Beshalach: Have We Really Left Egypt?

So here we are, still in Parashat Beshalach. We have supposedly left Egypt. Yes. But when we decided to go up to Israel, each of us settled, more or less, on the reason that drove him to make this departure, this departure from exile; for the departure from Egypt is the departure from every exile. Granted, this departure was made once and for all, for the whole of Israel, and it is woven into the very DNA of the history of the Jewish people; that is to say, without the Exodus from Egypt we would have no birthday. We were born with the Exodus. The day we left Egypt is the day of our birth.

The day of Matan Torah (the giving of the Torah) is the day of our bar mitzvah, and the day of our home in Israel is the day we truly experienced a covenant with our land and set up our house. Here too, in the background, a labor has been accomplished, and nothing is achieved without sustained trials that must be passed through at all costs; otherwise, sadly, we risk losing our footing. And what Pesach reminds us of is the need to pronounce the three things: Pesach, matzah and maror. Whoever does not declare these three movements, which belong to the effort of his total liberation from Egypt, has not yet completed his journey. Lo yatza yedei chovato: he has not fulfilled all his obligations.

Yes. Now, Pesach means making the leap, and this leap that we make obeys no purely rational logic. Then the matzah: yes, the matzah means removing the chametz and keeping a dough from rising. That is something we take upon ourselves, but there is a time limit that must not be exceeded. And with all this there is the maror: the hard trials that belong to this whole process of our liberation from all the constraints of life, trials that keep coming back and making us believe that Egypt, in the end, was better. So I began by asking whether we have completely left Egypt. The Holy One, blessed be He, used three verbs for this departure from Egypt. That is to say, there is the departure that Pharaoh grants us: under pressure from G-d, he agrees to let this people go. It is a fact of our history that we began the journey toward our land only with the consent of Pharaoh, only with the consent of Babylon, that is, of Cyrus.

As for the State of Israel, there is hardly any need to mention it: without the Balfour Declaration, as you know very well, we would not be where we are today. But this is how the history that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants for us is made: He brings the nations into His will to settle the Jewish people on its land. So there is this will of G-d to settle the people; that is a second thing. Finally, there is the part of the people that, deep down, does not want to leave Egypt. It does not want to leave Egypt. At most, what it would have wished is that the Egyptians be sent out of Egypt instead, and that we be left there: if you want to free us, free us from the Egyptians, but let us not leave Egypt, do not tear us away from Egypt.

And that is why those Jews are the object of an expulsion: if they are not expelled, they will not leave. So we speak of gerush (expulsion), as we speak of gerush Sefarad, the expulsion of the Jews of Spain, the expulsion of the Jews of Bessarabia, and so on. And there is the expulsion from Egypt: ki gorshu, the people was driven out. So we are faced with these tendencies within the people. I have counted three; there is a fourth: the one that remained faithful to the patriarchs, that seeks to fulfill the wish of the fathers to return to the land of the ancestors, that never stopped praying, and that holds that it can realize its full and complete Jewish identity only in the Land of Israel.

Now we shall understand how these tendencies appear in this first verse, which recounts the departure from Egypt. But it is a departure announced with a double cry of distress. What is this double cry? Vay, hi. I have already had occasion to explain to you that the verb “to be”, in Hebrew, is the only way to realize oneself in the world. We have no verb “to have”, because we have never possessed; we possess nothing. On the other hand, when we invest in our being, it is a long-term investment, through our children, our grandchildren, and a hereafter that the Holy One, blessed be He, faithfully records for each person according to his good deeds. But when this verb “to be” is torn apart: vay… yehi. Yehi is the future, “it will be”, because we are not meant to sink into a past that no longer exists.

