This week’s portion – Be’Shalach, roughly translated to “when [Pharaoh] sent [the People of Israel] away” – is extremely visual. It begins by telling the story of the first days, and then weeks, following the Exodus – the departing of Egypt; yet it is written more like a screenplay, a compilation of visual images. Indeed, some of the most dramatic scenes ever envisioned (and later attempted to be captured by Cecil B. DeMille’s wonderful “The Ten Commandments”) are reported here in great detail: The parting of the (Red) Sea, the drowning of all of Pharaoh’s cavalry, the “pillar of cloud” walking in front of the People of Israel in the day, and the “pillar of fire” by night, and many others. Not for naught it was said about this portion that “what the lowliest of slaves had actually seen by that sea, even Prophet Ezekiel hasn’t seen in his grandest of visions.”
But beyond its wonderful imagery, this week’s portion is also unique in that it consists of a very mixed bag: On the one hand, it contains some of the greatest moments of faith between the People of Israel and their God; on the other, it contains some of the most bitter revelations of anger, non-faith, and continuing complaints against God by the same group of people. This tension – between faith and non-faith, between the holy and the ordinary, between the daily struggle and the occasional miracle, which is a part and parcel of the life of every practicing Jewish person – was wonderfully summed up (although in a different context) by Israel’s national poet, C.N. Bialik, in the opening lines of his famous poem, My Father:
“Strange were the ways of my life and puzzlement ruled their direction,
Between the gateways of purity and vile they have constantly circled,
The sacrosanct has intertwined with the profane,
And the glorious with the loathsome wallowed …”
(My translation, which does not do justice with the sublime original).
Indeed, alongside the most beautiful vision of divine miracle, the Children of Israel are quick to remind us of the mundane, frustrating, and – although it is hard to accept so early – the faithless lives of this recently-freed nation of slaves. My two short comments today would relate, first, to the notion of “how quickly we forget,” and then – in close relation – to the false question of “the proof of the existence of God.”
I. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi . . .
Right after God commits some of His most astonishing miracles – the parting of the sea, the drowning of the enemy’s cavalry, etc., etc. – we find the newly-freed nation, not surprisingly, in an abiding mode: “And Israel has seen the wondrous hand which God laid upon Egypt, and the people have seen God, and they believed in God and in Moses His slave.” (Exodus 14:31). To loyal readers of this blog, this classic move – of first showing God’s great powers and then the result of believing in Him – should sound familiar. Indeed, the Father of our Nation, Abraham, was first said to “believe in God” right after God promised him that he would receive all the best in this world (Gen. 15:6). But, God usually doesn’t end there – believing in Him when things are good is easy; what happens when things don’t go so well? Well before the story of Job, God tests Abraham despite the textual testament that Abraham believes in Him, and asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son (Gen. 22:1). Abraham’s belief is not shaken – perhaps even strengthened – by the ordeal. But God also tests Abraham’s descendants, with much less success. The same people who just witnessed some of the greatest miracles ever recorded, are now threatening to soon stone His slave Moshe (Ex. 17:4), and are now quick to wonder “whether our Lord God is present among us or not” (Ex. 17:7).
Indeed, as the Latin saying goes, “thus passes the glory of the world,” or, in modern English usage, “how quickly we forget.” But why is that? What caused the people to turn their heart away from God so quickly?
Though many answers were offered to this question, I would like to offer one from an area near and dear to me: the great outdoors. Despite the fact that the People of Israel were slaves in Egypt – and thus used to hard labor in the hot desert sun – they were not used to walking in the desert. As you may recall, they were walking the entire first night, and then – without mentioning any break – continued to walk onward for days; but they didn’t have, nor did they see, any clear indication of a water source. Their first Divine test, therefore, was a direct, very concrete one: A fear of dying in the desert of dehydration, or a total belief in God: “And they went three days in the desert and they have not found any water” (Ex. 15:22); “And they were encamped in Rephidim, and there is no water for the People to drink” (Ex. 17:1). Viewed that way, it’s not completely facetious to assume that quite a few reasonable people – perhaps even some readers of this blog – would turn atheist in the face of such a test.
But what is also fascinating is not merely the fact of the people’s rapid turn of heart, but rather the content of their grievances. Only a short period has passed since these slaves complained (wonderfully) to Pharaoh about the dismal conditions of their employment: “Straw you failed to provide to your slaves, yet bricks you order us to make! Thus your slaves are being beaten. . .” (Ex. 5:16); only a short time has passed since God himself confesses to Moshe that He has “heard the crying of the Children of Israel that are slaving under Egypt” (Ex. 6:5), and yet just a short period afterwards Egypt seems like Paradise, and these same people complain to Moshe: “How we wish we were dead at the hand of God [here in the desert; unlike] in the land of Egypt, where we sat by the pot of meat, where we have eaten bread until we were full – and now you have taken us all out to this desert to starve this entire congregation to death.” (Ex. 17:3). What is happening here? How can their memory be so short?
The answer is well-researched today. Economist and psychologists – mainly Kahnman & Tverski (the former received a Nobel Prize in economics for his research on the subject) – remind us that we prefer what is available to us – even if it is extremely detrimental to us – to something we have no familiarity with. (Oversimplified, this is what they called the “availability heuristics” in their seminal 1973 article published in Science magazine.) Think for a second about your own life: would you prefer the known and familiar – even if you do not particularly like it – or to venture off to a new start, somewhere you have never been before? The quintessential paradigm here is – just like in the Bible – your workplace: Most people complain about their workplace, yet very few leave on their own accord. Is that the “People of Israel” syndrome?
II. Can you “Prove” that God Exists?
Here I want to make a very short, but crucial point on the great issue of Faith. Many times, ever since the fourth grade, I hear a lot of people tell me: “If you prove to me that God exists, I will then – and only then – believe in God.” Two things are wrong with that argument: First, as we have seen in this week’s portion, “proof of God” has nothing to do with the notion of faith. As we have learned, the lowliest of slave standing on the departed Red Sea has seen, in her own eyes, the glory and mighty of God like no one before or since, and yet the People of Israel turned away from God in a heartbeat, as soon as things became difficult in the desert. In contrast – and this is Leibovitz’s point – for many generations Jewish people who have never seen God or never even imagined that they would ever see him, not only believed in Him wholeheartedly, but were willing to sacrifice themselves on “Kidush Ha’Shem” – for the sake of God – while reciting the Sh’ma rather than to convert to another religion. That alone goes to show that the correlation between that so-called “proof” and the notion of “faith” is anecdotal at best.
But on a deeper level, the sentence itself – “prove to me X, and then I will believe in X” is simply a non-sequitur. If one chooses to believe in something, than they must relinquish any desire for proof that that this simething exists; otherwise, there is no room for belief. By the same token, if something is proven to you, you can’t be said to believe in that thing; rather, you simply know, or aware of its existence. Thus, you cannot believe that the table on which I’m writing this blog exists; you simply know it. Similarly, you can’t know that Roger Federer would win the upcoming Australian Open in tennis, but you – or I, for that matter – may certainly believe in it.
Indeed, belief and proof are mutually exclusive. You either believe in something, or you have proof (know) it exists. For that reason, many scientists were – and still are – religious: They had (or even created) proof for many areas in their research field, but they did not have (and couldn’t have) any proof that God exists (or does not exist) and therefore they believed in Him.
Finally, therefore, you may stop asking yourself (and others) for the proof of the existence of God in the world, and simply ask yourself that: do you believe in Him?
Shabbat Shalom,
Doron
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