Seventh Day Pesach
Written by Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein Thursday, 24 April 2008
I once knew a rather assimilated Jewish family in the Boston area whose son, going to medical school, began seriously dating another student he had met in his classes.
She was from an Egyptian Coptic Christian family. For reasons I cannot recall, reconstruct, or even begin to fathom, the Jewish parents thought that for the first occasion to meet and entertain the young woman in their home, they would invite her to a family seder. During the reading of the Haggadah, almost entirely in English, they noticed a certain reserve in their guest, which lasted through the evening. The following day, their son called to say, “As soon as we left the house, . . . said, ‘I found those readings so offensive to me and my people that I feel I never want to come back to your parents’ house again.”
She thought of herself as an Egyptian, and statements that we hear as pertaining to evil people who lived 3200 years ago, she heard as relating to herself.
The traditional Torah reading for the end of Pesach includes Shirat ha-Yam, the “Song at the Sea” (Exod. 15: 1–18). It is a familiar passage, which contains some of the most familiar lines of out liturgy (Exod. 15: 11 and 18). It also raises some significant problems. Unlike the narrative in the previous chapter, this contains nothing about Moses holding out his arms to control the waters, the sea parting, the Israelites passing through safely on dry ground, the waters returning to their normal state—indeed, Moses does not appear at all in the actual poem. And there are puzzling indications of a later date: reference to the Philistines (who had not arrived in the area at the time of the Exodus), to God’s sanctuary in Canaan, ‘The place You made to dwell in’.
There are also theological issues. The most famous single verse of the poem, מי כמוך באלים יי, “Who is like you among the gods, O YHWH,” presumes the existence of other gods, and asserts that the God of the Israelites, YHWH, is simply the greatest of them all. This not the doctrine of true monotheism. The passage presents God in blatantly militaristic terms: יי איש מלחמה (15:3), literally, “YHWH is a man of war, a warrior”, or—as a teacher of mine once put it, “God wears a green beret.”
Not the least troubling aspect of the passage pertains not to these narrative, historical, and theological details, but to the overall tone of Israelite exultation in the catastrophic defeat suffered by the Egyptian forces at the hands of God. It is this sight of the Egyptians drowning in the sea that inspires the joyous faith of the Israelite people. How does that sound to the Other, outside the Jewish camp?
Perhaps as an antidote to this, a passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 10b) is frequently cited both in introducing the Torah reading and at the reading of the Ten Plagues in the seder. As the Israelites stood at the far shore of the sea, “the ministering angels sought to sing their song. God said, “My creatures, the work of My hands, are drowning in the sea, and you would sing a song?!”
The Israeli scholar Joseph Heinemann has written a trenchant analysis of this statement, which he describes as “striking in its radicalism”. In his reading, the song the angels wanted to sing was not a song of triumph like that of the Israelites, but rather their regular praises of God, part of their ordinary daily responsibilities: even the customary angelic worship was suspended under the circumstances as inappropriate when human beings—though the enemy—were dying.
Heinemann notes that this statement appears only in the Babylonian Talmud, in the context of homiletical introductions to the reading of the Scroll of Esther. He provides evidence that the view of most Palestinian scholars was far more hostile toward the Gentiles. Indeed, he argues that the original Palestinian form of the statement pertained to the Israelites in a time of peril and distress at the shores of the sea before the parting of the waters, and that the Babylonian preacher apparently transformed it to mean something quite different from its original meaning. Why? Because Jews living in the Diaspora were sensitive to how their texts sounded to non-Jews.
Purim was a problematic holiday for Jews living in the Persian Empire, as Pesach was problematic for Jews living in Alexandria. In quoting the statement about God’s rebuke to the ministering angels, the Babylonian preacher was warning his people that despite the last chapters of the Book of Esther, they should not celebrate the massacre of Persians.
This is not a matter of “What will the Gentiles think?” that Zionists sometimes disdainfully dismiss as characteristic of an exile mentality. We want Christians to be aware that when they read negative language in their Scripture describing the Pharisees and the Jews of Jerusalem, we hear those passages talking about us. It is not that they will change their Gospels, or that we will change the Shirat ha-Yam, or the end of the Book of Esther. Rather, it is that we should all read our familiar texts with sensitivity to what may cause pain to our neighbours.
The triumphant exultation of Shirat ha-Yam must indeed be balanced by the radical assertion of God’s rebuke to the ministering angels at the destruction of the enemies of Israel: “My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you would sing a song?!”
1 Joseph Heinemann, Aggadot ve-Toledoteihen (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), pp. 175–79.
