Shabbat Pesakh 5785: Uncertainty

What if this Pesakh

We recall precarity

Versus redemption?

– Jen Van Meter

This year Shabbat occurs on the seventh day of Pesakh. The Torah story assigned to this day recalls the most uncertain time of all in the course of our ancestors’ redemption. First, HaShem leads us on a deliberately circuitous route to avoid contact with any other human encampments; second, HaShem then leads us in a reverse course, in order to lure Pharaoh into what will ultimately be a fatal pursuit. Finally, exactly that happens, and we find ourselves trapped between the Sea of Reeds on one side and the approaching Egyptian army on the other – the Jewish version of being caught between Scylla and Charybdis. 

Uncertainty just at the outset of carefully devised plan has a murderous impact on morale. There is something about the first steps of carrying out a plan that is so tentative, as we wonder whether we’ve worked it out correctly, whether our assumptions will prove true, and whether we can trust each other in the process. So when it all seems to go wrong, our ancestors are quick to conclude the worst; their words to Moshe have always seemed to me to be the first demonstrable example of sarcasm in our ancient literature:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ֮ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה֒ הֲֽמִבְּלִ֤י אֵין־קְבָרִים֙ בְּמִצְרַ֔יִם לְקַחְתָּ֖נוּ לָמ֣וּת בַּמִּדְבָּ֑ר מַה־זֹּאת֙ עָשִׂ֣יתָ לָּ֔נוּ לְהוֹצִיאָ֖נוּ מִמִּצְרָֽיִם׃ 

And they said to Moses, “Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt?” (Ex. 14.11)

Human nature hasn’t changed much since then; we are still quick to assume that all is lost when things seem to go wrong, and often act with great alacrity to blame someone else for it. And very few of us are comfortable in moments of uncertainty. A lot of bad theology emerges from the human desire to believe something certain rather than accept mystery at the heart of life.

There is, however, another choice, midway between assuming failure and accepting mystery, and that is to balance them both in an awareness of time. HaShem is an expression of all Place and all Time, and you and I are each one individual nexus within that reality. As long as we live, we move with HaShem, at each moment of our lives occupying exactly one position in which time and space converge in us, and every moment, by the nature of time and space, we are also moving from one position to another. We are not static. Every moment brings the possibility of a new awareness, a change in circumstance, a different perspective. 

It took the Israelites forty years to learn that a spiritual path takes time – indeed, it takes a lifetime. The path we as a kehillah kedoshah, a holy community, follow together will always be part mystery, part uncertainty, and part assumption that will be proved wrong as often as not.

When we face uncertainty, if we have enough willingness to show each other Hesed, grace, we will emerge better than when we started, as we move, each of us and all of us together, in the Eternal circles of our shared and our solitary existence.