Sea, and the crossing through of millions of people from slavery to freedom. This moment is the powerful culmination of the Exodus story, which we’ve been studying for the past month week after week, sermon by sermon. The fact that when looking at these chapters of the Bible it is staggeringly unclear whether we’re talking about the past or the present, is truly chilling. 

Over the past month we have witnessed the saga of how an insecure leader hell bent on consolidating power, and hell bent on making people forget history and bend to his will based on lies about vulnerable populations in their society’s midst — succeeds in turning neighbors on neighbors in fear, and leading people to acquiesce to policies that are not even in their own interest. We’ve looked at our texts and seen how once-valued minorities can quickly turn into scapegoats for a nation’s problems, and how the majority can enable atrocities, or sit idly by while they happen, because the magnitude of the shock and horror is so overwhelming — how can one imagine fighting against forces so much bigger and more powerful, and at what cost, to one’s own safety? And where is God in this moral catastrophe? Well, God identified an unlikely leader who didn’t want the job, and gave him the strength and direction to lead even when his own people turned on him — remember, they said, “Stop trying to help!  The more you “help”, the harder they make our lives!” which was true! But then God sent the plagues, 10 plagues one after the next that take Egypt down a path of decline, fear, reactivity, and chaos. At a certain point, even Phaoraoh’s advisers who had helped him birth this whole plan of holding onto power, say “Enough!”  

And so this week begins with the words, “Va’Yehi B’Shallach Paro et ha’Am… When Pharoah finally sent out the People…” thus beginning the scene in the Prince of Egypt where I always start to cry, as families begin to gather their belongings, and hurriedly rush out, their children skipping along, toward the possibility of a different world.

And while the splitting of the Red Sea is inarguably the most iconic moment in the Jewish story, we would be fooling ourselves to think it was inevitable. It is a blip. It is an aberration. Whether it was a divine miracle or whether it was an incredible confluence of the forces of nature conspiring to support the liberation of the Jewish people for a story that would reverberate through the generations, the fact is that this moment is the exception, not the rule. The unbounded happiness of that extraordinary sea-splitting moment is surrounded on all sides by fear and doubt, by hopelessness, complaining, discomfort, anger, grief, cynicism and suspicion.  So rather than focusing on the temporary moment of light in a dark story… I want to look at how, in the midst of darkness and all of those dimensions of the human experience (which we know very well right now), how nonetheless, did our people create the conditions for that miracle? I think right now, in order to even imagine the light, we have to talk about navigating the doubt, fear, and despair that threaten to enshroud us in darkness.

https://youtu.be/iU21-NBXt38

Our first clue that the Exodus was not inevitable is that text tells us that the Israelites went up from Egypt Hamushim — usually translated as armed or laden. This is generally understood as in the last act of leaving the homes in which they were slaves, the Egyptian families put items of gold, silver, even dolphin skin, into their bags — an act of what you might even call reparations — so that the Israelites and their fearsome God would remember them with kindness. “We might have enslaved and degraded you, and we can't change the past but here is something to help you get back on your feet.” This included household items and weapons so they could defend themselves in their journey through the desert. In a few chapters when the building of the Mishkan begins — the traveling spiritual retreat center of the Jewish people — it is understood that all the materials to build it came from this last act of generosity in the part of the Egyptians. Or self preservation. Chamushim.

Any Hebrew or Semitic language speakers hear any familiar roots in that word?

Chamesh — five. Rashi, a medieval French commentator, says its also possible that chamushim has an alternative meaning, which is that one in five Israelites made this journey — the other four fifths stayed in Egypt.

Let's do a little biblio drama here. You're all Hebrew slaves. For the past 238 years this life is all you've ever known. I Moses, have told you that God will deliver you from this place and make of you a mighty nation, bring you to a Land promised to your ancestors where you will dwell in peace and security. But it's going to be bloody, and there are a lot of unknowns. Someone make a case for coming with me.

Ok now, someone make a case for staying. 

What could possibly cause a person to not leave?? Fear, doubt, getting used to the darkness and the comfort of the known. Not believing really that anything could be better than this, not believing their efforts would be rewarded — so not taking steps toward a different future. Our tradition says those folks were left in Egypt. You did not descend, ancestrally or spiritually, from those Israelites. We come from the 1 in 5, the distinct minority, who did not despair. Who embraced the unknown at a moment’s notice with the clothes on their back and half-baked bread in their bag, giddy with a sense that a better future awaited them.

But then they get to the actual sea and look back and see the Egyptian army hunting them down, pursuing them. And the water stands in front of them, unparted. That giddy, expansive sense of the future disappears and is replaced with terror.  This is, by the way, where we see the first use of sarcasm in the Torah, as these people scream at Moses, “what, we're there not enough graves in Egypt you had to bring us out here to kill us??” They are in full despair and self-pity mode. One by one the leaders of each tribe of Israel look at the water and say I'm not going in first, I'm not going in first.

