BESHALACH 1993

In the Torah portion Beshalach we learn how Pharaoh and his army chase after the Jewish people in order to bring them back into slavery in Egypt.  The question can be asked, where did Pharaoh get the temerity co do this?  After all, hadn't he suffered enough with the ten plagues?  How did he think that he could ever capture the Jewish people and bring them back to Egypt?  Wasn't he convinced that G‑d was fighting for them?  Wasn't he convinced that it was futile to try to recapture the Jewish people?  After all, it was he who had chased them out.

Also, after the Egyptian army is swept away Moshe Rabbeinu and the Jewish people sing a song, and the rabbis say that before Moshe Rabbeinu could sing this song he had to be assured that it was proper to sing this song.  He had to remember and look in Jewish history to find out whether there was a precedent for this.  The rabbis say that he found a precedent.  After Abraham had rescued the people of the city of Sodom and he had rescued especially his nephew Lot, that the king of Sodom had come to him and said, "You give me all the people and keep all the booty for yourself," but Abraham refused and he said, "I lift up my hand to G‑d, the G‑d of the highest, the owner of the heaven and the earth."  And Moshe Rabbeinu said, "Since Abraham said that sentence, therefore, I can say this is my G‑d and I will glorify him, the G‑d of my father, and I will exalt Him."  Why should he have co have found a precedent for this song, and why was it that it was the words of Abraham that gave him the precedent?  "I lift up my hand to G‑d, the G‑d Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth."

Finally, we learn in a Medrash that Rabbi Zechalifta said that it is harder for G‑d to make matches than it was for Him to split the Red Sea.  In fact, they tell a famous story that a women matron came to Rabbi Zechalifta and said, "I understand that your G‑d made the whole world in six days.  Tell me, what is He doing since then?" Rabbi Yosef Zechalifta said, "He is making matches.  He is matching the daughter of so and so to the son of so and so."  The matron looked at him and said, "Is that all that G‑d is doing?  I can do the same thing.  I can take my thousand maidservants and menservants and send them off one to another and declare that they are married, and it will take me just a few seconds."  Rabbi Yosef Zechalifta looked at her and said, "You think it is so simple?  To G‑d it is harder than splitting the Red Sea."  Sure enough that evening she went home and she lined up her thousand manservants and her thousand maidservants one opposite the other and said, "You are now married," The next morning she came and she found this one had a broken leg, this one had a black eye, this one had a broken wrist.  She went back to Rabbi Yosef Zechalifta and said, "Your Torah is true.  G‑d is truly a great G‑d because it is very difficult to make matches."  We can all ask, though, why did Yosef Zechalifta say like the "splitting of the Red Sea"?  Why didn't he use another term?  Why did he use the splitting of the Red Sea?  He could have used any other miracle.  He could have used the miracle of any of the ten plagues or the miracle of the manna, which we also learn about in this Torah portion, or any other miracle.  Why did he chose the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea?

