Exodus 14:5-9, 21-29
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
October 10, 2021
Over the last seven years, it has been my privilege to lead Torah Yoga for our friends at Temple Beth Sholom in Framingham. Each month, I am challenged to take a particular portion of the Torah, their sacred text which parallels the first five books of our Bible, and find a way to embody the imagery and wisdom through gentle yoga poses. This opportunity has led me to a deeper appreciation of Jewish understandings of scripture.
Throughout the millenia, rabbis and mystics have studied the Torah—asking hard questions, noticing what’s missing, envisioning stories behind the story. They have drawn upon scholarly analysis, mystical experiences, legends, daily life, and their own creative imaginations. As they wrote their wonderings and insights down, they created bodies of writing that are broadly called midrash. The midrash themselves are sacred writings—a holy conversation with holy scripture.
With gratitude for the wisdom of Judaism, and with a recognition of my limited understanding of these rich writings, I want to draw on two midrash stories that can help us connect this ancient biblical text with the challenges of today.
The reading from Exodus suggests a clear order of events. The Israelites are trapped between the Red Sea and the approaching Egyptian army. At God’s command, Moses stretches his hand over the sea. God sends a wind that makes the waters part. Once they can see a path through the water, the Israelites cross on dry land.
There is a midrash—from the Sotah 37a Tractate of the Talmud—that adds more detail to the story and shifts the order of events. The people are trapped, worrying and wailing as they see the approaching Egyptian army. They have heard, over and over, the promise that God will guide them, even across the raging waters. But they see no path. They are paralyzed. One man, Nahshon, steps into the water and begins to walk through it. He dares to trust the promise of God before he can see it. Only when he is up to his neck do the waters finally part. The rest of the Israelites join him, crossing in safety.
This is a midrash for our times. In so many arenas of our lives and with so many justice issues facing our world, we long for a clear, well-defined, visible path through the seas of uncertainty. Until we see it, we are inclined to join the Israelites on the shore—panicked and paralyzed. The story of Nahshon challenges us to step out into the water before we can see the path ahead, to trust that God will work in and through and beyond us to make a way out of no way. The path we create in partnership with God might not be as well-defined as the one we imagine from the Exodus story; the promise of our faith is that God will walk it with us. The journey will not be easy; it will be holy.
What are the arenas of your life where you find yourself paralyzed beside the sea of uncertainty? What are the injustices of our world that seem so overwhelming they leave you trapped by inaction? What would it mean for you to step into the water before you can see the whole path ahead?
Maybe we can add our own midrash to the conversation, our own holy imagining. I imagine a story of a community that holds hands and dares to walk into the sea together, trusting that God is in our clasped hands, in our love for one another, and in our commitment to try to be a source of healing and justice.
The second midrash I share builds on the latter half of the biblical story: that awful scene where the Egyptians drown. Following the drowning, the Israelites sing and dance—the Song of the Sea, a celebration of God’ faithfulness. The Sanhedrin 37a tractate of the Talmud expands the story. Angels who are ministering to God want to offer their own song of praise. God tells them to be quiet. “The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you would utter song before me?!”
In this midrash, God understands the Israelites need to celebrate after they have escaped slavery and danger. God even understands their—our—human inclination to interpret events from a narrow perspective. And God sees a bigger picture—the suffering of the Egyptian soldier, the grief of the Egyptian mother. The midrash challenges us to acknowledge the limits of our own perspectives, to recognize the incompleteness of the stories we tell about life, and to seek to see the world a little bit more like the way God sees it. The midrash asks the questions: Whose story is being told? Whose story is left out? Why?
This too is a midrash for our times—and especially for this weekend. Tomorrow we celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. It is an opportunity to step back from the ways we have told the story of our nation and listen deeply to stories that have been told but have not always been heard. If we listen, we will hear of rich cultures and traditions; we will also hear disturbing stories of destruction of those cultures and devastation of entire peoples.
This is an important opportunity—and a challenging one. To truly hear these stories is to call into question the stories we have learned and the ways we understand who we are as individuals and as a nation. If we listen deeply, we will be challenged to make changes. It’s hard to envision where those changes will lead us.
If we listen deeply to the Nipmuc people, we will learn about how they lived on this hill for part of the year, catching salmon as they swam upstream in the Sudbury river. We will learn how they were moved by missionaries to South Natick. We will wonder what it meant when several signed a document giving the deed to this land, land which no one owned, to the Stone family. As we listen and learn, how will that change our understanding of our beloved campus? How will it impact what we do here? I don’t know. The path forward is not clear.
It’s as though we are back with Nahshon and the Israelites, beside the Red Sea. We hear the promise that, if we choose to listen deeply to stories that challenge our own, God will guide us on a sacred journey. We don’t yet see the waters parting; we don’t know where the journey will lead us or how muddy the path will be. Can we dare to be like Nahshon and step out into the water, only together? Can we trust that God will be with us on this sacred journey?
May we listen deeply to stories that challenge our own. May we trust that God is with us when we step into the water. Amen.
I invite you to join me in a responsive prayer of confession. Your response: “Open our hearts; bless us with courage.”
O God, we are here, waiting for you by the sea. You have promised to be with us on the journey, but we would like a little more clarity before we step out. For the times we fear the unknown,
Open our hearts; bless us with courage.
O God, you know the stories we tell. You know how limited our perspective can be. You challenge us to broaden our understanding, to listen deeply to stories we have ignored. When we fear how we might be called to change,
Open our hearts; bless us with courage.
O God, we are trying. We are holding hands—metaphorically, of course. We are gingerly stepping out into the water. We are daring to trust you are with us. As we risk this faithful journey,
Open our hearts; bless us with courage. Amen.
Friends, believe the good news. We are not trapped by our fear. We are not constrained by the limits of our perspective. By the grace of God, we are set free to listen, to change, to trust. Let us step out in faith. Amen.