I have already had occasion to recall this saying of Ibn Ezra: he’avar ayin (the past no longer exists), he’atid adayin (the future is yet to come), vehahoveh keheref ayin (and the present is the blink of an eye); it escapes me. So, in sum, my life is there, in motion, in a time of past, present and future that I cannot grasp. But that is not true, because I realize it through my acts. Every act I perform has its time; it has marked its time; it has taken a measure of time. So when everything lies in the project of the future, because that is its aspiration, then: vayehi is “it was”, and vehayah is “it will be”.

That, vehayah, is good news. We are in a hopeful perspective. Vehayah, you hear it: “And it shall be, when your children ask you.” That children should question their fathers, that they should not be indifferent to their message, to their history, to their heritage, to their legacy: that is wonderful! But when the whole future has already become a museum piece and lies in the past, woe to the past and woe to the future. Vay, hi: this is what introduces the departure from Egypt. Why? Because people still thought that it was Pharaoh who freed us from Egypt; that, indeed, without the Balfour Declaration there would have been nothing, and without Cyrus there would have been nothing. And so a screen came between us and the hand that was bringing Jewish history to fulfillment, a hand discreet, but present and active. We ignored it.

You see, Beshalach Paroh: Pharaoh is a man, but it is not Pharaoh who sent the people out. It is Hashem who sent the people out. If we are always going to fear Pharaoh, always remain beholden to Pharaoh, then we have not left Egypt. It will take a long journey through the desert to come out of exile: forty years of history. And those forty years of history, take note: when they are accompanied by the Holy One, blessed be He, they are forty; when they are left to man, they can be multiplied by ten, G-d forbid. You know, four hundred years of Egypt is what the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed; He Himself shortened that time in order to ensure the survival of the Jewish people, and He carried it out. And now, as the people comes out of Egypt, there are two great tendencies within it.

You know how people always say, “Oh, the people, it is not defined. It is not my people, it is not your people.” No: it is “the people”, indefinite. When it is indefinite, that means it is made up of different tendencies, held together by an artificial bond, while each waits for its favorable moment to let its true desires and true interests burst out. So what does G-d do? Velo nacham Elokim derech eretz Pelishtim: G-d did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines. And yet, to go from Egypt to Israel, the way is to follow the coast straight up to Israel. Now, is this lo holichem? Are we to say that He did not make them walk, or that He did not lead them? What is the difference?

The difference lies in the verse devoted to this rightful departure: the verse which, I remind you, sets out the four obligations to recite the Gomel blessing (of thanksgiving): for those who recover from illness, for those who have crossed the seas, for those who have escaped danger, and for those who have come out of prison, who were held hostage. For these four it is written: yodu laShem chasdo, “let them give thanks to Hashem for His kindness” (Psalms 107). And there, regarding those who cross the seas, a detail is added: it is not only a matter of thanking Hashem for His kindness, but viromemuhu bikhal am uvemoshav zekenim yehaleluhu, “let them exalt Him in the assembly of the people, and praise Him in the seat of the elders” (Psalms 107:32).

One must exalt Hashem in the assembly and among respected people, wise people. Why? Because there is a difference. On dry land, I may not know my way, not know where to turn, but once you have shown me the way, I can continue on my own. That is called holekh, walking: just show me the road and I will get there by my own means. But crossing the seas is different. You can put me in the sea, place a compass in my hand and tell me, “Go on now, manage by yourself”: facing torrential waves, facing a sea I cannot master, if I am not constantly helped by a hand that guides me, I would never venture out for a moment. That is the difference between being made to walk and being led. Walking means going one’s own way. G-d did not want to set them on the road to the Promised Land by simply pointing out the way. They must not feel that it was they themselves who had naturally accomplished this.

They had to be munhagim: they had to be guided, to feel that they were being led, as Yosef was for his brothers. This is an important idea. The Holy One, blessed be He, knowing the people, wanted to forge its identity through the hard trials of the desert, so that it would feel that this was no easy march, and so that it would not pack its bags and return to its land of exile at the first difficulties. It had to continue on its way, because it was helped by an invisible presence. And so we can connect this with the fact that the people, on leaving Egypt, took thought to bring with it the bones of Yosef. […] Everyone was busy counting the gold and silver they were carrying out of Egypt, or that had been entrusted to them, but Moshe had only one concern: to bring the bones of Yosef with him.

