A quick thought that struck me this week on parshas Beshalach:
A general question that presents itself throughout the account of the exodus and ensuing period of wandering in the desert: The Children of Israel are always complaining about one thing or other...how do they not see what God did for them with the ten plagues, the splitting of the sea, taking them out of Egypt laden with gold, silver and clothes, and how did they not realise that they were in good hands? How could they be so ungrateful, like spoiled children?
Listen to them: "...it would have been better for us to serve Egypt than to die in the desert."
And later on: "...had we only died by God's hand in Egypt, while we sat around the stew pot and ate our fill of bread, for you have taken us out into this desert to kill the whole population by starvation."
Now a more specific question that dawned on me when preparing the Torah reading of the Shirah - the song at the Red Sea: According to the way the sections are broken up for individual readings, we continue without a pause to read how the people complain about the bitter waters of Marah. Now I wonder why we do that - why not end the reading immediately after the song on the high note of revelation and praise, as in, let them have their moment of greatness and come back to their complaints later?
Here's a theory then that I think is supportable:
The Children of Israel, throughout their period of slavery in Egypt, had grown used to a predictable world of cause and effect. A world in which the laws of nature were known, where you knew with reasonable certainty that if you did A, then B would follow, you work hard, you stay alive, etc.
Over the last year, they witnessed the shocking power of God to destroy, save, change the whole order of the world by the utterance of a word or a wave of a hand. That was no doubt exhilarating and inspiring, but also incredibly unsettling. Terrifying would be a better word, if the feeling can even be described. All of a sudden they found themselves in a capricious world where absolutely nothing could be taken for granted.
Reduced to a state of insecurity bordering on hysteria, they could not even trust in the most basic elements of the old world as they knew it. "What shall we drink?" we hear them ask incredulously - as they wondered whether water, once the essence of life, had become a bitter poison in this new world...
Their repeated wish to have died in the 'comfort' of Egypt expresses this existential insecurity as they longed for the old dependable system of cause and effect. Yes, life was hard, they worked in horrific conditions, but at least you knew what to expect when you woke up in the morning. It's not hard to see why they couldn't quite let go of the memories when you think about it like this.
Now listen to how God responds to the complaint about the bitter water: firstly he showed Moses a piece of wood that he was to throw into the water, rendering it 'sweet' and perfectly drinkable. In other words, he showed them that the old order of nature remains in place - they still needed to drink normal water in order to live - but, as He goes on, a whole new dimension was to be added to the rules of cause and effect.
Sham sam lo chok umishpat - "there and then, He laid down rules and laws..." As a sort of preview of the Torah to come later, God introduced the Children of Israel to the concepts of Divine Legislation. I've discussed the difference between chok and mishpat elsewhere (click the highlighted link to go there) but suffice it to say here that God introduced the people to the idea that they would be subject to a new type of Law that He would communicate to them by revelation.
This then, is the second part of God's response. God says, so to speak, that from now on, the rules of cause and effect within nature are subordinate to a different channel of causation - the channel of chok umishpat, which I call spiritual cause and effect. Now, we harness and control the workings of the world by how we act with respect to God's given laws.
Yes, the predictability of purely physical nature is no longer absolute, but in answer to the deep need for security and self determination, if you like, God responds by giving the people a new set of controls. As the reading ends, "if you will listen to the Voice of God, do what's right in His eyes...then I will not place the afflictions of Egypt upon you..."
There's a post script to all this, which I hope to add soon, but in the mean time, what do you think? Does this make any sense to you?
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