Finally, after 400 years of dreaming about a future that is not yet within our grasp, the time is now. All that seemed to be obstacles has fallen away; the door that leads away from enslavement to now is beckoning toward the commitment to what will be.
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. Trust, HaShem tells Moshe, not in what is, but in what is not yet. I will be what I will be; we will be what we are not yet.
In our parashah, called BeShalakh, the Torah records the great Song of the Sea, chanted to a special melody, during which the congregation rises in respect and excitement at the moment of the great memory relived.
They’ve crossed the great Sea. Pharaoh can no longer threaten them. Moses and Miriam and the Children of Israel sing and rejoice and celebrate. They have been liberated from bondage.
They are free! All that they dreamed is now true. And now what?
Grumbling. Complaining. The Hebrew word is ַוַיִּלֹּנוּ va’yilonu: The people grumbled against Moses: “What shall we drink”? (Exodus 15:24)
Yes. Rather than giving themselves up to celebration and gratitude, the Israelites complained. Rather than trust the vision now realized, they turned their eyes away and grumbled about sore feet, moaning over an entirely unrealistic memory of their Egyptian situation.
The whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron: “We wish HaShem had killed us in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread. You brought us out to this wilderness to starve!” (Exodus 16:3).
In Jewish mysticism, we are taught that there are two spiritual states: mokhin d’katnut, “diminished spirit,” and mokhin d’gadlut, “expansive spirit.” Fear is a state that strangles us down to a place of diminished spirit, complaining, angry, hurt, unable to permit ourselves to hope. Curiously, it occurs not when we are beaten down by our situation, but, often, when we are standing on the threshhold of escape from all that holds us down.
It is at that moment when we ourselves are the weight that holds ourselves down. The state of mokhin d’katnut rushes in just at the moment when we might give ourselves to joy rather than fear.
Why is the language of lovemaking so hard to learn?
Why is the body so often dumb flesh?
Why does the mind so often choose to fly away
at the moment the word waited for all one’s life
is about to be spoken?
– Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar
Here is what it truly means to enter the wilderness. To leave Egypt is to leave that which is comfortingly familiar, even if it stifles growth and freedom and dreams. To leave Egypt is to walk into a wilderness which is only romantic on a bumper sticker; in real life we often see such a moment as scary and unsafe, and we do not see that it is our invitation into mokhin d’gadlut, a chance – that may not come again – to hold out our arms and embrace existence, and to sing its praises.
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. Trust, HaShem tells Moshe, not in what is, but in what is not yet. I will be what I will be; we will be what we are not yet.
On this Shabbat, consider: what do you long to hear, yet run from? Can you begin to understand how it holds not only you back from the ability to trust others, and life itself – and how that holds you, and me as well, from exploring the freedom we might share to move through the wilderness in joy?
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 