B’Shelach
This week’s parsha, B’Shelach (13:17-17:16) finds us finally leaving Egypt guided by YHVH with a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire by night. YHVH wants to make yet one more demonstration of his power, so he strengthens Pharoah’s heart, Pharoah pursues the Israelites and we cross the sea of Reeds and Pharoah’s army, in the words of a great Negro spiritual Mary Don’t You Weep, “got drownded.” The people stop and sing songs of praise in what scholars believe is one of the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible, Miriam gets a mention as a prophetess (15:20) and the people travel from place to place. The parsha then introduces the obnoxious theme that will persist for the rest of the Hebrews’ journey to Canaan—their whining and ingratitude towards YHVH and his suffering servant Moses who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt.
We get the introduction of manna with the instruction to only gather enough for one day except for on the day before Shabbat to gather a double portion because there won’t be any on Shabbat—an instruction that is only somewhat followed, as might be expected. Finally, the parsha ends with Amalek being defeated at Rephidim and the completely puzzling demand of Moses by YHVH to “Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”(17:14). Only that is precisely why we remember Amalek. This is a busy and eventful parsha; this overlong summary leaves out much that could be discussed.
I’m going to focus on the following four themes.
Exodus—history or myth?
Death and wilderness
Joseph’s bones
Male and female representations of divine energy
The exodus from Egypt, in all likelihood never happened historically. Why do I say this? Two core reasons. First, if the Israelites sojourned in Egypt for 430 years as the text tells us (Exodus 12:40), and then came to Canaan in a mere 40 years, the Israelite culture should reflect that sojourn in Egypt through material artifacts like pottery, agricultural implements, baskets and altars. But we see no archaeological evidence of any Egyptian influence on material culture.
Second, if Pharoah and his army indeed drowned, you’d think that would be a prominent enough thing to merit mention in the Egyptian histories of Egypt. But there simply is no mention of anything remotely like this in Egyptian sources. By the way, what I am saying is the common position of archaeologists.
Does it matter? The historicity of the sojourn in Egypt, the parting of the sea of Reeds and the Exodus clearly matter for some people who go through a lot of mental gymnastics to justify the Biblical account, just as there are plenty of people who find creative ways to argue that indeed the cosmos was created in six days. But if you believe, as I do, that myth is truer than history, the fact that the Exodus is myth and not history does not detract from its power for us.
This story, it seems to me, is an absolute model for what it takes to address oppression. There’s an external component, the Pharoahs of evil rulers, bad bosses, the capitalist patriarchal system etc., but defeating that external component isn’t enough without internal transformation. The necessity for our inner spiritual work is given to us by the portrayal of our ancestors who were forced to wander and die in the desert because they brought their internalized Egypt with them.
How do you regard this story—myth or history? Do you believe in the need for external and internal transformation? Which path calls you more?
Dying in the wilderness. Pharoah draws near to the Israelites before they cross the sea of Reeds, and they complain “Was it for want of graves in Egpyt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? …Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.’” (14:12-13). Of course, Moses tells them to be quiet, YHVH is going to take care of it and he does.
The wilderness is a place of metaphoric death. When we go to the wilderness for spiritual transformation, we have to let our old way of doing things, our ego if you will, die in order to create space for something new, transformed, different. If you aren’t willing to (metaphorically) die, you simply aren’t going to grow spiritually. The Hebrew people are saying in this verse, the very common and human approach that they would rather hew to their comfort and stay slaves then go through the discomfort of personal growth.
Our ancestors had to literally die in the desert, the myth teaches us, because they could not figure out how to die metaphorically, how to let go of who they were and the old patterns of their lives that were no longer serving them.
Death is this great and scary spiritual teacher. If you are like me, you’ve wanted to avoid the whole subject and pretend that you are immortal. Death is everywhere. Every spring I plant tomatoes and come the first frost, the plants die. I pretend their death means little, but that’s just a defense mechanism. That first frost is a tragedy for that tomato plant. The plant, I believe, knows that it is coming, it can feel that its fruits just aren’t ripening the way they were a few short months earlier when the days were longer and hotter. It starts flowering like mad, flowers that will never turn into fruit. The plant is helpless to do anything different about it; if it could I’m sure it would transplant itself into a hot house heated with natural gas so it can keep living, even though its whole design is to die.
That’s us, that’s me—we live in denial that our death is a question of when, not if. In some sense, we are all Hebrews—at least most of the time. As much as I believe in being spiritually uncomfortable, I also dread it.
When was the last time you were spiritually uncomfortable? What did you learn from that? How do you relate to the fact that we will all die? What are your beliefs about death?
This question of death brings us to Joseph’s bones. The Israelites carry his bones up with them. Amidst the rush to leave, a 430 year old oath is remembered and observed (13:19). Another example of myth. Why? I offer two thoughts. First, bones are a really concrete reminder of a lineage. If you’ve ever been to a catacomb of a monastery where they store the bones of the spiritual ancestors of the place, for me at least, it creates a profound sense of the flow of who has come before you and that you will take your place as an ancestor some day.
Bones, according to French anthropologist Roberte Hamayon, are the repository of the soul according to indigenous Siberian people. “With reference to death, animal bones, like those of humans, are deposited in high places, in trees or platforms called aerial tombs. The soul lodged in the bones of an individual is supposed be recycled and then return to animate a new individual of the same human line.” (p.286 Hamayon in Harvey ed. A Handbook of Animism).
