Into the Midst of the Sea on Dry Ground

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“Into the Midst of the Sea on Dry Ground”

by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

All of Pesah is concealed within one phrase: “ b’tokh haYam b’yabasha / [And the children of Israel went] into the midst of the sea on dry ground.”

The whole thing is crammed into one literally impossible, delicious self-contradiction. You can either be “in the midst of the sea” or you can be “on dry ground.” But you cannot be both “in the midst of the sea” and “on dry ground” at the same time. (Unless, of course, you are in another Universe. More about that later.)

We say after a quick reading that the text obviously means that once the children of Israel arrived at sea, then it became dry ground or perhaps, as the famous midrash about Nahshon ben Aminadav teaches, once they stepped into the midst of the sea—up to their nostrils, then it became dry ground. But that is not what Torah says. It says they did both and at the same time!

When I was a little boy growing up in Detroit, my mother always shopped at—I think it was called “the Big Bear Market” because they gave S & H Green stamps. These were the grocery store precursors of frequent traveler air miles. These stamps came in small perforated and gummed sheets and were awarded in proportion to each dollar spent. It was my job to lick the stamps and paste them into little newsprint booklets about the size of a TV Guide. We kept the booklets fat with stamps in a shoe box on the floor of the front hall closet and when the box was full we would take its contents to the local S & H Green Stamp “Redemption” Center where we would exchange this basically worthless stash of stickum for something of more enduring value, like a carpet sweeper or an electric toaster. That is how I came to learn about redemption: the process of cashing in your chips or exchanging something for its true worth. Stamps for toasters or slaves for free men and free women, it’s all the same. But you can’t have one until you relinquish the other.

In Kabbalistic thought this is called “entering the Ayin, ” or the “Holy Nothingness.” In order for something to change from what it is into whatever it hopes to become there must be a moment when it has stopped being what it was yet before it has become what it hopes to become. For a split second it is literally nothing. No longer green stamps, no longer slaves. Not yet toasters, not yet free men and free women. And when we say that Pesah is the great festival of death and rebirth it is just this Holy Nothingness which effectuates the transformation. The metaphors for it are everywhere, from the symbolic “birth” of walking through a doorway smeared with the blood (of a lamb?) the morning after the first seder to, as Professor Lawrence Hoffman has demonstrated, the matzah as a replacement for the Pascal offering connnoting salvation--to take this bread into you and be transformed. But none of them are as literally overwhelming as passing through the sea (of amniotic waters).

Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the miracle was not that the waters parted for the Israelites but that they all walked into the midst of sea, drowned, and were reborn free men and women on the other side. You want to be reborn, you want that a new and better you should emerge from the frozen hulk winter has made you, you want to be free again, then you have let go of the old you. You must be willing to walk into the midst of the sea on dry ground and risk it all. But you say, “What if I don’t come out the other side?” And I say there were probably a lot of Jews who were also afraid to step into the midst of the sea. They chose instead to bank on old, but sure slave lives. We never heard from them again. But the ones who entered the water, hungry for a rebirth were rewarded. Not with the promised land but with the strange honor of being able to wander in the wilderness for forty years. Theirs was the ultimate act of faith and may be been rewarded with the ultimate gift: rebirth in the wilderness.

At the core of this great feast of redemption is the preposterous assertion that the redemption of the children of Israel did not occur until they entered a mode of being in which they were simultaneously and impossibly both slave and free, wet and dry, dead and alive. Perhaps this is why, as the Hagaddah reminds us, every Jew must regard him or herself as if he or she were personally a slave in Egypt. But how could that be, here we are sitting around a banquet table as free men and women! To live in the paradox.

haggadah Section: Commentary / Readings

Source: Original