Sh’vi-i shel Pesach: Trauma and Transcendence
(delivered by Rabbi Sacks on April 29, 2024)
Barely had our Israelite ancestors left Egypt, their belongings on their shoulders and the unleavened bread in their pouches, when they found themselves and their children in mortal jeopardy. Before them lay the expanse of the Reed Sea, and behind them was Pharaoh, filled with anger and remorse at letting the Israelites go. The Egyptian king was leading an Egyptian army and intended either to destroy them or return them to slavery. Despite the many miracles wrought for them while in Egypt and the extraordinary release from centuries of bondage, the Israelites responded to the approaching army with understandable fear. They were trapped between a sea and an army. They felt completely vulnerable. It was an existential trauma.
How Israel emerged from their trauma and how they grew and developed as a people is embedded within the narrative. Indeed coming to grips with their trauma is the burden of the entire rest of the Torah. Yet on another level, it seems an almost clinical case of growth and maturity. By coming to grips with fear, dread, and challenges they turned from a spiritually and physically enslaved people into Am Yisrael.
Let’s try to understand the scope and depth of the Israelites’ deep and profound trauma. The centuries of slavery were in themselves traumatic, and it is difficult to assess the impact that endless servitude had upon our people’s national psychology. Moreover, our ancestors were passive onlookers to most of what occurred and most of what they experienced. G!d and Moses were the actors on stage; the people were onlookers, in the audience, as they watched the increasing pressure brought upon the Egyptians which finally led them to their Exodus. They played no role in their freedom, fought no battles, engaged in no combat. They did, however, have to bear the brunt of Pharaoh’s shifting directives making their labor and lives harder and more bitter.
The Exodus, too, must have been mind-numbing: the material goods given to Israel by the Egyptians (as a gift? as a bribe?) coupled by the insistent goading of the Egyptians to hasten out of their land, to leave, to disappear. The story is an expulsion as much as it is a miracle of freedom from bondage. The very identity of the Israelites was shattered. Who they were had radically changed in almost a moment; there had been no time to assimilate their experience or understand their new status. No wonder, as they stood sandwiched between sea and army, then, they betrayed fear, anger, dislocation, and irrational thoughts about returning to Egypt to resume their lives as slaves. These are common reactions to trauma.
Moses’ response to Israel’s sense of panic and dislocation was perfectly expressed. Israel needed reassurance and some sense of safety. Their panicked reactions as they were “greatly frightened” crying out to HaShem; their morbid sense of impending doom, (“Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness”), and their striking out with anger against Moses himself (“What have you done taking us out of Egypt”) are all part of the expression of trauma. Israel does not know how to understand their circumstances as a people without an identity (“Let us be and we will serve the Egyptians”), because that is all they know, all they understand.[1]
Smoothly and with almost clinical assurance, Moses says to the terror-stricken people, “Have no fear! Stand by—“Hit-yatz-vu”–that is, calm down “and witness the deliverance which Hashem will work for you today.” G!d will do battle; you are not alone. What you will see now, you will never see again, namely, the despoliation of the Egyptian army. Meanwhile, hold your peace.
But that’s not enough. Individuals who have experienced trauma are also told to take affirmative action. And here, G!d tells Moses that in order to face their anxiety Israel must go forward. Moses must show the way by lifting up his rod over the sea till it is split. Israel needs to face not the enemy without, but the fear within.[2] And while Israel does so by walking through the sea, G!d will vanquish their external enemy.
During the night a pillar of cloud stood between the sea and Egypt, Israel in between. There is no movement. During the night, the Midrash perceptively describes the Israelites in fierce discussion as to what they ought to do and how to proceed. It is a scramble of mutually exclusive emotional thoughts and impractical solutions. Some wish to return to Egypt, others want to fight the Egyptians, and others decide to commit suicide by jumping into the sea and drowning. All these “solutions” are reflections of the inner turbulence of those who have been traumatized.
By morning a decision had to be made. Moses lifts his rod over the sea and, as the Torah coyly puts it,[3] the Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, to which the Midrash asks, If they entered the sea why does the Torah say on dry ground, and if on dry ground why does Scripture say into the sea? It’s either one or the other.
The Midrash contends that the verse implies that the sea did not split apart till the waters reached their nostrils. Facing one’s fears does not in and of itself dissolve the danger one perceives; Israel had to allow the dread to nearly overwhelm them and then let the faith that their guide Moses, and G!d personally, would drain away the anguish coursing through them, saturating them.
The relief at just having survived created the environment for a song of triumph. Israel had begun to release part of its trauma. Looking back at the devastation wrought by the returning sea over the Egyptian army, they saw the elements of faith and courage rise within themselves, the hand of God on the sea and the shoreline, and the wisdom of Moses’ leadership. They trusted in God and Moses—even if not for long.
Coming through a traumatic experience, living with the history of slavery, and witnessing miraculous events which saved their lives did not automatically change them internally. That would take a long time. Just several days later, when Israel found itself without water to drink in a wild and dry wilderness, that their old fears would rise again.[4] Once again they complained bitterly; once again they cried out against G!d. The Song at the Sea was an interlude in the ongoing process of maturation.
For Israel, born out of trauma, it would take generations to loosen, then lose, the bonds of loss, anguish, fear, and dread. And it would be a requirement to tell that story of dread and courage. To tell and retell the narrative to one’s children, to relive the Exodus, and to insert it as a constant reminder in the daily liturgy of our people. One cannot suppress horrific memories; one needs to confront them and grow from them, learn from them, and carry those memories forward into uncertain futures and new challenges.
Thus, the residual communal trauma we suffered came rushing to the forefront of our souls and psyches on October 7. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed and over 1,270 wounded. The losses include 395 IDF soldiers and 59 police officers. The sense that Pharaoh’s hordes overwhelmed us was inescapable. And yet today’s chanting of the Song of the Sea also serves to let us know that this is one more river to cross, one more stream to ford. In our history, we have come through many turbulent seas which nearly overwhelmed us. It took courage and the ability to face the trauma that so many endured, to pursue our dream of living out our Jewish lives in peace and cooperation with our neighbors.
The seventh day of Pesach, then, is a punctuation of the past and a prologue to our history. Today’s Torah reading leaves us with a triumphal song and with the message that we must never forget where we came from, how we got here–and that the story does not end with today, for the Jewish story, our story, is the story not only of ignominy disgrace, and trauma, but a story of exodus, redemption, and transcendence. May the stages of redemption and transcendence come soon and speedily, and then remain firmly in place. Amen.
[1] Exodus 14:10-12.
[2] Exodus 14:15-16.
[3] Exodus 14:22.
[4] Exodus 15:22-27.