Why? Because Yosef had made his brothers swear before his death, saying to them: a day will come when the Eternal will bring you out; He will remember you. “But do not forget, at that moment, to take my bones,” he said. Of course, the question has been asked: why did he turn to his brothers and not to his own children? He should have engaged his own children; that would have been much safer. No, this was his concern. Why? First, because it was he who had brought them down. It was he who chose to bind his fate to theirs. And it was he who achieved the unity of the first family cell. He brought it fully to realization.

It cost him much suffering. And he bore his brothers no grudge. On the contrary, he reassured them, telling them that all this had been willed for the sake of life, and that he had been sold only in order to serve them better. For this was indeed part of a historical agenda that escapes us, because we are not the only ones making our history. We take part in it to some degree, sometimes for the good, but it does not follow the plans of a Torah, of strict observance of the rules of the Torah, so much as the strict rules of the avot (the patriarchs). The avot did not leave us a Torah, only exemplary lines of conduct, an absolute morality that withstands every trial, an unshakable faith.

And that is what holds us. We do not call upon Elokei Moshe, the G-d of Moshe who brought us out of Egypt, but upon Elokei Avraham, Elokei Yitzchak veElokei Yaakov, because it is our fidelity to what they transmitted to us that forms part of our chains, of our constitution. That is what gives eternity, an essence, to what we are. And that is why the expression atzmot Yosef, “the bones of Yosef”, is used. Take note: it is not a matter of bones; it is a matter of atzmut. Atzmut Yosef is the essence of Yosef. It is the very essence that is deposited in each one of us. It is what allows us to reach other values, to discover them, to savor them.

And that is why Moshe and Yosef are linked here. Why? Because both were servants of Pharaoh and of the Jewish people. Yosef served Pharaoh while serving his brothers, in the economic sphere, giving them the means to live when famine had taken hold of the whole earth. And Moshe is the one who grew up in Pharaoh’s palace and went out to his oppressed and mistreated brothers to bring them out of Egypt. Yosef and Moshe are intimately bound to this sojourn of the Jewish people in Egypt, one at the beginning of the exile and the other at its end. Now, we are told that without Yosef, the Jewish people could not have gone much farther than the shore of the Red Sea.

Why? Because the sea refused to obey Moshe, saying: “You indeed have a divine command to split me in two, but I too have a divine command, given to me since creation, to follow my course and to go on watering these lands without departing from my laws.” And [the answer came]: “Take note, today you must yield to the original order, and you have no choice.” Hayam ra’ah vayanos, “the sea saw and fled” (Psalms 114:3): the argument ended when the sea saw the coffin of Yosef; it fled, it split in two. It obeyed, no questions asked; it split in two.

Why? Because that is what Yosef had done with the wife of Potiphar, who had cast her eyes on him and wanted him for herself, not merely for an encounter, but for him to be truly her man. And he left his garment, that is, what served him: vayanas vayetze hachutzah, “and he fled and went outside” (Genesis 39:12). This flight outside is the will to keep intact the essence of the patriarchs and to cast off the garment we have agreed to share with the nations. Yes, because we have garments that we share with them. And that is as it should be, but there are limits, and those limits mean that at such a moment we belong to another order of being, another order of reality in history, which is not in the natural course of things but in the supernatural course.

That, then, is the theme of this first verse of the parashah: vayehi, I repeat, a double cry of woe, because we have not sufficiently drawn the lesson: beshalach Paroh et ha’am, thinking that it was Pharaoh who sent the people out. Now, among this people, take note, there were those who had prepared their bread, their matzot. For the Holy One, blessed be He, had told them to eat matzot, to accompany the eating of the Paschal lamb with matzot. So they had prepared matzot. They already knew. So those matzot were ready, without leaven. But what about that fringe of the people that leaves Egypt last, with dough that was not ready enough? That is what is called the erev rav (the mixed multitude).

