Skip to content
Dear Friends,
It was fun for our community to get profiled this week in the Jewish Exponent! I hope you’ll check it out and share.
Meanwhile, I wanted to share with you the D’var Torah I offered this past Shabbat on the eve of long-time member Evan Schwartz Chrismer becoming Bar Mitzvah:
I often joke about the fact that all 54 parashot — all 54 Torah portions — are equally sacred; I say there is a 54-way tie for the most special parashah.
Still, there’s a Torah portion, and then there’s a Torah portion, and Be’shalah, which from here going forward will forever be Evan’s Bar Mitzvah portion, is a very special one.
That’s for a number of reasons, but on a basic level, it’s because this is the parashah where the Exodus happens — this is the parashah where we are freed from Egypt, crossing the sea, singing as we cross, experiencing that sacred taste of freedom.
The Exodus is not just one of a series of moments in the story of the people of Israel. As in, okay, sure, there’s the Passover story, but there’s also the Hanukkah story, and the Purim story, and Yom Ha’atzma’ut, the story of Israel’s independence. On one level, yes, those are all distinct moments in the story of the Jewish people. But on another level, the Exodus, and specifically the portion of it that will be chanted tomorrow, is the paradigm, the model, the mirror through which Jewish tradition views each of those moments, and — I’ll take it a step further — through which Jewish tradition views Jewish, and, dare I say, all of human existence.
It’s a bold claim, so let me break down what I mean by that.
When we celebrate Purim, when we celebrate Hanukkah, when we celebrate Sukkot, it’s marked liturgically by the chanting of Hallel, the service of praise. That is, a service of deliverance — a service of “oh my God, we made it, and I didn’t think we were going to make it. Oh, God, thank You, Your blessings are beyond any words we could speak.” And yet, we use words to express that thanks, and what are the touchstone words from that service that we use? B’tzet Yisrael mi’mitzrayim, in Israel’s coming out of Egypt, min hameitzar karati Yah, from the narrow place I cried out to you God, va’anani bamerhav Yah, and You answered me with freedom and expansion.
Even Shabbat, which we think of as flowing from the story of creation — in six days God created the world, but on the seventh day God rested — is, it turns out, also a remembrance of the Exodus. As Evan will chant when he leads us in the Kiddush, the blessing over wine sanctifying this moment, ki hu yom tehilah l’mikra’ei kodesh, zekher liy’tzi’at mitzrayim. “Shabbat is a sacred day, a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt,” these words say.
So what does this mean that all of these additional sacred moments — holidays, moments in history, Shabbat — flow out of the paradigm of the Exodus, and what do I mean that even existence does, too?
Can we stipulate together that life is hard… or at the very least, not easy? And before we even get to life as a whole, can we stipulate that, historically, while there have been highs and lows, life for the Jewish people has not been easy? Long after the constriction of the people in Egypt, we had multiple exiles from our homeland, we had living in diaspora under foreign authority not favorably disposed to the Jewish people, we had the Crusades, the Inquisition, expulsions even from what were already foreign lands, modern antisemitism, the Holocaust, and beyond.
Throughout those chapters of history, Judaism survived, and one of the ways that it survived is that it invoked the memory of the Exodus at each and every holiday — not just Passover; each and every Shabbat; and, as we encountered earlier this evening, each and every prayer service, morning and evening, Mi kamokha ba’elim Adonai, who is like You among the celestials, Adonai. Mi khamokah nedar bakodesh, who is like you, bedecked in holiness. Those words were sung by the Israelites as they experienced their passage to freedom.
Throughout those chapters of history, Judaism survived, by perpetually, rhythmically, invoking the memory of the Exodus, which reminded us that we have been through this before, and in the face of constriction, we have always broken through to a joyous freedom.
This is not to minimize the loss and the suffering encountered along the way; those losses have been profound, and continue to be, and we can’t pretend they don’t happen; we do have to mourn, too. But this memory of the Exodus is perpetually present to teach us that ultimately, there is reason for hope, and, actually more than hope, reason for faith, that just as we experienced God’s salvation with the Exodus, so, too, will we experience it in whatever moment we are going through. That’s the tradition.
This is experienced on a collective level, and it’s experienced on an individual level for not just collective, but also personal salvation.
Egypt, Pharaoh, isn’t just a paradigm for the unchecked tyrant, commissioning painful executive orders (though, hmm, that seems to eerily resonate throughout the ages). Egypt, mitzrayim, the narrow place, the place of constriction, is a paradigm for our world feeling small, for pressure, anxiety, darkness settling in, even if the source of that constriction feels like it’s inside of us rather than around us.
The Exodus is a paradigm for those moments, too. We’re invited to feel the cool, soothing waters of the sea. The sense that in our memory, transmitted in the unconscious and the conscious, we know that if our ancestors got through this, so can we.
In fact, the call of Passover is not just about the memory of our ancestors. The call of the Haggadah is that “in each and every generation a person is obligated to see themselves personally as having made the Exodus from Egypt.” Somewhere in our memories, we have the sense that we, ourselves, have experienced that sense of breaking free from our worst oppression, giving us the faith that it will happen again.
On Passover, we’re called upon to immerse ourselves in the whole journey, starting with the degradation of oppression, the maror, the bitter herbs, halakhma anya, the bread of poverty, on through to freedom, the celebratory cups of wine, and Hallel, singing our hearts out with joyous praise.
Most days of the year, without being too melodramatic about it, we have enough of a taste of Egypt in our collective lives; we have enough of the stress and the constriction and the sadness; we witness enough of the world’s suffering, so that we don’t need to go through that whole journey. Instead, we simply remind ourselves, morning and evening, with just a taste of the Song of the Sea, of our capacity for collective and personal salvation: Mi kamokha ba’elim Adonai, who is like You among the celestials, Adonai — through Your strength we are carried through to freedom and salvation.
There are a couple of days a year, though, where we go a little bigger, and tomorrow is one of those days. This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song, referring of course to that Song of the Sea from which mi kamokha is taken. Tomorrow is the day where the moment of the Exodus, the moment of the Song of the Sea, falls in the course of our reading chronologically through the entire Torah.
And we don’t let that moment pass by like just any other moment, any other Torah reading. Evan, our Bar Mitzvah, will be up here getting ready to chant from the Torah, and we’ll invite the whole congregation to stand — something that only happens for one other Torah reading, the reading of the Ten Commandments. We’ll stand, and we’ll actually participate with Evan in the chanting of the Song of the Sea, repeating certain phrases that he chants, imagining ourselves as though each of us came through that sea, feeling the coolness of the saltwater in air, on our journey to freedom.
Only, it’s not just imagination. As the scholar Paul Mendes-Flohr writes, the ceremony of Shirat HaYam (The Song of the Sea) is no “mere exercise in historical recollection. Nor is it simply an imaginative leap across time. No, the ceremony of Shirat HaYam brings to a height the experience of sacred time, the retrieval of the eternal moment of our redemption.”
The eternal moment of our redemption.
We relive Shirat HaYam to remind us that the Exodus was not just a one-time moment. It’s an all-the-time moment, an eternal moment. No matter the straits in which we find ourselves, forming a relationship to the moment of the Exodus is how we understand, in our hearts, that… we’ve got this. We will get through. We always have and we always will.
Wishing you a Shabbat of joy, a Shabbat of freedom, and a Shabbat of peace.
