Sermons

Shabbat Shalom

The People of Israel have come a long way as they sing on the shore of the Sea of Reeds in our Parsha this week. Their song is one of joy and victory. Their greatest fear had been an attack by the army of Egypt. God sent Israel out of Egypt by a route that will avoid the former slaves from having to fight a war against Egypt. God, however, sends the people on a path that will trap them if Egypt should attack. It is no wonder that the people completely panicked when they saw the army pursuing them while they were trapped on the shore of the sea. It was an amazing miracle that the sea split and gave Israel a path to escape their enemy. Now, looking at the sea, with dead Egyptian soldiers in the water, they rejoice and sing in honor of the great and awesome God that has saved them from certain slaughter.

Not that long ago, before being freed from slavery, before any of the plagues, when Moses first appeared before Pharoah demanding that the Israelites be freed from bondage, Pharoah had responded with a cold refusal to let the slaves go and then, to drive any idea of freedom from their heads, Pharoah decreed that the bondage would increase; they would not be given straw to make bricks; Israel would have to collect their own straw and still produce the same number of bricks each day. The Israelites all but cursed Moses for promising them freedom and instead only made their slavery worse. What kind of a cruel God would make their darkness darker?

Now, as they stand at the shore of the sea, recognizing the miracle that they experienced, they understand that God does indeed love them, God cares about them, and the God will protect them.

Of course, by the end of the Parsha the People of Israel are complaining to God again. They still have a long way to go in their relationship with God. But when they are attacked by the Amalekites, they have faith that God will still protect them, and they are able to go to war and be victorious.

A Hasidic Rabbi offers this parable about the People of Israel at the sea. It is a story of a father who has a very young son who is deathly ill. There is a medicine that can save the child, but it is very bitter and tastes very bad. The child refuses to take the medicine. No amount of arguing will change the child’s mind. Nothing will convince the child that the medicine will help. Finally, in desperation, the father forces the child’s mouth open and pours the bitter liquid into his mouth. The child comes to think that his father must hate him. When he grows up, of course, and sees how much his father loves him, he has the mind to understand that the bitter medicine his father forced upon him was a token of great love. It was painful also for the father that he had to hold his child’s mouth open that way and pour in that medicine. But because he knew this cure was needed, he took the pain upon himself and did as was needed....

I am sure we can all relate to this story if we have children. There always comes a point where we must force our children to do something they do not want to do because we know that while it may be hard and bitter, it is for their own good. It may be years later before a child understands the pain it must be for a parent to do something to a child that their child hates. It is only later that the pain of that moment is revealed as an act of love between the parent and the child.

My teacher and friend, Rabbi Dr. Art Green looks at this parable and asks a difficult question; “Who is the father in this story?” While we can relate to the father in the story, because it is a parable, there is the assumption that the participants in the story have symbolic meaning. Because it is referred to in an explanation of our Parsha, we can only understand the parable if the “father” it refers to is God. It is God who forces us, the child, to take the bitter medicine. We may not be happy about the situation, but we have to understand God’s actions in the Exodus as an act of love. Life is not always easy or convenient. Sometimes things happen to us that we don’t expect, things that make us uncomfortable, things that make us angry. Only later do we understand that what has happened is not some “punishment” from God, but something that will eventually help us understand our lives better.

The late Rabbi Harold Kushner applies this premise to the entire Torah. When the People of Israel arrive at Mt. Sinai, they discover that while they are no longer required to serve as slaves to the Egyptians, they are now expected to freely serve God. Rabbi Kushner writes, “A loving parent does not show genuine love by telling a child, “Do whatever you want.” That would not indicate love, but a lack of concern and abdication of responsibility. The truly loving parent says to the child, “I care very much about you, and although I cannot live your life for you, I want you to have the benefit of my experience.”

The Jew understood from the beginning that Judaism was a religion of love because it did not leave us to find the way through life alone and unaided. It offered advice, insight, and experience. It was out of God’s love and concern for Israel that God gave them the Torah, so that instead of stumbling blindly, they might be aided by its principles, take heed of its warnings and draw closer to God.”

It some ways we are still like that little child, it seems like we are never ready to take on the real messiness of life; we would rather have the problem than to have to work to make a solution real. I hear, from time to time, of someone who falls sick with COVID. I ask if they are taking the drug that can ease the symptoms and shorten the illness, Paxlovid, but sometimes I am told that the sick person refuses to take the healing drug because it has a bad aftertaste. What they say is completely true. Paxlovid does have an aftertaste that is not pleasant. But after all, it is a medicine, not a dessert! Are we not acting like children when we prolong our illness just to avoid five days of a disagreeable taste? COVID can often have serious complications. There is a medicine that can protect us from those complications. These people are possibly endangering their lives just to avoid a bad taste in their mouth for a few days.

On a larger scale, inflation can be devastating to the economy. Things that are essential to buy, food, clothing, fuel, all go up in price almost to the point where we can no longer afford them. It is usually an imbalance in the supply and demand world. Supplies become scarce so their price goes up. Prices can only come down when things become so expensive that people can’t buy them anymore; then supplies begin to grow, and the need to sell more becomes so important that the price has to come down so that the goods begin to sell again. This is a natural flow of a capitalistic economic system. The Federal Reserve Bank can move to bring prices down faster by raising interest rates. By artificially raising the cost of goods, the faster the short supplies will catch up and the faster prices will come down. Things become even more expensive faster so that the prices will come down faster. We have to force down the medicine so that the illness can be cured. (Yes, I am aware that there are all kinds of complications here, but I am a rabbi not an economist!)

There is much that is messy in our world. There is a war in Israel and a nasty political season in this country. Both of these, in their own way, are making life painful for us. The solution for these problems will bring even more pain to Israel and in our own country. The war will spread, and more people will be killed and displaced. Political battles are raging so much that necessary legislation is being delayed or rejected. I am afraid that things are going to get worse before anything can get better. Difficult choices are ahead that will require leadership and hard choices. As the sign outside my office teaches, “Every problem has a simple solution, that is usually wrong.” The reality of life is that often things have to get worse before they can get better. Simple solutions can often make everything worse in the long run. We may not like the choices we have to make but it is always important to do the work to find the best solution even if it means some more pain now, to have a better life tomorrow.

There were many times when the People of Israel thought they would be free, only to have Pharoah renege on the promises that he made. It took terrible suffering by the Egyptians, the death of children and the destruction of the Egyptian army to secure freedom for the Israelites. There will be forty more years of suffering by the Israelites until they reach the Promised Land. A whole generation of former slaves had to die before their children could inherit a land that flowed with milk and honey.

Israel and the United States will have to live with the representatives that we elect. We need to remember that there are no easy answers to the problems we face. Democracy is a messy form of government, or as Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for everything else.” When there is so much at stake in a country, there is no shortage of people who are ready to tell us what the best solution might be. There is no end to the pundits who predict what might or might not happen if one person is elected over another. Who is telling the truth? It gets harder and harder to figure it out every day.

We only have two freedoms we can count on. Our right to vote and our freedom of speech. If we don’t vote, then we lose our voice as to how to fix the problems of our country. If we don’t speak up out of fear or apathy, then people will listen to others who may have a different point of view. We need to articulate why we think our choices are correct and we need to make the choice in the voting booth that will best bring our choices to life. It may be hard. It may take a lot of work. It may take a lot of time. But we need to do what is hard today to make tomorrow better.

May God help us make good choices in life and may the words of Torah, though they are hard to follow, bring blessing into our lives as we say … Amen and Shabbat Shalom