Caught Between the Sea and a Hard Place

Leaping

Here’s the moment. You’re facing a vast and deep sea with an approaching army hot on your heels, the army representing the very nation-state that has enslaved your people for the past two hundred years. What do you do?

This is one of the pinnacle moments in Jewish time. The portion of Beshalach, which we read this week, takes us alongside the Israelites as they hastily exit Egypt. On the way, they find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place: a seemingly impassable body of water and a threatening armed force.

So there you are. Your pulse quickens as you can’t figure out which way to go. Do I leap into the unknown of this raging sea, or do I hang my head sheepishly and ask my previous enslavers to take me back? It is at this moment when Moses attempts to allay the people’s fears by saying in chapter 14:14-15:

יְהֹוָ֖ה יִלָּחֵ֣ם לָכֶ֑ם וְאַתֶּ֖ם תַּחֲרִשֽׁוּן׃ וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מַה־תִּצְעַ֖ק אֵלָ֑י דַּבֵּ֥ר אֶל־בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל וְיִסָּֽעוּ׃

God will battle for you; you hold your peace!” Then God said to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward.”

As great a leader as Moses had been, in this moment he makes a misstep. God’s response makes clear that now is a time for action, not prayer. God’s already done the divine table setting. Now it’s on you all.

It’s a powerfully subversive moment in a text as theologically driven as the Torah. The jarring tone begs for interpretation, and a resonant one comes from the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, who wrote¹:

This is the meaning of ‘Why do they cry to Me?’ (Exodus 14:15)—’to Me’ specifically, for the matter depends upon Atik” (this is the mystical aspect/name of God that is hardest to comprehend but it’s also the level of God which is above all duality and difference). In this moment of great distress and unknown, they needed to rely on something beyond their own comprehension. They had to abandon themselves completely and forget their own danger in order to enter the world of thought, where everything is equal. Otherwise, they’d remain the material realms where people are constantly assessing what’s good and bad.

That penultimate line is the most abstract and the most essential. When he says “abandon,” he doesn’t mean to lose yourself completely; instead, one has to make room amid their own pain and sadness to recognize other people’s pain and sadness. When one enters the “world of thought,” they move away from the purely material nature of our existence and begin to see the threads of humanity that connect all of us.

I find this teaching deeply resonant in this moment of our country. On a micro level, the trauma of last week’s killing of Alex Pretti by ICE officers weighs heavily on all of us. On a macro level, there’s just an immense amount of terror and sadness penetrating our psyches, and it’s hard to simply exist in this moment.

One of the things I noticed in the responses to Pretti’s murder was this inability for people to recognize and empathize with other people’s pain. To be clear, it’s intensely hard work and it’s something I struggle with, especially when it comes to people with whom I have ideological disagreements. But so much of that pushback toward Pretti’s killing was framed around this type of thinking:

And I couldn’t help but wonder, are we so fractured that when a U.S. citizen is killed by immigration authorities, we can’t muster up some sympathy?

So when faced with this burden, what do we do? Do we return to our old pathways, the things that keep us stuck, or do we think about leaping into the unknown sea?

That’s where the wisdom of the Ba’al Shem Tov comes in and helps us think about action—because where else can you make room within your own distress for others better than through actually doing something?

This is supported by another beautiful teaching from the chasidic realms, from the Birkat Avraham, Reb Avraham Weinberg (20th century, father-in-law of the Netivot Sholom) who commented on the same passage above:

It is written in the Zohar that this ‘why do you cry out to Me- is ’to Me’ specifically, for the matter depends upon Atik’ My grandfather wrote that the language of Atik (remember, that’s that particular name/manifestation of God) is an allusion to the phrase of being moved from one’s place. The phrase in Hebrew (Mah Titzak Elai), ‘why do you cry out to me’ forms the acronym of Emet-truth. If a person wants to know if one’s crying out to God is true, they need to assess if they’re being moved from their place. More specifically, is your crying out pushing you to do something different from what you’ve always done?

Playing on the linguistic similarity between the word truth and one of God’s names, the Birkat Avraham argues that our crying out is only as effective as the power it has to activate us. When it pushes us to do something different, to move from passive to active, then we can find a way to channel our emotions in moments like these.

We’re all carrying so much right now, as individuals and as a collective. Can we integrate these teachings? In these instances when we feel our backs strongest against the wall, we can double down on action. That’s how we can put the Ba’al Shem Tov’s and Birkat Avraham’s teaching into action.

So here we are once again at the ‘sea.’ Just as the Israelites had to move forward into uncertain waters, we too are called to step forward into service when fear and overwhelm threaten to freeze us. As Dr. Joanna Macy² said in an interview:

The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding evermore capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.

So show up in some loving way. This week, let’s challenge ourselves to identify one concrete way we can make room for someone else’s struggle alongside our own, whether through a conversation, an act of support, or serving with presence and compassion. In doing so, we don’t abandon ourselves; we connect to something larger that sustains us all.

1. Noach 131:1

2. 9/16/2010: author & teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology.