Torah Posting: בשלח
Everybody knows that the children of Yisra’el wandered in the desert for 40 years after they left Mitzrayim, before they reached the Promised Land. But personally, I feel I was not told clearly enough about the reason why when I was in Sunday school. And that’s strange, because it is emphasized rather clearly by the first line of this parashah.
The narrative voice of the text says that God did not lead the people “on the road to the land of the Plishtim” — that is, directly to the land God promised them, which was, as we have repeatedly heard, presently occupied — “although it was closer.” And the text puts the explanation in God’s own voice, saying, “lest the people have a change of heart when they see war and return to Mitzrayim.” So, the second line explains, God led the people the long way, through the wilderness.
Now, they did teach me the bare facts of that in Sunday school. But I don’t feel they properly acknowledged what it meant. God judged that the people were not spiritually ready to enter the land. They had to be trained first. And this is fine and beautiful on a symbolic and mystical level. But also, the plain pshat reading is that they were specifically not ready to conquer the land through war with its inhabitants. I recognize this was surely an obvious detail to many generations of my ancestors, but for me, it sticks in my throat. At this point in the story, it seems like an unjustified act of aggression. How exactly is God going to get the people hyped up for that?
Anyway, the text then explains that the people were armed. It doesn’t explain how, and it uses a strange word, חמשים, for it, but the commentators mostly agree that it means they were strapped. The sense, I feel, is that they were richly provisioned and powerful going out of Mitzrayim. We aren’t meant to think of them as miserable and undignified slaves anymore. They are glittering gloriously.
Mosheh has brought with him the bones of Yosef in accordance with the ancestral oath to bury him in the Promised Land.
They begin their march, and God goes before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, lighting the way. This is our first depiction of how special and supernatural this time is. God is physically manifest with the people for this journey.
God begins to brief Mosheh on what will happen next. He instructs him to make camp by the sea. Pharaoh will see them there and believe they are trapped. God will harden Pharaoh’s heart again, and Pharaoh will attack. God has determined that the total military defeat of the Egyptian army is necessary to secure God’s glory in the world.
Pharaoh sends six hundred of his finest chariots and a horde of regular units, led by elite officers, and they overtake the Israelites there by the sea.
The children of Yisra’el are terrified and cry out to God and Mosheh. As usual, their complaint is poetic in its sarcasm: “Were there not enough graves in Mitzrayim? Is that why you took us out into the middle of nowhere to die?”
It seems God’s concern about the people wanting to turn back was warranted. They remind Mosheh of their position that it would have been better to live in slavery than die in the wilderness.
To me, this is a far deeper and more compelling demonstration of the spiritual growing-up the people have to do than their readiness to conquer a place militarily, but I suppose that in their context these were one and the same.
Mosheh reassures them that the awesome miracles are just getting started, and that God will do their fighting for them here.
God gives Mosheh his staff-wielding instructions and reveals the plan: God will split the sea and allow the people to cross on dry ground. Then God will drive the Egyptian army after them, and — without yet saying how — God will gain glory through Pharaoh and his troops.
The Divine Messenger — the מלאך, the “angel” — that had been clearing the way before the people moves back to follow behind, and the pillar of cloud follows, standing between the Egyptians and the Israelites. It curses — or illuminates? The word is יאר, the root is ambiguous — the night, so that the attacking army could not approach in the dark.
Then Mosheh goes to the sea and holds out his staff. A strong east wind blows all that night to split the waters and reveal a path across dry ground. I feel like most popular characterizations of this miracle were conceived in the idiom of the silver screen, where it has to happen instantaneously, so the movie can keep this scene climactic. But the description of a meteorological phenomenon that takes all night is far more beautiful to me because it is more natural, though no less miraculous.
The waters form walls on the right and the left, and the people walk into the sea on dry ground.
Pharaoh’s army follows them in, all of the horses, chariots and riders.
At the “morning watch” — the אשמרת הבקר, a term I guarantee you has a lineage relationship to Babylonian astrology — God looks down upon the Egyptian army as the pillar converts from fire to cloud, and it terrifies them. God freezes the wheels of the chariots, and Egyptians give up and decide to flee.
God then instructs Mosheh to raise the staff again in order to close the wall of water around the army, and he does so. As the Sun rises, the entire Egyptian army drowns in the sea. And the children of Yisra’el see what God has done for them, and they fear and believe, both in God and Mosheh.
Then the people sing a song to God recounting the glory of this event — one of the most renowned liturgical pieces in the entire Torah, which Jews to this day sing every single morning. The song is a bit scary, but what can I say? It rouses me. It’s one of the most alive parts of the service for me every time.
This extended liturgical song is given in the name of Mosheh. But after that, his sister, Miryam, picks up a drum, and she and all the women dance and drum and chant. She is referred to here as מרים הנויאה, Miryam the Prophet. I just want to make sure this gets its own moment here, because it does in the Torah.
Okay, party’s over. Three days into the trek, the people can find no water. They get to a place that is literally called מרה, Bitter, because the water is undrinkable. And so begins the kvetching of the people to Mosheh. “What shall we drink?”
A lack of water is no minor detail, so Mosheh cries out to God for help. God shows him a particular kind of wood, which he throws into the water, and it becomes drinkable. And this first minor shamanic working becomes a testable rule between God and the people. God declares that if they continue to follow the divine practice instructions carefully out here, they will be spared from illness and plague. And then they find a place with 12 springs and 70 palm trees to camp.
On the 15th day of the second month, just past the Full Moon after Pesah, they arrive in another wilderness between there and Sinai, and the people have become disgruntled again. Before it was lack of water, now it’s lack of food. They yearn for the material comforts they had as slaves; at least they had meat and bread.
