(Originally published in January 2021)
The Israelites are on the cusp of a new life and a new way of being in the world. They have left Egypt and they need to let go of their slave identity and open up to the larger possibility of self implied by a connection to God.
Such a transition is enormously scary. Even if what they are leaving is a life of suffering, it is still a known life, and giving up what is known for an unknown and uncertain desert existence must have been terrifying. God takes them the long way around on their way out of Egypt precisely because He anticipates this uncertain feeling, that the people are likely to regret having left Egypt and want to go back. Later, when they are confronted by the pursuing Egyptians, the Isralites remind Moshe that they had in fact been ambivalent way back in Egypt; even then they had wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to stay in slavery rather than risk death in the desert.
And so part of the task in this week’s parsha is for the Israelites to embrace their new life and move forward despite their ambivalence and fear and uncertainty. Moshe’s response to the people’s terror at seeing Egypt right behind them is: Don’t be scared! God will save you! But God responds differently. God knows that it doesn’t help to tell people not to be scared or uncertain. Instead He says: What are you yelling at Me for? Tell them to move forward! The only way around fear is through it, moving forward despite the fear, in the fear, through the fear itself, not letting it stop you, but also not denying it. Allow the uncertainty and move forward anyway.
The depiction of the walk through the Red Sea implies this attitude as well. They walked betokh hayam bayabashah, “within the Sea on dry land,” with the water forming a wall on either side of them. The very water which frightened them to jump into — the midrash says that it was only one individual who had the courage to walk in up to his neck — that was the water that they had to walk through to get to their new selves. And the way they did it is instructive; the swirling water of their fear did not disappear, but was contained on either side, stilled for the moment instead of raging, so that they could see it and pass through it, but do so while walking on solid ground, with some sense of unshakability to hold them through it, feeling the fear but still putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward.
To walk in this way — within the fear — gradually does vanquish the fear; the movement itself teaches courage, a courage that begins on the outside and gradually seeps inside, as if the mind gradually wakes up to what the feet are already doing and knowing, that moving forward is tolerable.
And so, at the end of this walk, having travelled with and through their fears, the people then turn around for a final letting go of those fears as they open their eyes to see clearly the drowned Egyptians in the Sea. The Torah spells this out explicitly, this seeing of the dead, a strange detail considering the counter tradition that the angels who wanted to sing that day over the Egyptians’ demise were not allowed to do so since the enemies, too, are God’s creatures. But for the Israelites this witnessing was essential. It was a letting go, a ritual unburdening, a sendoff of their attachments and fears surrounding Egypt. Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, comes from the root tzar, narrowness or straits. The Israelites needed to finally let go of the forces that were holding them back from this new life, constraining them to a narrow identity and perspective, limiting them through fear and habit to the life they had previously known. In seeing the dead, the Israelites were saying goodbye to these constraints, relinquishing them to the power of the Sea to carry off.
The process was like a breathing in and a breathing out. They breathed in the courage of stepping forward amidst the fear, and they breathed out Egypt with all its associated limitations and constraints and fears. They breathed in the possibility of a sparkling unknown future, and they breathed out — letting go — of their attachment to the known past.
What happens next is a giant leap forward. This two-sided process of moving forward and letting go invites in a new energy, a quantum surge of power and creativity and life force — Song, a rising up and singing of the song they — we all — were born to sing. Released of constraint, letting go of the known, freed from the fears that held them back, the Israelites open up their mouths and their souls and the spirit sings through them a song for the ages. Singing of God’s glory, the Israelites have released themselves from their small indentured identities and become one with this divine glory.
Perhaps this new shining light of theirs is precisely what they were scared of in the first place, what we are all scared to truly manifest, why we hold on to our habitual constraints — because this light inside us is unfamiliar (yet also deeply familiar) and so bright that we fear it will blind us and those around us. We don’t let go of our Mitzrayim limitations because we are scared we can’t handle who we might become. As Marianne Williamson famously says:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
The Israelites at the Sea let go of that fear and opened themselves to a song that continues to sing in our world. Az Yashir, “Then he will sing,” it begins, in the future tense, as if to imply that yes, when they sang, they gave permission to others — the birds and the trees and all of us — to sing, then and now and forever.
Photo by Pixabay at Pexels