Until one guy, Nachshon ben Aminadav, the leader of the tribe of Judah, steps into the water. Nothing happens. Keeps walking, to his knees, into his chest, he is so sure this is what must be done…everyone else is sure this was a fool's errand coming out here to the desert. And the water is up to his nose… 

And then… the water parts. The sea opens up and reveals dry land below. The Israelites cheer, rush in, traverse the water, get to the other side, look back and see Pharoah and his army barreling toward them and then, just as miraculously as the water split, it returns to its place. The mightiest empire washes away. Our people are free and in their first act of doing something as a people, they sing. Incidentally the song of the sea, a Hebrew acrostic poem starting with Alef and ending in Taf and praising God’s greatness starting with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, that song — is one of the oldest shared tunes for a prayer across all of the global Jewish communities, that we know of. It’s a beautiful moment of unity and harmony that has animated the moral imagination of the planet for 3,000 years. And it’s the blip. Immediately after that the people start complaining about the food in the wilderness, the accommodations, and the leadership. This continues for the rest of the Torah.

I was in Israel all of last week studying at the Hartman Institute in a cohort with 25 other rabbis — it’s a real honor, I feel very lucky, it is always really meaningful and this is not the only story I’ll share from my time there (tho it is the only story tonight). I was there over Rosh Hodesh, the monthly Jewish celebration of the new moon, thought of by our tradition as a women’s holiday because of its relationship to the cycle of the moon (any Mishkan Rosh Hodesh circle people here tonight?). On this day each month, a group of women called Nashot haKotel, Women of the Wall, do an act of civil disobedience, and last week I joined them. What was this act of civil disobedience? Shacharit, Torah reading, musaf — a traditional Jewish prayer service. This shouldn’t be a big deal — the Kotel is an ancient Jewish prayer space and we were there for Jewish prayer — but because these women who show up every month are liberal Jews like me (meaning non-Orthodox), and we were wearing tallitot, many were wearing tefillin, we were reading and blessing Torah, and singing in full throated voices, every month these women are subject to all forms of harassment and abuse, at the hands of other Jews. While we were there we had hot coffee and used Kleenex thrown at us from every direction, and the entire service we were surrounded by a group of teenage girls shrieking at the top of their lungs to drown out our voices. There is an opinion in the Talmud expressing that the sound of a woman’s voice singing can arouse men and distract them from their prayer — and so in a kind of fundamentalist Charedi (or Ultra Orthodox) worldview, our voices needed to be covered up. The irony of teenage girls using their female voices to drown out our female voices in the name of not having women not distract men in prayer with the sound of the female voice… was not lost on anyone. The Nashot haKotel regulars said last week wasn’t so bad — they’ve had chairs thrown at them. They’ve had people snatch their prayer books out of their hands and rip out and crumple up the pages. They’ve had men take bullhorns to drown out their voices.

Why, you might wonder, do these women subject themselves to this kind of harassment and abuse month after month? Can’t they just accept that the Kotel, the Western Wall, is not, as the Prophet Isaiah describes, “A House of Prayer for all people,” or even all Jewish people… it’s an Orthodox synagogue. And if that’s what it is, why can’t they do what I do every week which is, go someplace else, some place where they’re wanted? In other words, why not just stay in Egypt? Is it so terrible?

And the answer is that they see themselves like Nachshon, fighting to part the waters of religious hegemony in the Jewish state, a fight we all have a stake in. What’s interesting, and where the fight for women’s equality in religious spaces overlaps with what we hear most about here, which is the conflict with Palestinians, is that from the inception of the State of Israel, while the structure of government for state is democratic (a parliamentary system, in which different groups are represented including progressive Jews and Arabs and many minorities), the state religion has always been Orthodox Judaism. And that worked fine for the first few decades of the state because religious people were a tiny minority and didn’t impose an Orthodox worldview on the rest of the state — but in the past few decades, the percentage of Orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel has gone from marginal — about 5% of the total population, to what it is now, about 20% of the total population — and those trendlines are continuing. 

So as religious as I and the other Women of the Wall may seem, dressed in our tallis, singing all the prayers with fluency and joy, blessing and reading the Torah, leading services… we are seen as deviant, trouble makers, challenging the status quo. All these women want is to have their — our — Judaism, recognized as legitimate and to be able to pray as we want in Judaism’s holy sites, which should belong to all of us, without the harassment and intimidation of one group getting to dictate the terms of what Judaism is allowed to look or sound like. Because it’s this kind of supremacist thinking that is not just preventing women’s voices from being heard at the Kotel — it’s alto leading to some of the most damaging policies vis a vis the Palestinians, as well — once driven by a fringe minority (a minority even banned from the Knesset because it was deemed so dangerous) but now it represents a strong voice and influence that is at once messianic, right wing and fundamentalist in nature. It is by no means the majority in the state of Israel, but most people aren’t doing anything to change things — they can live with things the way they are, and don’t have the moral imagination or energy to try to change things. Four out of five Israelites didn’t leave Egypt. And so anyone willing to stand up in the midst of the status quo and challenge it, becomes like Nachshon. God bless those brave people.

