"Biblical account of the Exodus" offered by Anna Weber '08 at the JRC, Jan. 2008

Hi, everybody. I would like, before I start, to say hello and Happy New Year and Happy Winter Study and Happy Finals, probably, belatedly, and also to thank Dani for inviting me to speak tonight. I'm a sucker for this whole biblical interpretation thing, and for future reference it's a good way to get me to come back to the J after I've been away for a while.

Anyway, this week we have the Exodus. It's a big deal. Like, this is it, guys. And there is so much going on in this parsha that I couldn't possibly address it all. Our story picks up just after the people set foot out of Egypt and it takes us all the way up to getting water from a rock, which, I admit, has a certain personal appeal to me as a geology major. But I would like to talk about a certain other passage that also caught my attention.

As God leads the people toward the Red Sea, or the Sea of Reeds, whichever you prefer, “The Lord went before them in a pillar of cloud by day...and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel day and night. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.”

Now, I wonder, is anyone else getting a flashback here? We all remember how the universe started: God said, "Let there be light," and God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. We get some elaboration during the fourth day of the Creation, with what I think is some beautiful language:

God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they shall serve as signs for the set times -- the days and the years; and they shall serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth. And it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that this was good.”

Light, dark. Day, night. The act of Creation itself, the very first action that takes place in the entire universe -- and then gets talked about again and again, as though there could be any uncertainty -- is the separation of light from dark. And this makes sense, because the difference between dark and light really is the founding principle of our reality -- but then so is the passing between dark and light, the transition between them and how we get from one to another.

 

And then there is what I think is the most beautiful prayer in our services: the Maariv Aravim. "Creator of day and night, You roll back light before the darkness and darkness before the light. You cause the day to pass and bring on the night, and separate between day and night.”  Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech haolam asher bidvam ma'ariv aravim. Praised be Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who brings on the evening.  Lovely. Moving toward the evening, setting off our lives with the coming of the evening, is, essentially, what Shabbat is all about, and the reason goes all the way back to Creation.

 

Now let's return to the Exodus. God goes before the people as the embodiment of light and dark, but it's light in the darkness and darkness in the light. The language is very similar, but the separation that we saw in Genesis has been, more or less, thrown out the window. A column of fire in the middle of the night -- we might as well be back in the chaos of the deep that preceded the Creation.

 

But then what happens next?  The Angel of God, who had been going ahead of the Israelite army, “now moved and followed behind them; and the pillar of cloud shifted from in front of them and took up a place behind them, and it came between the army of the Egyptians and the army of Israel. Thus there was the cloud with the darkness, and it cast a spell upon the night, so that the one could not come near the other all through the night.”

So what I'm picturing here is the Egyptians on one side, behind the pillar of cloud, in the darkness, and the Israelites on the other side, in front of the pillar of cloud, in the light. They are separated by the difference between dark and light: on the one side, the chaos and unrealized state of slavery in Egypt, separated by God from the bright potential of the Promised Land on the other. It's Creation all over again.

 

But what about Maariv Aravim? This separation happens at pivotal moments in our history, sure, like Creation and the Exodus, but it also happens every day. It's a power beyond anything we have control over, separating the light from the darkness and the darkness from the light. In that sense, Creation happens again and again every sunset and sunrise. The Exodus happens. It's like we get another chance every day -- twice a day -- another chance at creation, at bringing ourselves out of whatever chaos or slavery we've subjected ourselves to at the moment. It's a heartening idea, really. And it's just been sundown, so let's get started. Shabbat shalom.