When the Jew Must Fight

Just before Jews made their way into the ocean, with Pharaoh and his army of chariots in hot pursuit, God told Moshe to tell the Jews there was no need doing battle with the Egyptians because God will do the fighting for them. (Ex.14:14)

Four weeks later, when Amalek pounced on the Jews, Moshe tells his people "Go out and fight Amalek!" (Ex.17:9)

Why should Jews sometimes let God do the fighting for them, while other times Jews must put up a fight?

Depends on the enemy's agenda. Egyptians wanted to take the Jews back to slavery. Amalek, on the other hand, sought to prevent Jews from their association with Torah.

Whenever a Jew confronts that which would prevent him from learning Torah, he must fight off this enemy!

Expression of Jewish Instinct

A week after their flight to safety, Jews fleeing Egypt felt a sudden fright. Suddenly they saw a mighty, rumbling army in fearsome array, rapidly advancing in pursuit after them.

Torah testifies (Ex.14:10):
 "וייראו מאד ויצעקו בני ישראל אל יהוה"

The Jews were trapped in a beach enclave with no flank to escape to, caught between the desert and the sea. These were dreadful moments. King Pharoah himself, in armored chariot, led the charge. The mighty empire's army, a juggernaut excited for victory, kicked up dust as they charged forward.

Jews acted on instinct; They turned to God. Out of fright, their prayers issued forth as screams from the pit of their hearts.

The unique context of their present situation gave these prayers its vocal character. Jews always prayed to God, but any other time of day or day of the week, they would have evoked a different sort of prayer. This special situation they found themselves in is what now cast their form of invocation.

(Only after they saw their prayers go unanswered they turned on Moses to complain.)

Prayer to G-d comes natural for the Jew. Abraham, Isaac and Yaakov worked hard on this form of worship, so much so that this inculcation projected and bequeathed a congenital instinct to their children. They prayed - not because they elected for something in particular this one time, but rather because prayer of the Jew connects him to God! Prayer is the vehicle by which the Jew bonds to G-d. He prays every day, year in year out.

It's not so much a Jew wants something for himself when he prays. Rather, the Jew wants to bond with Hashem. Yes, the Jew asks for personal and selfish concerns too, but all the while he rates his personal desires less than primary. Worship of Hashem is what is paramount in a Jew's life.

The Torah is quite specific; "They were frightful, so they screamed." Any other moment of the day their prayers would have manifest differently, but pray - they always would.

But why pray now - with the Egyptian army ready to steamroll them; If they trusted God will spare them, again, there was no need for prayer now; And if they held doubts about God's salvation, then what good would prayers do?

Rashi explains (Ex.14:10): Because Jews always first prayed to God - for anything - because they worshipped God and always wanted to cleave to Him. Any other day, it could have been in quiet earnestness, but at this point in time - they cried out.

A Midrashic Riddle Solved

Torah uses an adjective that peculiarly describes the famous Jewish Exodus from Egypt. "The Israelites," it says, "left Egypt - 'penta-armed'". (Ex. 13:18)

The Midrash addresses this Hebrew word with a cryptic explanation. Says the Mechilta, "It means 'well-provisioned'. Some say 1 out of 500 left, some say 1 of 50, and some say 1 of 5".

This Midrash makes no sense. The meaning "well-provisioned" suggests 100% of the Jews were emancipated. Then there's the opinion only 0.2% made it out; Another says 2%; and finally one says 20% pulled out.

Not only are we left puzzled how many participated in the exodus, but how can four opinions differ regarding a physical fact to such a great extent? How could the disparity be so ridiculously vast, where the range shows a 500-fold difference?!

This is no small difference of head count. This could mean a difference of nearly 300 million men who remained in Egypt.

Rashi too offers two opinions, by explaining the term "penta-armed" to mean either "well-prepared" [thereby also suggesting that all Jews participated] or it may mean only one in five (20%) made it out.

Rashi could be understood to mean only 20% of Jews made the exodus, and that these Jews (600,000 men) were well-prepared.

But a similar approach cannot resolve the multiple opinions of the Midrash.

The Rebbe comes to the rescue. This midrash, he says, really refers to the future redemption, the one unfolding in our generation. He says the estimates do not represent conflicting opinions. Instead, each estimate, he says, reflects a separate stage in the drawn-out redemption process.

At first, says the Rebbe, only 1 in 500 Jews will actually want this exile to come to a close. 499 out of 500 will, at that stage, prefer that business go on as usual, rather than wish for the redemption. But the tiny few who actually desire the redemption will persist in their outreach efforts.