God responds with another rather hands-on solution. Bread will rain down from the sky. The people must go out and gather their portion each day, and God construes this to Mosheh as a test. They will be given simple ritual instructions for this gathering. Will they be able to follow them?
God adds a key stipulation. On the sixth day of the week, when they count what they have gathered, it will turn out to be a double portion. The meaning of this is left hanging for now.
Mosheh and Aharon address the people, informing them that a sign from God is coming to restore their faith and put an end to their grumbling. By morning, they will behold the glory of God. Mosheh instructs Aharon to tell the people to advance toward God — who is, remember, physically manifest to them at all times now. But when the people do this, the Glory (כבוד) of God appears to them in some extra-powerful way.
In the evening, quail appear miraculously and cover the camp. In the morning, there is a fall of dew all around. As the morning warms, the dew has left a flaky substance as fine as frost on the ground.
The people say to one another, “מן הוא” — “What is it?” Mosheh responds that this is the לחם (bread) God has given them to eat. But in a delightful bit of mystical recognition, they come to call this substance מן — or manna, as other traditions have transliterated it — turning the people’s question — “What (מה) is it?” — into a statement: “This is מן (What).”
God then gives precise instructions for gathering the מן. Each household must gather exactly the amount each person will eat. When they go out to gather for the first time, they do so haphazardly. Some gather a lot, some gather a little. But when they come back to measure it, everyone has exactly the unit of measure specified by God, no matter how much or how little they collected.
Mosheh then adds another instruction: “No one shall leave any of it over until morning.” But some people don’t listen, and by morning their מן becomes stinky and maggot-infested. Mosheh is angry with them for ignoring the instructions. They shape up after that. And they recognize by natural law that they must gather the מן each morning because it melts when the Sun grows hot.
On the sixth day, they gather their double portions, and when the community gathers before Mosheh, he explains why God set it up this way. Tomorrow, the seventh day, is Shabbat, a holy day of rest. They must prepare their second portion of מן to eat on Shabbat ahead of time; it will not spoil in the morning.
This comes to pass, and Mosheh explains further: There is no gathering on Shabbat. There will be no מן to gather; you must eat what you have prepared on the sixth day.
Naturally, some people go out on Shabbat to gather anyway, but they find none.
God becomes impatient at this, imposing a further restriction: No one can leave the camp on Shabbat either.
Now, it seems, they get it. And here they name the substance מן. It is described as like coriander seed, colored white, and tasting like wafers in honey. Sounds pretty good.
Mosheh explains that one omer — the unit of measure for one person — of מן must be kept in a jar throughout the ages as a sign of this miracle that kept the people alive in the wilderness. That’s pretty cool. The timeline of the text gets a little squirrely here, though. It says Aharon places the jar “לפני העדת” — “before the Pact” — without it being at all clear what that is. This is probably foreshadowing of the receiving of the Law in the form of stone tablets that will be carried around in an ark, and so we’re learning the מן is approximately as big a deal as that, but… we haven’t gotten that yet. So you can take this as a little bit of omniscient narrator timeline-jumping, or you can take it as a rough stitch à la documentary hypothesis. Up to you.
The text does now explain that this was the people’s food for 40 years, until they reached the land of Kena’an, so a little temporal zoom-out in the narrative does seem in effect. It then, however, sticks in a parenthetical explanation of how much an omer is in terms of an ephah (presumably a later unit that would have been commonplace to somebody reading), almost like a footnote that got incorporated into the main body of the text at some point, which I find pretty funny. I’m gonna have to go with “both.”
The people set off again, and once again, they can’t find water. They argue with Mosheh again, he argues back at them. Mosheh goes to God at his wits’ end. God tells Mosheh to take his magic wand and set out with a delegation of elders to a particular rock at Horev, which he is to strike with his staff, and water will issue from it. He does this in sight of the elders, and this place is remembered as one where the people wavered in their certainty about whether God was present with them.
Shortly after that, ’Amalek attacks — the historic, ancestral enemy. Mosheh instructs a general named Yehoshu’a to raise an army and fight ’Amalek. The next day, Mosheh will position himself on a hill above the battlefield with his magic wand in hand. Mosheh goes up the hill with Aharon and someone named Hur. Whenever Mosheh raises his staff, the people begin to win, but when he lets it down, ’Amalek prevails. So Aharon and Hur sit Mosheh on a stone and hold up his arms for him, so his hands remain steady until sunset, and the children of Yisra’el thus prevail over ’Amalek at Refidim.
God instructs Mosheh to write down a declaration and read it aloud to Yehoshu’a:
כִּֽי־מָחֹ֤ה אֶמְחֶה֙ אֶת־זֵ֣כֶר עֲמָלֵ֔ק מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃
“I will utterly blot out the memory of ’Amalek from under heaven!”
Then Mosheh builds an altar here and declares eternal war against ’Amalek.
This is an extremely ominous parashah to me, despite it being the one that describes the people’s liberation. Much war and conquest is foreshadowed. In the Song at the Sea, God is described as “איש מלחמה” — “man of war.” That, it seems, is the image for us to take away from the story of the exodus.
But I do feel the message is more nuanced, because there is a stark contrast between the indomitable War God and the helpless, complaining, nascent people — between the brave warriors on the battlefield and frail Mosheh needing his arms propped up. I don’t think a reading that simply concludes “Israelite values are warrior values” is complete. I think you have to understand the warrior ideals in contrast with the sensitive, needy reality and see how the people will navigate the thin, dry land between those walls of water.
🌊
