Beshallach

Beit Warszawa 18th. January 2019

Rabbi Dr Walter Rothschild

Geography has always fascinated me and I have often found Geography as portrayed in the Torah quite fascinating – some place names remain the same, some have altered over the millennia. Unless some major cataclysmic catastrophe happens – where exactly WAS Atlantis? – most major land masses stay roughly the same, the rivers too; The mountains and deserts, at least for as long as we puny short-lived humans have been around, have stayed where they were. As though that had always been the case, though geologists know better. Important for our understanding of human history is not what may have happened billions of years ago – continental drift, ice ages and the like – but what the world has looked like for the past few thousand years. Our sidra opens with God making a strategic decision and one could almost visualise God (were that to be allowed!) poring over a map of the Middle East or, like a War-Gamer, considering the next move for the pieces to be shuffled around the board.

Pharaoh has sent the people of Israel off – pushed them out of Egypt, though the Hebrew is ”Beshallach Par’oh et-Amo” – ”when Pharaoh SENT them away.” (Exodus 13:17). Pharaoh has until now steadily lost this game of divine or demonic Chess, losing some valuable pieces including cattle, crops, fisheries and all the Firstborn, not to mention his own status as his weakness is constantly revealed, so now Pharaoh simply wants to clear the board. But now it is up to God to lead the People and move them – not north-east but east or south-east (it all depends where they were actually starting from, where they had been gathered by the Egyptians – since they had been enslaved they had no longer been confined to one small section of Egypt, the Province of Goshen.)

God has a Plan. God SAYS (presumably to himself, for in the Torah God has a habit of thinking aloud) – ”I had better not lead them the Way of the Sea, the Via Maris, the trade route that runs parallel to the Mediterranean coast. It is indeed a well-developed route with infrastructure but – it is well guarded by Egyptian posts and it leads inexorably through El Arish (the wadi here is thought to be the ‘River of Egypt’) and then to Rafah and Gaza, the land of the Philistines! No, that won’t do, that won’t do at all. The people are inexperienced, poorly equipped, untrained and incapable of facing a strong military and hostile force. No, better I should take them instead towards the Red Sea, through the desert. Yes, that will do. We’ll worry later about how to get them across that body of water. For now, let’s simply make a surprise move here and here, so that the Egyptians won’t understand what my Plan is.” I am embroidering the bare Torah narrative a bit, I admit, but only a bit. There are many questions one could ask, such as: ”Why could God not simply weaken and eliminate the Philistines as a threat, as God has already done with the Egyptians?”

The People of Israel set off basically unprepared, armed with some quickly-baked thin crackers (actually they were just as likely to have been soggy half-baked pitot) and left-overs of roast lamb hastily wrapped up as their provisions. They are led by a man whom they barely know and who had, until now, been very unpopular for causing them so much additional work and trouble, who even needs an interpreter to communicate with them but who keeps talking about some invisible Deity called ”I AM” of whom they have not heard before, but who apparently made some promises to their great-great-grandparents which are now – at last – about to be fulfilled. They have asked the terrified Egyptians for valuables and equipment but they are on foot so everything has to be carried – they have no carts. There are 600,000 of them, men that is, not yet organised into proper tribal or subsidiary units, or military units, not to mention all their wives and offspring and a crowd of opportunists who seize the chance to escape with them – an ”Eruv Rav”, a ”mixed multitude” – and flocks and herds that need to be led. Since it has been four hundred years since any of them – apart from Moses – had even ventured across the Eastern frontier they have no idea of where they are going, they have no appreciation of geo-strategic campaigning or logistics. They are descended from nomads, but they had grown accustomed over the centuries to stability and a regular and varied diet, one they will miss from now on. Fish, cucumbers, garlic and more. (Sounds very healthy!)

First they head from Sukkot and when they reach the edge of the desert they strike camp at Etham. (In Numbers chapter 33 we have a slightly different version of their travel diary and there it states they camped in Sukkot as well after a three-day march.) Until now they have been in Egypt – ahead of them is a bare wasteland, frightening. God does however have some handy technology – flares to light their way by night, for they will not stop to camp but must keep walking, and a smoke pillar by day. There is no rest – now they have to keep going.

