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We need to embrace the nothingness of the land in-between and use that time to attain wisdom, for contemplation and discernment, and to seek connection ... Lessons for Today
Moses said to the people, "Have no fear! Stand by, and witness the deliverances which the Eternal will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again. The Eternal will battle for you; you hold your peace!" Then the Eternal said to Moses, "Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. And you lift up your rod and hold out your arm over the sea and split it, so that the Israelites may march into the sea on dry ground." (Exodus 14:13-16)
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Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes:
So the Israelites follow Moses and his God only to wind up between the approaching Egyptian chariots and the abyss of the Red Sea. Now there is no turning back, no moving forward.
It is logically impossible; cannot be done. You can either be "in the midst of the sea," or you can be "on dry ground." But you cannot, at the same time, be both. The Hasidic master Dov Baer of Mezritch teaches that there is a place, an order of being, called Ayin. Nothingness, through which anyone (or anything) must pass before it can become something new. Just a split second after it is no longer what it was but before it is what it would become. This is a place of great terror. When you enter the Nothingness, there can be no guarantees. All bets are off. You could become anything - or remain nothing, forever. Such a place contains both a sea and its opposite. Sea and dry ground. Life and death. Good and evil. Slavery and freedom.
You want to know what happened at the sea? I'll tell you. The waters didn't literally split. The people all walked into the sea and drowned. Then they all walked up onto the opposite shore, reborn into free men and women. Into the Ayin....
Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet, Five Cities of Refuge (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) p.57.
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Rashi quotes from the Midrash (Exodus Rabba 21) to explain Israel's predicament:
There is nothing for them to do but to journey on, for the sea will not stand in their way; their ancestor's merits and their own, the faith that they placed in Me so that they left Egypt, will suffice to divide the sea for them.
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Finally, Pharaoh relents and allows the Israelites to leave Egypt. With great excitement and trepidation, the Israelites flee, making haste lest Pharaoh change his mind. And change his mind he does. Pharaoh discharges his warriors to return the slaves, and occupying the lead chariot himself, they give chase. Approaching the yam suf - the Sea of Reeds - the Israelites find themselves stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They have the vast sea before them and Pharaoh's troops rapidly advancing behind them. What to do?
This is one of the most dramatic moments in the entire Hebrew scriptures, and a moment that has inspired great amounts of midrash and speculation, commentary and conversation. What could the Israelites have done? What options did they have? What would you have done? With very little choice except perhaps to stand and fight, which would have meant almost certain death, the Israelites took the ultimate leap of faith, literally jumping into the water. Surely they were hoping for a miracle. One tradition suggests that God did not part the waters until Israel demonstrated their faith by jumping in. Nachshon, the first to take the plunge, did get his feet wet, but demonstrated the faith that compelled God to provide that miracle.
No matter how they got into the sea, the Torah text makes it clear that the Israelites were extraordinarily afraid. They cried out to God and challenged Moses. Moses reassures the people, and God reassures Moses. As Rashi points out, the Israelites really had no choice but to move forward into the sea. But it was not fear that compelled them into the water. Rather, they knew that God would save them. Rashi, putting the most positive spin on the Israelites’s motivations, suggests that they had already demonstrated their faith in God by leaving Egypt. They left, not only to flee slavery, but, more importantly, to follow the path of God. This demonstration of faith, along with the faith of their ancestors, made the relationship between God and the people of Israel secure. The people, knowing this, and having witness God’s power through the display of the plagues, made the people confident that God would help them now.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner offers a mystical teaching to describe the circumstances in which the Israelites found themselves. That moment on the shore of the sea, when the Israelites faced what appeared to be a death by drowning in the sea before them or certain slaughter by Pharaoh’s army behind them, was the moment that transformed Israel forever. But, before they could be transformed, before they could become what they were to be, they must experience that liminal point where they cease to be what they were, but are yet to become what they will be. This transition stage is referred to by the name Ayin - “nothingness” by the Chassidic sage Dov Baer of Mezritch. This is the pure primordial state of nothingness that serves to strip away all time and thought, the ego and materials awareness, and connect the soul with the Ein Sof, the Infinite One who created out of nothingness. As another Chasidic Sage, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev wrote,
"A person must fear God so much that his ego is totally nullified. Only then can he attach himself to Nothingness. Sustenance, filled with all good, then flows to all universes... The individual thus attaches the Life Force of all universes to Nothingness, which is higher than all worlds... On the level where this Life Force has not yet been constricted into the universes, it is attached to the Nothingness... " (Kedushat Levi Bereshit, p. 5).
And, as it is written in the Book of Job, "Wisdom comes into being out of ayin" (Job 28:12)
One must connect with God out of nothingness, and it is out of that connection, that pure state unfettered by the restraints of the material world, that our path becomes clear. It is there that we attain true wisdom. For the Israelites, that path took them forward, into the sea, into freedom, and into covenant with God.
That brief unsure moment of nothingness at the shore of the sea, which must have seemed to last a life-time, stripped the Israelites of the slavery of their past, but also made it clear that any expectations or knowledge of the future was baseless. They had to go forward, they had no choice because they could not ever return, but they were paralysed with fear about what lay ahead. It was at that terrifying moment of nothingness, of Ayin, of the no-man's-land betwixt-and-between, that the former slaves connected with their God - not through faith or fear or rational thought, but through true soul connection - compelling them to take the leap of faith into the unknown. It can’t be explained; it just happens.
Lessons for Today
It is the scariest place to be. Knowing that the past has come to an end, but not having a clear path to follow into the future, is painful and confusing and frustrating. Whether it is the ending of a relationship, the termination of a job or period of study, the loss of a loved one, we know that change must happen, but we don’t know where or how. We always take great comfort from the patterns of our lives and knowing, basically, what our immediate future holds. When that is torn away from us, we become anxious and uncertain and afraid. Nothingness is profoundly uncomfortable.
We can appreciate how the Israelites must have felt.
With nothing, we can have no expectations, and that scares us. It scares us into expecting the worst. But that makes no sense either, because if we can have no expectations, we can’t expect the worst either. Rather than allowing ourselves to be frustrated that we can’t find our path, we need to realize that being in Ayin, while unsettling, is a part of the path itself. It was not that the path of the Israelite from slavery to freedom began on the far side of the Sea of Reeds. Rather, the path lead them through the sea. We need to embrace the nothingness of the land in-between and use that time to attain wisdom, for contemplation and discernment, and to seek connection - connection with God, ourselves, and the others with whom we travel our path. For it is only with connection that the path will reveal itself.
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