Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is parsha Beshalach, Exodus 13:17-17:16.
Often times when modern people reach this part of the Torah they recoil at the sudden appearance of war in this tale of redemption. Without the context of life in the ancient Near and Middle East, this uneasiness with bloody conflict is understandable. Unfortunate though it may be, it has always been an essential aspect of nation building for a people to prove their ability to defend themselves from attackers. Still to this day, even those organizations ostensibly concerned with fostering peace make provisions about war. The United Nations has a list of criteria for those who want to claim themselves a sovereign nation. One criterion is that the nation demonstrate a capability to defend itself from foreign threats. As the Israelites leave Egypt, they are immediately faced with just such an issue.
When Moses leads his people from Egypt, the pharaoh attempts to recapture them one last time. This is the famous scene at the Red Sea. God instructs Moses to raise his staff over the sea as if to divide it and indeed the sea parts. As the Israelites cross the dry sea bed, the water itself is described as being a wall on either side of them. When the Egyptian army pursues them into the sea, the water crashes down on top of them.
But there is something here that should give us pause. The Torah is usually fairly exact with its language. While the traditional interpretation of this passage is that the Israelites safely crossed the sea, then the sea went back to normal when the Egyptians entered, the language itself doesn't present us with that much linearity. It could just as easily be read as the two events happening simultaneously. Aside from being a miracle, how could this be possible?
Once again, we must approach the Torah on the level of metaphor. The passage clearly states that the Israelites find the bodies of the Egyptian soldiers washed up on the opposite shore, indicating that the Egyptians drowned more or less at the same time as when the Israelites crossed. In one sense, this makes the scene less magical, but it also makes the lesson that much stronger. Pharaoh says of the Israelites at the bank of the Red Sea that they are "bound up in the wilderness". As we saw last week, the "wilderness" is a common allegory for the confusion of life. In this passage, those who follow God in the sea, the wilderness, survive. Those who follow violence and lust aren't so lucky.
When the Israelites are on the far shore and the conflict is over, Moses stands before the people and essentially composes a song of glory. That song lists God's victories and therefore the victories of the Hebrew people by association. It sounds like any glory song of the era. Like much of ancient Greek poetry, it's a way to rattle swords and impress other nations with the strength of a people. A portion of Moses's song became a major prayer in modern liturgy. The Micha Mocha prayer is pulled from the middle of the glory song. Before it was a rabbinic prayer, Micha Mocha was a common battle cry used by a number of famous generals in Jewish history. It is essentially a cry that says, "My God is too powerful to be beaten. A lot of people have tried and we destroyed them". While we today don't have as much use for glory songs or battle cries, these things were of the utmost importance in establishing a respected presence in the ancient world.