Then in chapter 14 God plans a surprise reverse move – they should swing northwards and camp by the sea, in front of the ‘Mouths of the Chirot’, maybe an isthmus, east of the ‘Lord of the North’, – these are place names that must have meant something at the time even if they mean little to us now. (There is still a place, or a point marked on a map, east of the Suez Canal, called ‘Bir Musa’, the wells of Moses). The plan now is that Pharaoh should get over-confident and assume that the people are lost and scared and so make a risky move. This is quite an easy impression to make, because the people ARE lost, confused and scared! Especially when they see in the distance the dust raised by the chariots of Pharaoh’s mighty and angry army. It is not surprising that Pharaoh assumes that they are trapped and at his mercy. Of course what is being prepared is a master stroke – in this very chapter the people will find themselves, to their amazement, walking through the sea; the Egyptian army will find itself, to its amazement, caught in a very wet ambush when it tries to follow; the people will see the enemy army with its horses and chariots annihilated, corpses washing up onto the eastern shore – but at the same time they will realise that, although they have been saved from a massacre, there is now no way back across the sea westwards again. It is a dramatic story, so dramatic that it forms the basis of much of later covenantal and liturgical expressions. God will constantly remind the Israelites ”I am the God who got you out of Egypt – don’t forget that!” (Unfortunately, God will need to keep reminding them, whenever they despair or rebel or forget).

The chances are strong that few of you here today are terribly interested in the routes the Ottoman Army took to attack Egypt through the Sinai Peninsula in 1915, or the details of the tracks and the water supplies available at different times of year – by coincidence I was researching exactly this a short while ago and the issues of transport and supply and survival, the issues of Geography, have remained largely the same whether several thousand or just one hundred years ago. This is what I mean by the fascination. Armies come and go but the basic facts of Where are the Mountains? Where are the Valleys? Where are the Wells and Rivers? remain the same.

Once the celebrations and singing have been completed in chapter 15 they confront the inexorable need for Water – especially since some of what they find is bitter, brackish, undrinkable. Moses is shown how to provide clean drinking water and God promises that if they obey some basic hygiene principles they will be spared the diseases that afflict the Egyptians. In 1915 the British Army had to filter water from Egypt that was piped into Sinai, so as to prevent spread of bilharzia, a common eye disease in Egypt caused by micro-organisms in the water….. Then in chapter 16 their provisions run out and they need food. A hungry person is a desperate person – let us not forget that the whole reason the Israelites had even come to Egypt had been due to a famine in Eretz Canaan – and no-one wants to face a long slow death from hunger. Interestingly they do not pray to God, they grumble to Moses and Aharon and wish that God had simply let them die earlier, more quickly, with full bellies. Moses and Aharon of course feel rather threatened and want God to display some divine power. God’s response – is Manna, ”Bread from Heaven” and as a special treat meat – from Quails. Not only that, but God establishes a rhythm, a weekly rhythm of Six-plus-One, or ”One-Two-Three-Four-Five-SIX-Pause-One-Two-Three….” whereby the heavenly food will be delivered free of charge but not on the seventh day – to compensate, there will be a double portion on the sixth. At this point there is no real description of a Sabbath as an abstraction, a memory of Creation or of Liberation – that comes later – but in fact the people will be taught to start counting and will then experience the new, strange concept – unheard-of for slaves – of a Day Off.

Ironically, although God was concerned that the Israelites were not really ready for an armed conflict with the Philistines, soon after they have finished celebrating their miraculous survival they will be attacked by the Amalekites and need to defend themselves. By now however their morale is better – plus, they know there is no way back.

At Pesach we read each year of the events that led up to the expulsion of the Israelites and we sing of the miracle of the Red Sea and the Manna, but on the whole attention tends to be focussed upon the events of the Plagues and less on these first early painful worrying days of freedom and the establishment of new structures, new rhythms and the awareness that Freedom brings Responsibilities and that a group requires discipline and that individuals require self-discipline.

