Parashat Beshallah: Not Running From the Fear

You’re running, you’re running, as fast as you can. You hear them behind you, chasing you. You know you can’t escape, but you just keep running, fleeing. Have you ever had such a dream? Or such a feeling?

Fear. The Israelites might have been able to physically leave Egypt, but could they leave their fears behind, or would their fears chase them forever, like the Egyptians in this parsha?

Fears chase us, surround us, box us in, like the Israelites standing between the Sea and the Egyptians, trapped. The only escape is to stop fleeing, to turn around, to see those fears up close and then watch them drown in the Sea of faith.

Running doesn’t help. The exodus story could not have ended last week because psychologically the Israelites would always be running away, and in running away, those Egyptians would still be their masters.

Freedom only comes with the dissolution of fear. Why was this moment at the Sea so intense as to be cause for song? It was the first taste of the possibility of life without fear – a breaking down of barriers and obstacles that bursts forth in song, great shouts of song that know no limit, because it is fear that sets the limits.

But how to get to that point? The midrash says that even a maidservant at the Sea saw something that great prophets have never seen . She saw, she understood, she believed with utter certainty (at least for that moment) that there was something greater than her fears, greater than those tyrannical Egyptians with all their iron chariots --- God shall live forever! proclaimed the Israelites in their song. What fear can stand up to this statement, to this sense of the eternity, of the ultimate utter supremacy of the divine?

My grandfather was killed by Nazi soldiers, and my father’s childhood destroyed by them. The fear of them lives on in my psyche, chasing me and stopping me from really being free, from really learning to sing. It is not enough to survive. One must also turn around and look squarely at those fears and watch them drown in a Sea of faith, faith that there is something good that is larger and more eternal. May we find the strength to see, to believe and to sing.