It’s Black History Month — in February because on February 1st, 1960 teenagers sat down at Woolworths’ counters in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were like Nachshon — they were by no means the majority of African Americans, not in their city or in the South. It was terrifying to be one of them. They were beaten and harassed and called every dirty name in the book. And while they didn’t know when the sea would part in a catharsis of equality and freedom; they didn’t know there would one day be a black President or multiple Supreme Court justices… they knew this was the next step they needed to take. Not everyone put their body on the line in that way — not seated at those counters were the student organizations, the NAACP, the ACLU, their church leaders and allies across faiths, the parents and younger siblings of those students who amplified their cause and who fought in the courtroom and on television and in the court of public opinion. Different people played different roles to advance the cause of freedom. In our story, Moses lifts his arm to part the waters, Miriam and all the women bring drums so they’d have a beat when they finally got free, as they believed with all their heart they would, and knew that when it happened they’d need music. Even the other Tribal leaders — the ones who at first didn’t have courage themselves to step in first — joined Nachshon and sent their tribes into the water after him. Nachshon may get the attention but there are dozens, hundreds of roles to play in the story to get the water to part and to pass through, and then to celebrate on the other side of it and keep walking.

It strikes me as very much like football, forgive the metaphor, Superbowl and all. In a kids’ game of football, wherever someone throws the ball, everyone runs after it. It’s not very efficient or strategic but no one has enough experience to know there is such a thing as strategy. In professional football, everyone has a place on the field, there are positions, and they’re all needed in an elaborate strategy to get the ball to the other side of the field. Not everyone can be the Quarter Back, nor should be! You need an Offensive Line, a Tight End, a Running Back, a Wide Receiver, a Kicker… I had to look all those up by the way! You need whatever position Taylor Swift’s boyfriend plays. And you need him playing that role, and not trying to do everyone else’s job. An Israeli rabbinic colleague expressed that she and her people still, even now 15 months after Oct 7, feel like they’re operating in fetal position, barely able to see themselves, not able to see others, and not able to envision what comes next. She said, but you Americans, we need you to hold the imagination for what can be here. The thing we can’t do for ourselves right now, we need you to hold that dream for us if we’re going to get there.

Personally speaking, as someone with deep ties and love for Israel and a feminist, and with a deep commitment to Palestinian self-determination and freedom, every time I come back from Israel I feel like my role on the field is to share the stories of activists, and feminists, and peace makers and people on the ground who are themselves like Nacshon, often at great risk to themselves and their families — in order to enlist all of us in the essential act of maintaining hope and moral imagination, to be the cheer leaders and the funders and the supporters of those brave risk takers. You can support Nashot HaKotel, and many other civil rights efforts in Israel, by supporting ACRI, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, their version of the ACLU. Similarly, right here at home, we can all be supporting the organizations that are taking up court cases challenging the executive orders and new laws flooding the zone that are immoral, inhumane and unconstitutional. There’s a tradition of giving Tzedakah right before Shabbat — I just signed up to give monthly to the ACLU. I can’t fight those court battles, I’m a rabbi. But I can support them. We all can. 

A friend in a Jewish leadership listserv I’m in who is black and gay had this to share this week:

“I was at a dinner — all black, gay, non-Jewish men … And my friend sitting next to me, who is an artist said, he felt so uninspired and couldn’t imagine painting at that moment. I said, “Yes we are entering into uncharted territory for the US and it may be paralyzing.” I then shared that, for us Jews, times like this beg the question, “Would you hide me?” Two days later, that same friend texted me and said, “I painted. I painted.” And sent along the picture of the painting, a beautiful picture of a bunch of people, their faces expressing the anguish and fear in this moment held by so many minorities in this moment. In the painting, a group of dark skinned people are saying to a group of lighter skinned people, “Would you hide me?”

It is possible that his role in this moment is to keep painting: to maintain inspiration and to interpret our collective pathos and remind us of our humanity. My role is to sing, to be a community leader and gatherer. Your role might be to find love or create art, or go to grad school, or organize or attend protests. Your role might be to give encouragement, support and funding to whomever needs it to fight the good fight. And we can’t, and don’t need, to all be Nachshon. But we can support the ones who are working day and night, often at great risk to themselves and their families, to push through the impasse, to defy gravity, to split the sea, not knowing what happens next but knowing it’s their role on the field.

Each one of us plays a different role in this moment to dispel the darkness, to prepare the way for the waters to part. Let us stand up and play it. 

Shabbat shalom.