Since then many nations have started up, fired perhaps by a revolution or a civil war, or a rebellion against an occupier, and they have quickly found that after the initial victories and flag-waving and parades there is a need to feed the population, to provide clean drinking-water and medical facilities, to establish basic hygiene, and routines, and more. The Israelites will also need to be told to set up their tents in rows, to dig latrines outside the camp, to establish a hierarchical judicial system and in general to develop a civil society. Mythic and romantic stories of heroic battles against the oppressors tend to end with the flag-waving and overlook the need to bury the corpses afterwards or to rescue and treat the wounded – let alone the need to care for the traumatised and the crippled for the rest of their lives, to comfort the bereaved, to replace the fallen. In the rising nationalisms that pervade Europe these days we see again a return to romantic nostalgia and the danger of neglecting the lessons learned in past conflicts – that it takes only minutes to destroy a city that has taken decades to build, that it takes but a second to kill a person who has needed decades to grow. The danger of ALL museums that focus upon a war of any kind is that they tend to neglect the period of calm before the conflict and the period of rebuilding and restoration necessary afterwards – if this is even possible. So long as one falls into this trap there is a danger that important lessons will be forgotten – Again. I have been to many war museums and they all show two-dimensional or three-dimensional posters, texts and exhibits but they all have cafeterias and toilets and heating. None I have been to has ever blown the stench of rotting corpses into one of the display halls, to make the exhibits more realistic. I wonder why?

Two important elements I have left until now. First, God seems to be looking for a way to get the Israelites moved to where God wants them, but by-passing a potential conflict with the Philistines. The Philistines will not be destroyed as the Egyptians are, but the Israelites will simply go round their flanks, to the South, and eventually enter Eretz Yisrael from the East, not the South-West. After the initial desperate defence against the Amalekites, the Israelites then spend 38 years in Sinai without any significant war, and they do not spent their time in military training or looking for trouble. They build up no professional army, no caste of warriors, though men of certain age groups are considered liable for military service and only the priests are exempted.

Secondly – when the Israelites leave they take something very, very important with them: The box with the mummified remains of Joseph. (13:19). I find this quite fascinating for, although Joseph had specifically asked before he died for his body to be preserved and kept in a mobile container and to be taken with the people when they leave for their ancestral promised land, back at the end of Genesis 50, it is amazing that after several hundred years they had in fact kept the ability to keep this promise; We are never told who looks after Joseph’s remains – perhaps the family of his son Ephraim pass this knowledge, this responsibility down through the generations – nor where it is kept. It has not been venerated in the intervening time. In Egypt it seems that everyone wanted a grave, a tomb – except Joseph, who wanted to put off burial until the right time came to be taken to the right place. Somebody must even have told Moses who himself, of course, since he grew up separated from his people, can never have known of this sacred object…

This is symbolically very important because it means that, even if the people have no real idea of God or of the covenant with Abraham and the promise made to him, they are nevertheless aware that they DO have an ancestor who came from somewhere to the East, who will want eventually to be taken back there (wherever ‘there’ is) when the time is right; it means they believe the right time WILL come, eventually. It means they have a sense of Continuity and Destiny. The book of Exodus starts with a new Pharaoh who had ”forgotten Joseph”; but the Israelites had not forgotten him and this is what acts to keep the peoples separate.

The right place will be the piece of land in Shechem that his father Jacob had bought – this memory has also been retained – and the right time will be after Joshua, Moses’ successor, has completed the conquest of the Land.

Thanks to the commandment not to make Images we are a people without big statues of mighty heroes, usually sitting on horses and waving swords, and without big paintings of mighty warriors, usually portrayed standing on the bodies of those whom they have slain. We Jews are held together by a sense of history, by a sense of destiny and – perhaps most important of all – a sense of responsibility, individual and communal. In the difficult times that several nations in Europe are currently facing – many of them mistakenly seeking a way backwards rather than forwards – there is still a lot we can learn from these chapters describing some vital aspects of what we refer to just as ”Yetziat Mitzrayim”, the Exodus from Egypt.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Dr. Walter Rothschild.