Perhaps the answers to all these questions are found in a comment of the Baal Hatureem, who says there are only three places in the whole Tenach in which the word "Horaim" is used.  One of these places is right here.  When G‑d said to Moshe, "Why are you crying to Me?  Speak to the sons of Israel and they should travel and you shall lift up your staff and stretch your hand on the water and split it."  In other words, Moshe was to lift up his staff after the Jewish people had plunged forward into the sea and the waters would split, and the unusual word Horaim is used.  The Baal Tureem also notes that that word is also used by Elisha when an artisan had lost his tools.  A huge wave had swept ashore and taken away his tools, and the artisan comes to Elisha complaining how is he going to make a living.  And Elisha asked the sea to lift up and return to him his tools, and sure enough, so it was.  The third instance is in Isaiah when G‑d tells Isaiah to lift up his voice and to remonstrate against the Jewish people so that they would return to G‑d and return to their responsibilities.  If we will notice that there is a common link in all the use of this word Horaim, and that it has co do with flux, with change.  The sea moves back and forth, The Jewish people, too, moved between righteousness and sinfulness, that this talks about constant movement.  This, of course, is why Moshe Rabbeinu was looking for a precedent in Jewish history whether he should sing a shira or not because a shira is filled with emotion.  He was wondering if it was proper to have emotion in religion.  After all, emotion is so movable.  Emotion is not like reason.  It jumps from one point to another point.  It is not constant.  It has highs and lows, and we see later on, too, that this is true.  The Jewish people were at the height of an emotional experience identifying themselves with G‑d.  It says they believed in G‑d and in Moshe, His servant.  Then we learn three days later they were complaining about the water, that everything was no good.  They asked Moshe Rabbeinu, "Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you brought us here?" They wanted to return to Egypt.  We see throughout the whole portion there are many complaints about the food and about not having meat and about the water.  In fact, in this Torah portion Moshe is actually commanded to beat the rock and bring forth water.  Finally they come to such a point that they doubt whether G‑d is among them.  This is only in a space of a few weeks, so our emotions go up and down.  We all know that a manic depressive has a severe disease.  A manic depressive has highs and lows.  Each of us, too, has these emotional swings.  The difference between us and a manic depressive is that we can control ours.  They are not so large, but we all know that sometimes we have highs and sometimes we have lows, and especially this is true when we are dealing with all sorts of emotions.  We see that at simchas many times when people are so happy and all of a sudden because a waiter has served a dish wrong or because the flowers are out of place people get so excited and upset.  Of course, because the emotions swing one side to the other and it is difficult co deal with emotions.  It is difficult to deal with all types of emotions, especially with love.  Many times you are not sure whether your prospective really loves you, whether it is really right or wrong, and many times you are affronted by little comments and because you have risked so much on your emotions, therefore you are afraid that maybe you have been misled.  There are so many problems when you are dealing with raw emotion.  Moshe Rabbeinu wondered, is it possible for him to sing a song, to enter emotion into religion?  You are going to have this cascade effect with this up and down, but he found a precedent, that Abraham Ovinu said that G‑d is the maker of heaven and earth, of not only clear reason, heavenly reason, but also of the earth, of the raw emotions, and religion has to be composed of both emotion and reason.  Of course, one of the tragedies of our day is that many times you find religion that is either too rational or too emotional.  They do not integrate the two together, but in the Jewish religion we know that that is one of the strengths of the Jewish religion, that it is the integration of the mind and the emotion that has always made Judaism a livable religion and a religion which has a heart as well as a mind.

So we see here that Moshe Rabbeinu needed to have a precedent in order to bring emotion into the religion.  Also, what caused Pharaoh to chase after the Jewish people?  The rabbis say that what caused Pharaoh to chase after the Jewish people because it says that it was told to the king of Egypt that the people had fled, not that the people were looking toward a goal, but that the people had fled.  Therefore, the king of Egypt thought that he could bring them back because they were not going any place.  They were just fleeing from the conditions of slavery.  Maybe he would make a few promises to them.  Maybe he would show them that things were not as bad as they thought and they would come back because they really did not have any place that they wanted to go.  That, of course, explains, too, why we had the threefold expression of Horaim because Horaim comes to teach us important things in this relationship that we all have one with another.  Of course, Moshe in the shira was talking about the relationship that man has with G‑d.  It says, "This is my G‑d and I will beautify Him."  Now the word Novai in Hebrew can mean not only to beautify but the rabbis say it can also mean solidarity, togetherness, I and he, and that we have common goals and aspirations, and also, of course, it can stand for a home, a habitation.  When we say that we are going to build G‑d a holy house it is also referred to as Nove.  We see here that in order for us to make our emotions work for us our emotions must be integrated into the religion.  How do we integrate these emotions into the religion?  We do it by Horain.  The first Horaim was when Moshe Rabbeinu lifted up his staff so that the people should travel.  The people had to be together.  The people had to have a goal.  If the people were just fleeing but not going to some place, then they could be sally turned around and turned back.  That applies to marriage, too, Love is a wonderful thing and many times young people come into my office and they are so much in love and then 3 or 4 months later they want a divorce.  Were they really not in love in the beginning?  No, they were in love.  So why do they want a divorce now?  Because they did not know how to harness their love, They did not know how to integrate their love into their lives.  Their emotions were cascading up and down, They could not channel it.  They could not harness their love and make it into something that would be enduring and forever.  This, of course, is what we are talking about here, too, in our relationship with G‑d, We have to be together.  We have to realize that there are ups and downs in the relationship but we have to persevere.  We have to believe that G‑d wants the best for us but sometimes we cannot see that.  We have to believe it.  In a marriage situation, too, we have to believe in the institution of marriage before we can even believe in our own marriage.  We have to believe that the institution of marriage is wonderful and we have to persevere even though there are going to be ups and downs in the marriage.  We have to persevere.  As long as the ups and downs are within reasonable bounds we have to persevere.  As long as it does not turn into a manic depressive type of relationship we persevere.  That is what the Jewish people were told to do.  Stretch out your hand and go into the sea.  Go together.  You are going to a goal.  You are not just fleeing from Egypt.  Unfortunately, many people enter into marriage because they are fleeing, either from their parents' home or from some sort of business connection or from a bad job or a bad self-image.  These kind of marriages are not going to work because people do not believe in the marriage, itself.  You have to believe in the marriage, itself.  You have to persevere.