Their tenacity, says the Rebbe, will pay off because thereafter 1 in 50 will push for the redemption. A third stage of this process will find that about 20% now thirst for redemption. Thanks to the perseverance of the former minority, 1 in 5 will now want out.

Ultimately - the redemption will be sought by each and every Jew.

Musing on Yishmael

It's utterly astonishing, almost unbelievable, to what depths of depravity Muslim culture infects its people. If I didn't see it for myself I'd never believe it. There are Muslim mothers who would rather strap their child with a suicide belt, to go kill and get killed, than buy the child a toy to play with. She gets more thrill in the child's death than in the child's life. Is this not a freak of nature?

If this were an exception, it could count as an aberrant statistic. But when schools, filled to capacity, teach to dispatch kids to kill themselves and sow terror, this monstrous behavior becomes for these children no more aberrant than drinking coffee.

How much love, kisses and hugs can you offer for political fodder?

Would God create such congenital mutations to start with? I seriously wonder the answer is "Yes". God, after all, created the Amalekite geneology which we have to eventually eliminate. This genome seeds a willingness to suffer self-sacrifice to gain the satisfaction of inflicting death to his innate enemy, which is the Jew and God.

The Yishmaelite, therefore, may well share a similar congential idiosyncratic lunacy - only in his case he can turn easily on his own kin, whereas the Amalekite seeks to target only the Jew and his God.

Here's an "anthem" song played on the official Palestinian Authority radio station for 2 days, after the PA was granted observer status at the UN. It included these words:
"We are bombs... the enemies were beheaded... Grieve not, Mother, shed no tears over my torn flesh... heroic men who mock death... We praised the Lord, and set out for Martyrdom. We strapped ourselves with explosives, and trusted in Allah... Onward men, on the roads to glory."

How sick is that?! Perhaps this is God's way to fix the definition of evil, and all who tether themselves to it, or align with it, or pivot their agenda about it, are - by definition - evil. If evil must be erased from the face of the earth, there must be clear-cut criteria people can use to make clear distinctions.

The Trial at Sea - and of Matrimony

Seeing the Egyptian army quickly gaining on them, the Jews, who hastily made their famous exodus from slavery 7 days earlier, were frightened. They faced the sea and felt trapped as the Egyptian chariots were closing fast. In those apprehensive moments, Torah tells us the Jews divided into 4 opinions as how to react. One group wanted to fight; The other to pray; Another to surrender; and the other, to commit suicide.

You'd think one of them would get it right, but not one did. Said Hashem to Moshe, "Tell them to go forward!" Which is exactly what Moshe did; He said, "Keep going!" (Ex.14:15)

By the way, here you have a clear indication the Moses of every generation knows that which Jews, otherwise, would never know were it not for their leader with whom God communicates.

The Jews were afraid; People started saying, "Oh no, I'm not going first." Just then, the leader of the tribe of Yehuda took the initiative and said, "I'll go first!". Only after the waters reached his nostrils did God split the sea and provide the Jews with a dry path to advance into. (Mechilta Beshalach 5; Sotah 27a)

You can imagine the tribulation Jews suffered with a mighty army closing in behind them and a dreadful sea they were ordered to enter in front of them.

To what do our sages compare these moments of tribulation?

- To finding a marriage mate!

Finding the right person requires much of what the leader of the tribe of Yehuda, Nachshon ben Aminadav, had and did. You have to be committed to following Hashem's directives, to the extent that not everything needs to be discovered from the start. Things will work out for the best if the attitude to obey God's command to marry (for it is indeed a mitzvah) is paramount. If you would just take the plunge - without too many calculations, you'd discover that that which appears as an awesome sea before you, will split, and a smooth road will lay ahead. Do your part, and trust in God, and God then chimes in to help you on the road you want to follow.

Women Singing by the Reed Sea

Once the Jews miraculously crossed the Reed Sea, and after they saw the dead Egyptians and their chariots washed up on the shore from which they just emerged, the men, led by Moses, sang a song of praise to God; And then their women, led by Miriam, did the same (Ex.15:20-21).

ותקח מרים הנביאה אחות אהרן את התף בידה ותצאן כל הנשים אחריה בתפים ובמחלת
... ותען להם מרים שירו‬ לשם

"Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took the drum [or tambourine] in her hand, and all the women followed her with drums and dancing. Miriam led them in responsive song, 'Sing to God ....'."

But our sages tell us the singing voice of a woman is erotic (Brachot 24a). How could these women have done something against the grain of Judaic law, which states a man must not hear the voice of a woman as she sings?

Two giants of Torah, as well as the Rebbe, tackled this question.