I’m not saying that ancient Israelites believed that souls resided in bones. We buried our dead in family catacombs, not high places, but this Siberian belief is suggestive of a mechanism of reincarnation. While there’s no evidence that our ancient ancestors believed in reincarnation, it is clear that reincarnation was a widely accepted Jewish idea by the middle ages. And I find the belief that there is a material aspect of the soul highly appealing. It is both indigenous and testifies against the too common Western patriarchal view of the inferiority of the body. The soul is not just this disembodied thing that temporarily resides in this alien thing called a body, contra Plato and his spiritual lineage of which we are all heirs.
I think these two reasons suggest to us why perhaps it was so important to Joseph have his bones buried in Canaan with his ancestors.
How do you define your lineage and how connected are you with it? What’s your perspective on reincarnation? What about the materiality of the soul?
Our parsha offers us two images of the divine that we may construe as representations of male and female energy. We see the YVHV as warrior and healer. We are also introduced to the idea of female prophets with Miriam and her celebration after the destruction of Pharoah’s army. Here’s the story.
The Israelites sing something called The Song of the Sea after Pharoah and his army are drowned. We recite a portion of the song almost every time we pray when we say Mi Chamocha B’elim Adonai and Adonai Yimloch L’olam Va’ed, The song follows an Ancient Near East mythological theme where the Storm God, for example the Babylonian Marduk, kills the female Sea God (Tiamat in the Babylonian myth) and then builds a palace. Here’s just a little of our bloodthirsty imagery. “Your right hand YHVH, glorious in power, Your right hand YHVH shatters the foe. In your great triumph, you break your opponents, you send forth your fury, it consumes them like straw.” (15:6-7). On the other hand, in the usual attempt to get humans to obey him (think Garden of Eden), here’s YHVH a scant few verses later “If you will heed YHVH your God diligently, doing what is upright in his sight, giving ear to his commandments and keeping all his laws, then I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I, YHVH am your healer.” (15:26). Personally, I have a hard time wrapping my head around a being who can be represented as both a warrior and a healer; I have this sense of whiplash.
We should note that there is a long history of interpreting the warrior God as being about the necessity for inner struggle, though I’m still not a fan of shattering my inner limitations with fury after I break their bones. By the way, this tension is exactly present in Islam in the concept of Jihad which many scholars and practitioners present as being about internal spiritual struggle, and not killing infidels.
The text also, at least for me, begs us to explore the differences between male and female spirituality. While certainly women can be warriors and men can be healers, and I’d rather see myself as a healer than a warrior, warrior is typically viewed as an embodiment of masculine energy and healing as an embodiment of female energy. Is our text suggesting something about the necessity for both male and female energy, both in the dual images of the divine and in the presence of both male and female spiritual leadership as we see Miriam as a leader?
Miriam as a leader puts in the briefest of appearances. Immediately after the bloodthirsty Song of the Sea, we are told that she took a timbrel in her hand and all the women went out and danced with her. (15:20) She’s introduced as Aaron’s sister but not as Moses’ sister, which is telling because Moses has more cachet than Aaron. We have here a fragment of a women’s ritual, perhaps after victory in battle because that’s referred to elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Judges 11:34 and 1 Samuel 18:6).
Miriam also figures in the parsha, but obliquely, when the Israelites travel to Marah (15:23) right after the Song of the Sea and the celebration of the women led by Miriam. Marah is the place where the water is bitter (bitter is the literal meaning of Marah). Moses throws a piece of wood into the water at YHVH’s direction and the water becomes sweet. Miriam’s name might mean bitter sea, and she is associated in Jewish imagination with water and a well that traveled with the people so that they could drink while in the desert. So I find the connection or Marah and Miriam suggestive at a minimum.
My objection here, as elsewhere, is that we are just given this fragment. We simply know very little about women’s spiritual leadership amongst our ancestors. We are reading a patriarchal text. Feminists rightly turn to midrash to fill in the blanks/reclaim women’s spiritual leadership. My approach in this commentary has not incorporated midrash. This parsha offers us the perfect example of the limitations of my approach.
How important is dancing spiritually? Our text would have the dancing as simply a form of celebrating, kind of like dancing at a wedding. But dancing, cross culturally, has also been a spiritual practice, a common method of inducing trance so that men and women can connect to the divine. Dancing to trance seems present amongst male Hasidim (aided by alcohol) on joyous occasions, and there is some effort at reclaiming dancing amongst alternative Jews such as Latifa Kropf’s practice which she borrowed from Sufi dances of peace. Sufi Dances of peace, ironically enough, was started by a Jew, Samuel Lewis who was descended from the Levi Strauss empire on his paternal side and the Rothschild family on his maternal side.
If we want to be whole, I believe, we need to incorporate both what might be called male and female aspect. We need prophets and prophetesses, we need to dance with timbrels in our hands and we need to be warriors (though perhaps in a less violent way). If we look at where we are incomplete in our lives, there’s a decent chance that we’ve cut ourselves off from our male or female sides.
How do you reconcile those two images of warrior and healer? Which speaks to you when? Does the warrior image need to be as violent as it is routinely portrayed? Does the unity of these disparate images in one being make felt or intuitive sense to you? Do you have any experience with dancing as a spiritual practice?
QUESTIONS
How do you regard the Exodus story—myth or history? Do you believe in the need for external and internal transformation? Which path calls you more? What do you find yourself doing more of?
When was the last time you were spiritually uncomfortable? What did you learn from that? How do you relate to the fact that we will all die? What are your beliefs about death?
Bones. How do you define your lineage? How connected are you with it? What’s your perspective on reincarnation? What about the materiality of the soul?
How do you reconcile those two images of warrior and healer? Which speaks to you when? Does the warrior image need to be as violent as it is routinely portrayed? Does the unity of these disparate images in one being make felt or intuitive sense to you? Do you have any experience with dancing as a spiritual practice?
