I have a good friend named Miriam Moules who is a Methodist lay preacher. We often discuss our plans for sermons and study sessions together, and are enriched by our very different perspectives on shared Biblical texts. Recently Miriam opened her sermon by asking her congregation: “Who do you listen to, who do you hear?” This strikes me as an excellent question to pose about Parashat Beshallach.
After experiencing the miracle of the parting of the Sea of Reeds, we are told that the Israelites “believed in God and in God’s servant Moses”. It’s one thing to believe, but did they actually listen to what God and Moses were asking of them? It would seem not; a mere three days after this miracle, in Exodus Chapter 15, they immediately start complaining. God’s response is interesting; we are not explicitly told that God listens to their outcry, but God does act by directing Moses to miraculously transform some bitter water into sweet, drinkable water. And immediately follows up with a conditional promise: “if you will listen carefully to the voice of God… if you will give ear to all my commandments… then I will be your healer”. It’s not enough to passively believe that if they cry out God will save them, the Israelites have to listen. Of course, in this verse as everywhere in Torah, listening doesn’t just mean acknowledging that God has said the words, it means taking action to actually “do the right thing”. But it’s striking that the verb Sh-M-’A to listen is repeated twice along with a rarer verb meaning to use one’s ears.
You will not be surprised to hear that only a few weeks later, in the following chapter, the Israelites are back to their grumbling! This time they are hungry and wish they could have died in Egypt (where at least their overseers fed them enough bread and meat to be able to work) rather than starve in the desert. Unlike with their thirst, this time God does not simply provide food and then tell the Israelites to listen. Rather, God provides manna in conjunction with strict instructions that the Israelites must listen to: they must gather only as much as they need, and not attempt to hoard or save up the miraculous food, and most importantly they must observe Shabbat and refrain from gathering manna on the seventh day. When Moses and Aaron relay those instructions, they repeatedly refer to God as “God who has heard your grumbling”. Some of the Israelites “do not listen to Moses” – they insist on keeping extra manna aside and it turns rotten and disgusting.
Why does the Torah place so much emphasis on listening as well as believing? Just before the Israelites break into song, back in Chapter 14, we have two key lines about seeing: “the Israelites saw the Egyptians dead… the Israelites saw the strong hand with which God acted in Egypt”. As the saying goes, seeing is believing: after seeing these things, they believed. Believed, but didn’t remember, even a few days later. In order to remember and commit to a continuing relationship with God, they had to hear as well as see. Seeing is immediate and inescapable: the sea has become walls right there, the corpses of our drowned oppressors are right there. But it’s very hard to pass that vision on to someone else unless you can put it into words for another person to hear. Thousands of years after the event, we don’t remember the Exodus and the sea-splitting miracle because we can still see it, but because we can hear the words describing what our ancestors saw.
And it’s not just words that we hear, it’s music. The most famous part of Beshallach is the Song of the Sea, accompanied by instruments and dancing. It is well known that most people form extremely strong memories based on music, that music can be repeated and memorized more accurately than words alone.
Let me return, then, to my friend Miriam’s question. “Who do you listen to, who do you hear?”. Of course we should always listen to God, and to God’s spokesmen like Moses and other prophets. But sometimes, as Miriam went on to explain, there are people we forget to listen to, because theirs aren’t the voices we expect to be worth hearing. Perhaps we need to pay more attention to Miriam’s namesake, the Biblical Miriam, who led the women in song and dance in Exodus 15:20-21. Or perhaps it wasn’t just the women. The American Conservative Rabbi R Danya Ruttenberg presents a strong case that “The verses at the end originally formed part of the beginning, and the Song itself—perhaps first existing as part of an oral tradition—may originally have been ascribed to Miriam, who led the Israelites in a powerful call-and-response of praise and worship.” If we hadn’t listened to Miriam’s musical prophecy, we wouldn’t recall the miraculous splitting of the sea so vividly.
When R Debbie Young-Somers wrote about Beshallach last year, she mentioned another example of forgetting to listen a voice that was important to hear. R Debbie recounts a Midrash about a woman named Serach, a granddaughter of Jacob listed by name among all his dozens of sons and grandsons. And according to Rabbinic tradition, among the rare human beings who never actually died. Lots of famous rabbis sit around debating what actually happened when the Sea of Reeds split, trying to deduce the information based on the precise word choices in the Torah verses. And Serach angrily points out, “I was there!” My friend Miriam talks about the importance of listening to angry voices, voices that make us uncomfortable. Voices of people who have actually experienced an event that we might otherwise be tempted to theorize about.
Maybe that is why God is so emphatic about the need to listen! We should listen to God’s words, and especially when they are brought to us via people we don’t expect to be the voices of religious authority.
Dr Rachel Berkson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.