|
Day 7
Moving Forward Anyway
Redemption! Parashat B’shalach is a Torah portion of glory — glory in the Song at the Sea, the poetic celebration of liberation from Egyptian bondage, and glory in the details of the Israelites’ first steps out of Egypt.
Taken as a whole, Parashat B’shalach’s opening verse sets the stage for the Israelites’ complex experience of desert wandering and their first encounters with freedom. Even the opening verse of this ecstatic and climactic Torah portion reflects the Israelites’ anxiety about their new reality.
We can empathize with the uncertainty that the Israelites experienced. Those early steps towards freedom were like walking into a vast abyss —not only a world that they had never known, but also a world none of their remote ancestors had ever known. Even for institutional memory, 400 years of slavery is an awfully long time.
God is compassionate towards the Israelites’ conflicts about freedom. Fear, and particularly fear of the unknown, can be tremendously powerful and it seems that God decided to redirect the Israelites’ route both to spare them the pain of seeing war and to let them avoid the easy excuse to give in to fear and return to the lives they knew in Egypt.
--Rabbi Ana Bonnheim, First Steps on the Path to the Promised Land, reformjudaism.org
| 