The Gaon of Vilna held that the women, in fact, did not sing. He bases his claim on the masculine form of the word "them", להם, interpreting this to mean that the women encouraged the men to sing. This, he said, is the meaning of the phrase "ותען להם מרים"; They told the men to sing.

This explanation, however, does not fit Rashi's explanation of what happened. According to Rashi, Miriam sang the verse and the women responded by singing that verse after her.

The Rogochover (he ordained the Rebbe) also deals with this question and says the women did sing, only their voices were drowned out by the drums they used while singing, thereby preventing the men from hearing their voices.

But here too the explanation does not tally with Rashi's explanation because Miriam's voice had to be heard otherwise how could the women respond in turn?

The Rebbe answers this question saying that Rashi himself provides the answer in a very clear-cut fashion. In his commentary on a prior verse, "... This is my God Whom I will beautify...." (Ex.15:2), Rashi explains the word "This" in the phrase "This is my God", saying the people so vividly sensed God they could point to this specter with their finger. Rashi then says, "That which [even] a maidservant saw by the sea, the prophets themselves never saw."

In other words, says the Rebbe, because Godliness was fully exposed to the Jewish people, because divine radiation became so tangible and omnipresent, the issue of eroticism had no place in such a reality. Nothing but holiness penetrated every human fiber.

The story of Adam and Eve exemplifies this idea. Before they sinned, "They were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed." (Gen.2:25). There was no significance to nakedness. But as soon as they sinned, the Torah tell us, "... they realized they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves as loincloths." (Gen.3:7).

That is, the sin caused God to conceal His revelation by a measurable degree; What was complete, sublime holiness until now gave way for a negative element to enter the space and block the holy radiation of the divine presence. By thus distancing Himself from man's visibility, man now got room for unholiness to blend into his environment to become a liability to reckon with.

Now, after the sin, after the creation of a negative sphere of influence, there's good reason to ask, as God asks Adam, "Where are you?" (Gen.3:9), i.e., Where do you stand, do you stand on the right side of an issue or do you stand on its wrong side?

By sinning, Adam created for all his descendants a navigator's muddle that allows one to have splits in his personality, where on some issues he can be on the right side, and on others on the wrong side.

As another example, consider a naked infant running around the house. Nobody practically pays attention because of the child's innocence. But were that child a 14-year old running around naked, that would provoke an entirely different reaction because this age innocence no longer applies.

So, with regard to the situation when God's presence was felt on that miraculous day on the 7th day of their first Passover, in the first month of their freedom and formation as a nation onto God, in the year 2448, on their way to receive the Holy Torah in 43 more days, the Jews had no issue with eroticism. The only sensation they felt that day was nothing but sheer Godliness.

By the way, I want to add about the vision of the Rebbe, as demonstrated here, where the Rebbe could appreciate vicariously the actual experience Jews then felt, as did Rashi, and as Rashi alludes to when he says, "That which a maidservant saw by the sea, the prophets themselves never saw." Rashi says, in Genesis 1:4, regarding the light created on Day 1 of creation, "God saw that this light is inappropriate for use by evil people, so He stored it away for use by righteous individuals in later generations." This lofty light gives such individuals, especially the Prince of the Generation, the ability to see and feel from an entirely different dimension and perspective we others are not yet privy to. With this special, archived light, these few individuals in every generation can see from one chronological end of the world to the other.

Misplaced Trust

In days of old (3,325 years ago), when Jews endured enslavement and hard labor in Egypt, God, through Moses, unleashed 10 plagues to force Pharoah and his countrymen to free the Jews and let them depart for the desert. Every month a new plague terrorized the oppressors; The plague smit for the first week, and for the next three weeks Egyptians got a respite - a time in which to reconsider and release the Jewish people. Moses would also warn the oppressors of each oncoming plague, giving the Egyptians further impetus to implement God's request, "Let My people go!".

Although Egyptians worshipped pagan elements, some of them now abandoned faith in their gods and came to realize the Jewish God prevails. When Moses announced the plague of deadly hail, these Egyptians, unlike their peers, heeded his warnings and took their prize steeds into their own houses with them.

Nevertheless, even these refined Egyptians, now cognizant of God's power and His affinity for the Jewish people, changed their minds once the Jews had escaped Egypt, and offered these fine horses to Pharoah who, through change of heart, now desired to hitch chariots of steel to them to chase the Jews and bring them back to forced slavery.

This mutable faith of Gentiles in God our sages address when they pronounce, "Even the best of Gentiles..." are quite worthless, if not worse. A Jew should always rely on God rather than entrust his expectations to the good will of even well-meaning Gentiles.