Waves of Faith

From head to heart to body

*This will be delivered at Temple Israel Center on the 7th day of Passover, April 29th, 2024

Nazaré, Portugal is a holy site, not for religious reasons, not for food, and not really even for people, but rather for water and more specifically for the waves that are crest there. When Nazaré reaches its most dramatic heights, it is typically the result of two waves converging and amplifying one another—up to five times their natural size in deep offshore water. A 15-foot swell at sea can result in a 75-foot wave near the shore. 

It is a mecca for surfers. The first time Maya Gabeira, one of the great surfers of the modern era attempted Nazaré , she nearly drowned after she wiped out, lost her life jacket, and was knocked unconscious under an avalanche of exploding white water. It took four years and three spinal surgeries before she could return. Even though all her peers told her not to attempt it again, she didn’t listen. She’s now the female record holder of highest wave surfed at 73.5 feet and in response, she said the following thing which felt very Jewish to me:

Fear is always present at Nazaré  but fear is very important because it will protect your life. The only way to deal with the fear is knowing that I’ve done my training and that I’m prepared, that I know different scenarios I can encounter, and that I have an instinctive response to problems that might occur.

Imagine standing in front of that body of water. It spreads before you making you feel small. You look behind you in your mind’s eye and see your horrific injury that shackled you.

What do you do?

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Fear and awe are part of our lifeblood as Jewish people. What Gabeira described feels akin to to what as Jews we might describe as yirah, a particular type of mindset we’re supposed to live with in our relationship with God. In tandem with yirah, we often discuss emunah-faith. To have faith born from fear is to live a life in awareness of the power of the Divine. 

Faith and spirituality are an intrinsic part of the surfer world: Bethany Hamilton, the professional who lost an arm to a tiger shark when she was 13, looks to her faith in God to compete on the same level as pros with two arms.The big-wave champ Greg Long sits in lotus to prepare for confronting apartment building-sized walls of ocean. Much of this has to do with the power of water.

Water has this ability to force us to confront our faith. Wallace Nichols, a biologist who explores the connection between humans and water says that if you look at the scientific recipe for flow states—the psychological term for when people are fully absorbed in what they’re doing—being in water checks a lot of the boxes, notably no distractions and a positive frame for solitude. All this may feed into why, when you look at the science of peak experiences, water and music are basically tied for first place, Nichols told. 

Sound familiar? How about the song of the sea?

The ‘oneness thing’ people get is, in a sense, a brain-chemistry response of letting go of that ‘need to know.

Let go of the need to know. How well served could we all be in life if we lived this principle?

There is perhaps no better moment to confront this relationship than the moment where the Israelites, on fleeing Egypt, find themselves stuck between the rock of the pursuing Egyptian army and the hard place of the Sea of Reeds in front of them. This is the story we read today and we all know how it goes. But the last line of the story is noteworthy when we look at it more closely. 

Just before we sing the song of the sea, the Torah tells us in Exodus 14:31:

וַיַּ֨רְא יִשְׂרָאֵ֜ל אֶת־הַיָּ֣ד הַגְּדֹלָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֨ר עָשָׂ֤ה יְהֹוָה֙ בְּמִצְרַ֔יִם וַיִּֽירְא֥וּ הָעָ֖ם אֶת־יְהֹוָ֑ה וַיַּֽאֲמִ֙ינוּ֙ בַּֽיהֹוָ֔ה וּבְמֹשֶׁ֖ה עַבְדּֽוֹ׃ {פ}

And when Israel saw the wondrous power which יהוה had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared יהוה; they had faith in יהוה and in God’s servant Moses.

On the surface, it seems like a beautiful reflection on the relationship between the people and God. They saw what God did and then they had faith. But if we think about it, there are a number of questions:

To have faith usually requires a leap but here, it only follows that which they saw. In that case, is that really faith? Additionally, we already know they have faith as the text has explicitly stated it before this moment, so what is it adding when it speaks to their having faith again here? 

To understand this answer, we turn to Rav Sholom Noach Berezovsky, the Rabbi of the Slonimer dynasty who passed away in 2000. 

