Shabbat Shira

This is a good Torah portion. The parting of the sea, the drowning of the Egyptian army, the song of the sea, water from a rock, manna, and the first war with Amelek! An easy week for rabbbis and dvar torah givers everywhere.

It is interesting that this whole process of leaving Egypt is characterized by so much violence. Each plague being respectively more violent than the next culminating with complete and utter devastation for each and every Egyptian household. Just when we think the violent parts are over the Egyptian army follows the Israelites right into their watery graves.

The Israelites triumphant song is nothing less then the celebration of this violence. "Horse and driver he has hurled into the sea" and even more disturbingly "at the blast of your nostrils the water piled up, the floods stood straight like a wall, the deep froze in the heart of the sea". The song goes on to praise God's might, but it is God's great ability to utterly destroy and annihilate that we are celebrating. Is this the God that we worship? When we say "mi chamocha ba'elim adonai?" are we proud that are God is so good at causing death and destruction?
Perhaps. But I have to hope that there is more going on here than just that.

Two thoughts:
What we are witnessing here is no less than the birth of a people. As we moms know birth is messy. It is accompanied by huge amounts of pain that feels like the most violent thing that has ever happened to us. If we read the story metaphorically than it makes sense that our birth story is a violent one. A celebration of violence even. Isn't this what we do? When the baby is born we celebrate, we rejoice, the violence and pain now part of the fabric of the story that we tell. No longer directly affecting us.

I do think the stories from the Torah can be looked at metaphorically and that the whole book can in fact be a giant tapestry for our life on earth as human beings. But reading the Torah metaphorically can be dangerous. If we don't look at the story for what it says, the phsat of the story, we are in danger of letting too much slide. So perhaps the violence in the story is just that. This is a violent story of war and death and destruction and this something that we have to live with. War and death and destruction exist in the universe and we can't live our lives pretending that they don't exist or protecting our children from finding out about this side of life.

The other thing that we learn in this story is that truly good and evil exist in the world. The Israelites are the absolute winners in this case and the Egyptians are utterly destroyed. The Torah doesn't want us to feel sorry for the Egyptians. We are meant to read the story and rejoice in the destruction of evil. Evil does exist. The job on Gods part and on our part is to wipe it out. Utterly and completely. Even violently.

The other part of the parasha that is endlessly fascinating to me is the part about the manna. The Israelites are told to gather us much manna as they need each day but no more. They should not gather more than they need with the thought of saving it for the next day. They should also not gather on Shabbat but take twice as much as they think they will need on the sixth day. Of course the Israelites have trouble with this. Some gather more than they need only to find their "leftovers" crawling with maggots with the next day. Some indeed go looking for manna on Shabbat. It takes some practice on the part of the Israelites but eventually everone gets to the point where they are able to gather "each as much as he needed to eat" and double that before Shabbat. We are told that the Manna looks like coriander seed and tastes like "wafers in honey". One of my favorite midrashim is the one that tells us that the manna actually tasted like whatever each individual wanted it to taste like. More precisely it tasted like whatever each individual needed it to taste like. Therefore babies tasted milk, women tasted fish or other protein, and the elderly tasted what they needed.

The nugget though that I love about this is that everyone was able to gather exactly what they needed to eat. What a great message for all of us struggling on a daily basis with what and how much to eat. The Israelites learned to gather exactly what they need. Presumably everyone needed a different amount, and what a person needed on any given day could vary. This was okay, as long as you were gathering only the what your body needed. It's when you started to hoard food or take more than you needed that trouble started. When we eat exactly what our bodies need to feel full we can exist in a state of harmony with God and with the universe. I just finished reading Michael Pollen's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and I think this parasha precisely and beautifully answers this question. We must gather what we need. It must be exactly what our bodies need in the right amount for us on that day on that given time period. When we eat this way we eat in a holy way, a Jewish way.

Shabbat Shalom.