Each time Bob Braun sends out the email assigning d'var torah dates, I find myself going through the same exercise. I quickly head to the study, pick up a tanakh, and skim my assigned parasha, looking for ideas or inspiration. Then, I try to remember what I decided to write about, so that when I sit down at the computer late one night, I'm not starting from scratch.
This time was only slightly different. This time, as I walked back to the study, I was hearing voices. "Shirat Ha'Yam", said a voice. "The Parting of the Waters", I heard. "Miriam's Song", the words chased me down the hall.
Finally, I was able to give expression to thoughts of my own: "Gail, stop it. I'll figure something out. You're just burying me in ideas; that isn't really helping. There's too much to write about here."
I stopped short. Not out of any realization that I was in big trouble for my less-than-gracious refusal of scholarly rabbinic assistance, but out of the awareness that I had just proven my own link to our ancestors who wandered the desert: Even here, in the midst of the richness of this week's parasha, I viewed God's gift as a curse rather than a blessing.
In recent weeks, we have read of great miracles witnessed by the generation that left Egypt. The plagues, and Israel's escaping unscathed, are a powerful topic at most every Seder table. We read this week that after the waters turned back and covered the chariots and horsemen and Pharaoh's army, "VaYir'u ha'am et-HaShem vaYo'aminu b'HaShem u'v'Moshe avdo" - "the people feared the Lord; they had faith in the Lord and His servant Moses" (Shemot 14:31, JPS translation). They immediately showed that faith through the Shirat ha'Yam, the Song at the Sea, which we recite each morning in our davening.
It would have been nice to end the parasha here. We could close our chumashim, stand for hagbah, suffused with a nice warm glow, earned by the merits of our ancestors. They recognized God; they had faith in God; they praised God in word and in act.
But we're Jews. It's never that easy. In fact, the only (slightly) surprising element is how little time it takes until the kvetching starts: not a year; not a month or a week, told in a chapter of Torah. 4 verses - 4 pesukim - and three days is all it took to go from Miriam's Song for B'not Yisrael in 15:21 to "VaYilonu ha'Am el Moshe l'aymor: Mah Nishteh?" - "And the people grumbled against Moses, saying "What shall we drink?" (Shemot 15:25, JPS translation).
What surprises me, as I read B'shallakh, is not the grumbling of B'nai Yisrael. I expect that. Instead, what surprises me is that, as Nehama Leibowitz writes,
"There was thus no change in Israelite behaviour even after the Almighty divided the sea for them. Their pettiness and grumblings persisted. They still hankered after creature comforts…Some of them were more concerned with the mud on their shoes. … If such was their state of mind both before and after deliverance, what, we may ask, had they done to deserve the miracle in the first place?"
God answered "Mah Nishteh?" with sweet water. To the complaint in the wilderness of Sin, God replied with manna and quail. At Rephidim, God again provided water, at Massah and Meribah. What more could the people want?
Jonathan Sarna answers this, noting in his JPS commentary that "where one might expect popular resentment to diminish in the wake of the divine response to each successive deprivation, in fact, just the opposite occurs." The faith of B'nai Yisrael, Sarna writes, "began to weaken under the strains of life in the wilderness". Not surprisingly, Sarna notes, "[these] narratives leave the unmistakable impression of being a negative judgment on Israel's behavior, an implicit critique of the people's ingratitude…and lack of faith."
For most of us, our tribulations and difficulties are nothing like those of the generation whose tale is told in B'shallakh. Yet, it often seems, we strive to exceed them in our grumbling. Instead of learning from the complaints, let's look to a different model from this parasha: let us be, it says in Talmud (Sotah, 36b), like Nachshon ben Aminadab: as the Egyptian army rode closer, and the tribes argued as to who should step into the Red Sea first, we read that he led the tribe of Judah into the waves, hoping by their actions to spur God's miracle.
May our actions be worthy of God's miracles, and may our complaints come less frequently than the miracles do.
Shabbat shalom.