Commentary by Rabbi Alan Green

“Do not be afraid! Stand your ground, and witness the salvation that God will perform for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you will never see again. God will do battle for you. Hold your peace!” Then God said to Moses: “Why are you crying out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. Lift up your staff, hold your arm out over the sea, and split it-so the Israelites may march into the midst of the sea, on dry ground.”
—Exodus 14:13-16

Nothing is certain in life. No event or process moves in a perfectly straight or predictable line. All movement in the real world is wavy—backing and filling, backing and filling, over and over again. In the midst of these backing and filling movements, it’s almost impossible to say what will happen next.

For example, we all know that the stock market moves up and down. But hardly anyone in the world can tell us when the stock market will move, or by how much. The movement of the stock market, as for life as a whole, is always uncertain. Is the trend up or down? It all depends on one’s time frame and perspective.

Similarly, God promised that the descendants of Abraham would be more numerous than the stars in heaven. Thirty-six centuries later, we Jews are still a tiny slice of the pie of humanity. But relative to Abraham and the small group that gathered around him, Abraham’s present-day descendants are numerous indeed. Did God fulfill his promise? Or does this fulfillment still lie in the future? Again, it depends on one’s time frame and perspective.

Examining the various steps of the Exodus yields a similar conclusion. God made it clear from the beginning that He intended to free His people from Egypt. But the process didn’t go smoothly. Step by step, the faith of Moses and Aaron were put to the most severe tests, both by Pharaoh and their own people.

Pharaoh and the Egyptians were subjected to ten plagues of increasing severity. Realizing on several of these occasions that he faced disaster, Pharaoh agreed to allow the Israelites to go, only to change his mind at the last moment. Even when the final blow was struck, and God killed all the first-born of Egypt, and Pharaoh’s will seemed finally to be broken, the outcome was far from certain. Pharaoh, like the stock market, was backing and filling, alternately relenting and repenting, over and over again.

In this week’s Parsha, Pharaoh and his charioteers have pinned the Israelite former slaves up against the Sea of Reeds. It’s an impossible situation: a return-ticket to Egypt in one direction, and descending to a watery grave in the other. What were the Israelites to do? Only one thing, and God told Moses to do it: “Lift up your staff, hold your arm out over the sea, and split it-so the Israelites may march into the midst of the sea, on dry ground.”

And yet the outcome was still far from certain. Would the mere act of extending an arm bring about such an improbable result? If we were Moses, would we have been able to follow such an instruction so easily? Would a scientifically-minded modern be able to take such a command at face value?

Playing on this theme, the rabbis of the Midrash stretched the principle of uncertainty to its breaking point. The rabbis interpreted that it was necessary for the Israelites to step into the Sea of Reeds long before it actually split. And in the famous Song of the Sea, the rabbis noticed the anomaly of the same word pronounced two different ways for no apparent reason: “Mi Cha-mocha Ba-elim Adonai, Mi Ka-mocha Ne’edar Ba-kodesh”—”Who is like You, God, among the mighty ones? Who is like You, glorious in holiness, revered in praise, doing wonders?”

Why does the letter Chaf, which begins the word Cha-mocha, first appear without a dagesh-softening the pronunciation—and then appear the next moment with a dagesh—making the pronunciation hard (i.e. Ka-mocha)?

The rabbis answer that the people who jumped into the Sea of Reeds were only up to their necks when they sang the first “Cha-mocha”. Hence, the water wasn’t high enough to affect their pronunciation. However, the people continued to move forward. By the time they reached the second “Cha-mocha”, the water was already up to their noses. At that point, they were forced to pronounce the word hard—”Ka-mocha”—because they were forced to expel sea water in order to keep singing. According to this Midrash, only then, at the last possible moment, did the Sea of Reeds finally split.

We face a similar degree of uncertainty every time we open our eyes in the morning. The world is our Sea of Reeds. The challenges that drive us to advance and achieve are Pharaoh and his charioteers. And whenever we successfully realize a goal, the Sea splits, and we “march into the midst of the Sea on dry land.” Yet nothing is certain until it finally happens.

Like Moses extending his arm over the Sea of Reeds, and like the Israelites who heeded the call to “go forward”, day by day, we are sustained by our faith—faith in ourselves, in our loved ones, and in our God. We must believe that, contrary to all external appearances, the Sea of Reeds that we confront every day of our lives will split at the very moment that we need it to do so.