The erev rav, ha’am, this indefinite people, is not a homogeneous people but a people made up of entirely different ideas, of diverse beliefs, who are nevertheless willing to share the same departure from Egypt for the time being, all the more so since they have no choice: antisemitism is there, and Pharaoh is there pressing them to leave the country. So they set out, and that is why G-d wants to accompany them, not merely point out the road and let them make their own way to the Promised Land by the route of the Philistines, which indeed is very near (ki karov hu), too near for a people that has not yet fully left Egypt: they would quickly go back. That is pen yinachem ha’am birotam milchamah, “lest the people regret it when they see war” (Exodus 13:17).

“Lest the people regret.” Look at this play on words: pen yinachem ha’am, yinachem. You know very well that this is the word of consolation offered to mourners: min hashamayim tenuchamu, “may you be comforted from Heaven”, or HaMakom yenachem etkhem, “may the Omnipresent comfort you”. What is consolation? We do not really know. One can picture a mother or father consoling a child. Is that it? No. Nor is it that someone comes, as the saying goes, to offer condolences as a form of comfort, a matter of politeness. No. Min hashamayim tenuchamu: may you be guided, may you be helped by the Almighty; for in the end, this is a hard trial that follows the natural course of life.

But now you must place yourselves in another perspective, where it is no longer you who are the actor, but you are being guided. You let go; you let yourself be carried by events toward other horizons. To receive this from someone outside is comforting; to say it to oneself invites confusion. And here too there is a deliberate purpose: vayasev Elokim et ha’am derech hamidbar Yam Suf, “G-d led the people around by way of the wilderness to the Sea of Reeds” (Exodus 13:18). The Eternal turned the people toward the Sea of Reeds to complete this birth of the Jewish people. As I have explained several times, the coming into the world of a child, which comes with the breaking of the waters, is somewhat the same phenomenon.

That is the true birth of the Jewish people: not at the moment of the departure from Egypt, but at the moment of the crossing of the Red Sea. There, I will stop here for today; if you have questions to ask… What is it? — Good evening, Kevod HaRav. You said that without Yosef we would not have left Egypt, because he cast off his garment to escape Potiphar’s wife. But in a way, Moshe also cast off his princely garment to leave Pharaoh’s house. He too did the same kind of act; so what is the difference between Yosef and Moshe on this point? Why could the sea not part before Moshe as well?

Well, there is one aspect I did not develop before you: here the Torah has already drawn a parallel with the departure from Egypt, where G-d [feared] that the people would return to Egypt. Now, this return to Egypt was wished for by the Jewish people only after the sin of the spies. That is to say, with the sin of the spies, the Jewish people clearly showed that G-d’s fears were well founded, and Moshe could do nothing about it. You know there is a striking feature in Moshe’s prayer for the Jewish people after the golden calf. After the golden calf, the Holy One, blessed be He, makes Moshe a tempting proposal, saying to him: “Listen, let us erase this whole rough draft.

Let us try to make another people out of you. Will you go along with Me? Be the new [forefather].” And Moshe replies: if, to this day, a table on three legs has not stood, how can you expect a table to stand for long on a single leg? That is to say, take note: the avot, the fathers, are not of the same constitution as others. The father is the essence of several children, and the father’s ramifications run through those children. And those children are not the same, so that one could never place the father and the children on the same plane of comparison. Moshe is but a child compared with the fathers. Yosef is not the father of Moshe […].

[…] I was expecting your question. That is why the Book of Bereshit, which is called Sefer HaYashar, the Book of the Upright, ends with Moshe… with Yosef, I mean. Yosef is considered the joint, the break, between the children on one side and the patriarchs on the other. And it is on this account that Yosef is entitled to two sons among the tribes of Israel and not just one. So that is why we have two Messiahs: Mashiach ben Yosef, you see, is […].