The second Horaim has co do with beauty.  The artist could not make his beautiful objects.  He did not have the tools co make his beautiful objects.  Many times when we are talking about beautiful things, when we are talking about beauty it causes us to be passive because we feel that we cannot in any way create a beautiful thing.  We cannot beautify our relationships.  We cannot beautify our relationship between man and G‑d.  After all, how can we beautify G‑d?  But the rabbis say that is not what it means.  When it means to beautify it means that we are going to do mitzvahs in a beautiful way, that we are going to do nice things for one another, that we are going to do them in a beautiful way.  The artisan is going to make a trinket, something nice for his spouse, that we are going to treat each other with care and consideration, that we are going to do nice little things for each.  We are going to do mitzvahs for each other in a beautiful way.  That's why the rabbis say that marriage is so important because marriage gives us the opportunity to do Chesed one for each other.  That is, of course, what man needs to do.  He needs to do kindness for each other, and when we do these kindnesses for each other we elevate ourselves.  We become more than ourselves.  Therefore, in order to have any type of lasting relationship we must be willing to do mitzvahs in a beautiful and loving and kind way, and if we want to have a relationship with our spouse we have to do the same thing.

Finally, too, Nove means a habitation.  We have to have a structure in our marriage.  It is not important what duties the couple decides that each one is going to doe, but you cannot have a marriage and say we are going to do everything together.

That means nobody is responsible for anything or one person is going to have to do it all.  It is going to create a lot of bitterness.  It does not make any difference if the man cooks and washes dishes and the woman takes care of the books.  It does not matter how you divide the duties but people have co be responsible.  You have to have a structure, and it is very important to have a religious structure for marriage.  That cements the marriage.  That is why the Jewish marriages were so strong for over 2000 years until just recently, because there was a structure in which they were held.  The same thing is true of a house.  Every pillar is important when building a house, so every pillar in a relationship has to be supported by a structure, an overall structure.  That, of course, is what Isaiah was telling the people, too.  You have to return to the Halacha.  You have to return to Jewish law because it gives you a structure of how to relate one to another and how to be kind and compassionate people, and there is a structure in marriage, too, that we need, and there is a structure between our relationship between man and G‑d also.  That, of course, is why this Torah portion is so important because it teaches about the relationship between man and G‑d.  This is my G‑d and I will beautify Him, the G‑d of my father, and I will exalt Him.  That is the essence, too, or a marriage relationship because we say that the paradigm of the relationship between G‑d and man is the relationship between a man and a woman.  Love is important and is essential co have a beautiful marriage, but it has to be channeled and harnessed, just like the love that the Jewish people had for G‑d had to be channeled and harnessed otherwise it would lead to all sorts of ups and downs.  It would lead eventually to a divorce.  It would not lead to a stable situation.  What is necessary in order to transmute love, to transmute emotion and to make it into an enduring relationship because, after all, G‑d created the heaven and the earth.  We must combine the reason and emotion together.  We must harness love to make it our servant, to make it a basis of a permanent relationship.  How do we do that?  By persevering, by believing in the institution of marriage, itself, by always doing deeds of kindness for each other, deeds of consideration, Thirdly, we do it by creating a structure in which it can function where everybody has his responsibilities and duties and, therefore, everybody knows where they stand.  It is our hope and prayer that all our young couples will build their marriages based upon these principles so their marriages will endure forever, so that, as we say in the shira, "This is my G‑d and I will glorify Him, my father's G‑d, and I will exalt Him."  Yes, relationships are beautiful and wonderful.  Let us all hope and pray that in our marriages today we will reflect the Jewish tradition and that truly they will glorify us and cause us to not only come closer to each other but also to our tradition and to G‑d.  Amen.