One verse, five voices. Edited by Nina Litvak and Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist
“Thus the Lord saved Israel on that day from the hand of Egypt, and Israel saw Egypt dead upon the seashore.”
– Exodus 14:30
Rivkah Slonim
Associate Director, Rohr Chabad Center at Binghamton University
On the day the Jews saw the Egyptians lying dead on the seashore they were saved by God. How so? Had they not already experienced the Exodus days earlier? Leaving Egypt – the geographic location – was just the first step. And God took care of it all. Purging themselves of Egypt, the mindset, was the hard part. And it was on the Jews to achieve this. Seeing the Egyptians dead on the seashore was the first step of a rescue from psychological and spiritual constraint and confinement.
Seeing what they had previously only believed, confirmed for them how much more about God and his miracles they had yet to believe in. Indeed, the ability to climb higher in our faith is an unending journey. The next verses relate that only now did Israel see – truly apprehend – the mighty hand of God that He had raised up against the Egyptians. They then feared God and believed in Moses his servant. Only in retrospect, and only after God left them very little room to doubt, did they recognize God’s mighty hand. Over and over again God showed them miracles.
Over and over again God shows us miracles. Since Oct. 7, 2023 we have even merited to see miracles of Biblical proportion. God has protected us from mighty regimes and shown us our enemies defeated on seven fronts. It’s time to say goodbye to the Egyptian mindset of doubt and skepticism. It’s time to open our eyes and see the mighty hand of God.
Rabbi Gershon Schusterman
Author, “Why God Why?”
This verse begins the Torah’s summary of the exodus from Egypt: On that day, the Jews walked into the Red Sea, and the water miraculously parted, “and the Children of Israel walked on dry land in the midst of the sea.” On that day Pharaoh and his army followed the Jews in hot pursuit, and as the Jews exited the sea, the waters, which were “standing like a pillar,” cascaded down on the Egyptians and they drowned “and Israel saw Egypt dead upon the seashore.”
Why does the Torah accentuate that the Jews saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore? Rashi says, lest the Jews say, just as we emerged unscathed from this side, perhaps the Egyptians escaped from another side and will still pursue us. By seeing them dead, the Children of Israel now knew that they were truly free.
After a year of seeing the 10 miraculous plagues visited on the Egyptians and witnessing the tumultuous waters crashing down on their pursuers, why were they doubting G-d? Where was their faith?
Faith, anchored in one’s soul, can remain peripheral, hovering above the person, but not internalized. The soul’s signal can sometimes become garbled; occasionally the signal may seem to fade and seem lost entirely. At Sinai, six weeks later, G-d gave us the Torah and its Mitzvot, tangible antennae to support receiving the soul’s message. These time-tested apps have served us well providing us with amplification and clarity to continue hearing Sinai’s message.
Rabbi Lori Shapiro
Founder/Artistic Director, Open Temple
Angus Fletcher’s “Wonderworks” explores how the cognitive sciences reveal a deepened understanding of literature. A diachronic study of great works of literature over thousands of years, Fletcher lends insight into a global canon of significant works of literature worthy of a rabbi’s parsing. How might a cognitive reading of this parsha illuminate a hidden lode?
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a pastiche of stories redacted (primarily in the 1870s by the founder of the theosophy movement), as if there were such a book. Aggregated from diverse fragments of sources recording Egyptian ritual and cosmic framework, the “book” illustrates how Egyptians dealt with death – from spells to afterlife.
As our parsha begins with the concept of Yeshua – or Salvation – and contains a disrupted syntax (which in Biblical Hebrew is a cadence of time clause/verb), a significant disruption of a common syntax arises, inviting us to consider an alternative reading: perhaps this verse does not glorify the death of Egyptians on the shore, but rather, illustrates a contrast of Pagan Death vs. Yah Salvation?
Here, according to Jews, the death of an Egyptian under a system of pagan rituals will NOT bring salvation – only finality. In contrast, a system under a God of Yah will bring an Eternity of Salvation. Sometimes, as Fletcher suggests, the verse comes to move us beyond our usual cognitive binaries. And as our world becomes exceedingly more complex, may all of our eyes and hearts be moved to see Beyond.
Rabbi Nicholas Losorelli
Jeffery & Allyn Levine Assistant Dean, AJU Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
Much of my husband’s family fled Iran during the revolution, witnessing their beloved country plunge into the darkness of extremism, and we now stand at a moment of great uprising in Iran. It is a moment for hope, but the human cost is unfathomable. It’s hard not to ask the question: why won’t God intervene? As in our verse here, God intervened in Egypt, why not here? This is of course the classic dilemma of the problem of evil, put simply: if God is all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing, then why does God allow such evil to persist?
Given this – and so many other evils plaguing the world – the theology of the crossing of the Reed Sea, and the toppling of evil-doers is a difficult one to process, because why does it have to get this bad for God to do anything? I don’t have the answer to that question, and I don’t think I ever will, but what I am seeing is that people got us into this mess, and that must mean that people can get us out, and maybe what made Egypt exceptional was that perhaps no matter how we gamed it out, people could not get us out of that mess, and that is why God had to intervene. It’s a shaky idea at best, but that alone is a cause for hope, because this all means that as insurmountable as it all feels, perhaps we – all of us – can lift ourselves out of this darkness.
Rebbetzin Miriam Yerushalmi
CEO SANE; Counselor; Author of “Reaching New Heights”
The name Mitzrayim, Egypt, can be read, “metzarim,” or “from the straits.” The Jewish people were saved not only from physical slavery but from psychological and spiritual bondage as well, from “the straits” of a constricted, limited, slave mentality. Witnessing the Egyptians “dead upon the seashore” can be seen as a total break from that restrictive past. The Lubavitcher Rebbe asks, why didn’t Hashem just move all the water to one side and let us walk on the other? By splitting the sea in two, the walls of water protected us on both sides. That hints to our two constant protections: Tefillah (prayer) and Torah. We were not saved only “on that day.” Every day, if we have faith and follow His lead, Hashem saves us anew. Every day, we escape the straits of our yetzer hara, our unholy intellect, the tendency of our animal soul to go after the wrong desires; we can then tap into the intimate wisdom of our heart where our G-dly soul resides. Once there was a child who wore the same set of clothing every day, even though he’d experienced a growth spurt and had long outgrown the outfit. He looked ridiculous, until finally a friend convinced him to get new, more appropriate clothing. Our thoughts, words, and actions are the garments of our soul, and every day, as our souls are freed to grow in holiness, we can shed the constricting garments of our past and don new ones that accommodate that inner growth.