There are three levels to faith: intellectual faith (in the head), emotional faith (in the heart), and bodily faith (found in the limbs). They increase in their greatness and there is a greater gap between intellectual faith and emotional faith than the distance from the heavens to the earth. The final level is the highest level as it is full recognition that there is nothing in this world that doesn’t come from God. When one has ascended to this great spiritual height, they no longer have to fear anything but God.

Again, the letting go of the need to know appears.

When the Israelites left Egypt, they had faith but it was only the faith of the intellect. That was why they struggled so much in their relationship with God and even early on how they constantly found themselves wondering, “is this God really going to save us?!” It’s a faith that exists in fleeting moments, when it’s convenient.

Then, at the sea, something transformed within them. They finally got it. When the Egyptians pursued them and they stood on the precipice of the sea, wondering what to do next and crying out to Moses, the response to them was

“v’yisau-go forward.”

The cloud that was moving in front of them moved to their rear flank, as if to say, stop looking backward, see what’s in front of you, really look at it. Embrace the fear. 

When after the splitting of the sea, it writes, “not one Egyptian remained,” the Slonimer Rebbe writes, that was also happening in the minds of the Israelites. In that moment, their intellectual faith became a faith of the limbs, fully embodied, the highest level of faith. They sloughed off the emotional shackles of subjugation, of a life running from fear.

To get out of Egypt, faith of the mind and heart was enough but this moment required something different.  To jump into the sea, frothing and raging that it was, they needed a real leaning into the fear. That was why it had to be noted that “they saw and then they had fear.” Faith without seeing was their baseline level of intellectual faith. Here, in this moment, they became believers of a different stripe. Seeing God’s actions, seeing those divine waves at the sea filled them up with a fully embodied faith, which is what is alluded to in Psalms when it says, “kol atzmotai tomarnah, adonai mi kamocha,” all my bones sing out to you; who is like you God?

When Gabeira described facing this 73.5 foot wave, she talks about the presence of the moment that it required in her body:

“You hear the explosive power of the wave breaking all around you, but you have already triumphed—over the wave, over the phenomenal power of the ocean, over your own wild and ferocious heart.”

That’s the emotional work of this special time of the year. We have to transform our faith from an intellectual one into a more holistic one. How can we triumph over our own wild and ferocious hearts that are somehow filled up and broken at the same time?

This is why this moment embodies the special essence of Pesach as the holiday of faith, just like every holiday has its own unique attribute. That is what led Reb Menachem Mendel of Rimanov to label Pesach as the Rosh Hashanah of Faith, as it was for the sake of our faith that we were actually redeemed from Egypt. On the 7th day of Pesach, we tap into the highest form of this. 

It is a fitting feeling to grapple with on this particular Pesach. Tomorrow, we will say Yizkor for the first time for October 7th, which I know Rabbi Tucker will say more about tomorrow. It will feel quite raw. After the chaotic events on college campuses and the release of a few videos of hostages seemingly still alive, the dire nature of the situation in Israel and Gaza weighs heavily on our hearts right now. 

Maybe we’re feeling so depleted by it all, the lack of anything feeling like momentum toward peace, so much so that we want to give up. Maybe all we have is a faith of the head, one that feels diluted and untenable. But the 7th day of Pesach, when our ancestors stood at the brink of the sea, that really must have felt untenable. To turn back or to jump in. That fear must have rivaled the surfers at Nazaré . A towering wave of water approached them. But perhaps like Maya Gabeira understood, they too knew that fear is important because it keeps you engaged. 

That perspective of the surfers and those who stood on the banks of the sea is one that would serve us well at this moment in time. We're still faced with these towering waves in front of us. We look behind us and we see approaching forces that want to take us back, so we have a choice. Do we run away from our fear into the known but constricting shackles of subjugation? Or do we seize our fear, dive into the waters once more, and attempt to ride the waves of faith that permeate our whole beings? I know which way I am going. I hope you’ll join me. 

Chag Sameach and Happy Sunday!