Hope, Hands and Bones – Beshalach

It is sometimes hard to figure out what a central message of a particular parsha is, particularly one so action packed and full of significant material as Beshalach.  Yet a look at the commentary at the end of the parsha that connects the number of verses, 116 in our case, and its gematria which is “yad Emunah” hand of faith can assist.

How is a parsha about faith when the people complain more than once about being hungry  as well as questioning whether God is in their midst or not(Exodus 17:7) when they literally have the manna given to them by God in their stomachs?   Or when it begins with the decision by God to lead them the long way from Egypt so they are not tempted to turn around and go back(Exodus 13:17-18) as they wish they could as they yearn for the meat they had in Egypt (Exodus 16:3)

Inculcating faith is a slow process, not an automatic one and not linear as this parsha shows.  But faith like hope is a way of being in the world with confidence and optimism.  In fact,   recent research on the science of hope  notes that hopeful people “believe in their agency – that is, their capacity to achieve the outcomes,” says Jacqueline Mattis a research scientist on positive psychology.

I want to speak here about two figures, a midwife of faith and an author of faith who are significant in expressing the “hand of faith” in this parsha, one mentioned by name and one only in the midrash.  As the people leave Egypt, we are told in the fourth verse of the parsha that Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, because of the oath sworn by his ancestors to remove those bones when God visits them(pakod yifkod) and they are able to depart Egypt(Exodus 13:19).  The midrash asks how the bones were raised from the coffin in the Nile that contained them?  Who could be the link between the promise made by Joseph and the current reality so removed in time?

The Talmud in Sotah  13a.[i]  has the answer.,

“And from where did Moses our teacher know where Joseph was buried? The Sages said: Serah, the daughter of Asher, remained from that generation that initially descended to Egypt with Jacob. Moses went to her and said to her: Do you know anything about where Joseph is buried? She said to him: The Egyptians fashioned a metal casket for him and set it in the Nile [Nilus] River as an augury so that its water would be blessed. Moses went and stood on the bank of the Nile. He said to Joseph: Joseph, Joseph, the time has arrived about which the Holy One, Blessed be He, took an oath saying that I, i.e., God, will redeem you. And the time for fulfillment of the oath that you administered to the Jewish people that they will bury you in Eretz Yisrael has arrived. If you show yourself, it is good, but if not, we are clear from your oath. Immediately, the casket of Joseph floated to the top of the water.”

When Joseph dies, he summons his brothers and tells them that God will surely visit them,(pakod yifkod) and bring them out of Egypt(Genesis 50: 24).  So when the same language reappears in God’s message to Moses in Exodus 3:16, the rabbis are convinced of the importance of these words^[ii].  The midrash in Exodus Rabba 5:13 asks, “And in what will they believe? By the sign of the visitation that he spoke to them, this was the tradition in the hand of Jacob, and Jacob transmitted this secret to Joseph, and Joseph to his brothers, and Asher the son of Jacob transmitted the secret to Serach his daughter, and still she was living, and thus statement is hers, “Every redeemer who comes and says to my children, ‘I will surely visit you’(Exodus 3:16) is a true redeemer, thus when Moses came and said “I will surely visit you” the people believed.”  In this telling, Serach and her awareness that this sign of visitation(siman hapekidah) authenticates the words of the one telling it becomes the vehicle to authenticate the commission of Moses, despite his being a murderer on the lam not raised as an Israelite and married to the daughter of a Midianite priest.  Serach, daughter of Asher is mentioned by name in Genesis 46:17, Numbers 26:46 and I Chronicles 7:30;  since she is mentioned both in Genesis and in Numbers, thus attesting to her being long lived, the midrash in the consolidation and conservation of character that is its central conceit anoints Serach as the person who keeps the secret of redemption.

Without the breadth of her experience and testimony, her familiarity with the words that Joseph spoke, the faith of the people in Moses’ leadership would not have been possible.  In this rabbinic understanding of her character, Serach is certainly among the righteous women for whose sake Israel was redeemed from Egypt as Rav Avira teaches in Sotah 11b.  As the beginning of Exodus is crowded with women making the physical births of the Israelite people possible, so too must the philosophical contribution of Serach, the assurance of this visitation be added to the possibility not just for physical birth but for a spiritual beginning for the people as well.  Serach’s assurance of the signs enable her to be a character presented as a midwife for the burgeoning faith the people are beginning to learn.  In tandem with the use of the verb “pakad” to describe God’s visitation of Sarah to enable her pregnancy in Genesis 21:1 and of Hannah in I Samuel 2:21 , so too the visitation of God to the people that Serach knows about makes her the midwife of faith.

The final story about Serach that connects to this parsha though there are a number of other fascinating sources about her is from Pesikta DeRav Kahana 11:12.  There is a discussion of how the waters of the Red Sea looked when split.  “Even as Rabbi Johanan was explaining that the wall of water looked like latticework, Serach bat Asher looked and said, “I was there, and the waters were, rather, like shining windows.” Serach demonstrates her agency in naming the world as she sees it with language, fixing it in her vision through her understanding.  Her ability to see the sea as transparent, a window to be viewed through, rather than the “wall” of the biblical text(Exodus 14:29) displays her control over her reality managed in language.

At the conclusion of the parsha, language is what enables Moses to be an author of faith when he translates his physical actions with his hands into written language.  The hands of Moses are described as “Emunah” faithful(Exodus 17:12), the only use of the word as in a physical sense in the Hebrew Bible.[iii] They are scratching at a method for instilling faith with a motion and a movement, a signal that will unambiguously transmit the emotions necessary for victory.

How does the choreography come about?  Moses’ supporters make him comfortable.  They place a rock underneath him[iv] and allow him to sit.  Then, they raise his hands, one on either side of him.  Moses remains seated that way all day.

The Mishna of Rosh Hashanah is clear about the function of the hands, stating that it was not their function to enact warfare, rather, that it was because “when the people turned their eyes upward and were subject to God they prevailed, but if not they fell. [v]  This interpretation says that it is not the hands themselves which are faithful, but the faith they are able to generate by enabling the people to focus appropriately. The ability not just to believe in the capacity to achieve something but to manage one’s attention and to join with others, are all aspects of creating hope in the view of positive psychology.

Moses does not stop at enabling the children of Israel to win the battle against Amalek but at the request of God, he writes down the victory and transmits it to Joshua.  This is the first reference to writing in the Torah according to the late Bible scholar Nahum Sarna[vi].  The faith expressed by Moses’ hands moves from gesture into language, presenting a reality of faith that can be transmitted to future generations.   Writing enacts something that would not be present otherwise.  It gives a particular shape and understanding of events in a form that can be communicated to others and into the future. Here in Exodus 17, the written memory is connected to the physical movements, to the upright hands of Moses, directing the gaze of the people.   Had Moses not held this physical stance of embodying faith, using his hands to make manifest what he believed he would have been unable to inscribe the words in a book to be transmitted to Joshua or to build an altar( Exodus 17: 14).

Both Serach as a midwife of faith and Moses as a gesturer of faith and then an author of it contributed language to a changed reality.  Serach knew the language of redemption and the code to raise the casket of Joseph while Moses had the capacity to put his gestures into language.  It is no accident that these examples of putting faith into language bookend a parsha that is one of the two lengthy  songs( with Haazinu in Deuteronomy 32) in the Torah where the language and look of the text itself, written as a wall, replicates the experience encased within it.  Language creates reality but also gestures to what is external to it, in this case a hand of faith.  Language creates agency which is inextricably linked to faith; having both agency and faith and expressing these in language as Serach and Moses do, is one of the first and most significant steps in the defeat of Amalek.

—

[i] The text reads, “The Gemara asks: And from where did Moses our teacher know where Joseph was buried? The Sages said: Serah, the daughter of Asher, remained from that generation that initially descended to Egypt with Jacob. Moses went to her and said to her: Do you know anything about where Joseph is buried? She said to him: The Egyptians fashioned a metal casket for him and set it in the Nile [Nilus] River as an augury so that its water would be blessed. Moses went and stood on the bank of the Nile. He said to Joseph: Joseph, Joseph, the time has arrived about which the Holy One, Blessed be He, took an oath saying that I, i.e., God, will redeem you. And the time for fulfillment of the oath that you administered to the Jewish people that they will bury you in Eretz Yisrael has arrived. If you show yourself, it is good, but if not, we are clear from your oath. Immediately, the casket of Joseph floated to the top of the water.”

[ii] The phrase appears in Genesis 50:24, 25; Exodus 3:16, Exodus 13: 19 and I Samuel 20:6, according  to the Even Shoshan Concordance.

[iii] Sarna, Commentary to Exodus: 96 .

[iv] Part of his faith, according to the Talmud Taanit 11ais that Moses remained in the same distress and discomfort of the rest of the people at this time of war,  that although he could have had a pillow or cushion he chose to be seated only on a rock.

[v] Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:8.

[vi] Sarna, Commentary on Exodus: 96