Shabbat BeShalach: Women at Sea
Rashi, commenting on this week’s amazing events at the Red Sea, quotes the Midrash ( Mechilta 15:22) that at the Red Sea, God was seen by the humblest maidservant in a more powerful way than even the greatest of the prophets.
What a fascinating and hyperbolic statement. It is meant to convey the magnitude of the Divine intervention for the Israelites.
What did they see? On one level, it was the miraculous crossing of the sea that they celebrated with that magnificent poem (or song, it is the same word in Hebrew) we read on this Shabbat. And on the other, it was about the joy of deliverance from death. Which was it? And what was this idea meant to convey?
Immediately after the song led by Moses, Miriam follows it up with an abbreviated version that she led accompanied by musical instruments. There she mentions God’s destruction of the Egyptians.
Miriam is one of a series of female heroines in the Exodus narrative. The two midwives who defied Pharaoh, Shifra, and Pua, by refusing to kill Israelite babies at birth, Yocheved who defied Pharaoh by having a baby and keeping him alive, Pharaoh’s daughter who defied him by adopting the Hebrew child and maintaining his Jewish identity, and Zipporah who saved Moses’s live on the way down from Midian to Egypt. And I think these all represent the female spiritual strength within the Israelite people and their religious culture.
So why compare the vision of the humblest level of the Hebrew people, to that of the prophets who all had a compelling vision of God? And this was so powerful an experience that they were able to withstand persecution themselves for preaching the word of God to an unresponsive and even antagonistic audience?
Firstly, it is implying that everyone from the most important to the least, had an experience of God so powerful that it rose from the lowest to the highest level of spirituality at that moment. Everyone could achieve the summits of religious experience. But then why within days did the people start complaining and demanding to go back to Egypt? What happened to those spiritual heights that they now were rejecting? God and their faith seem to have disappeared.
Humans are fickle and when things went wrong, they could only think of their immediate physical difficulties. Perhaps it is because being spiritual is such an intangible and difficult abstraction to come to terms with that we can only get glimpses of it. This is also why so many of us see Judaism only through the practice of rituals and community but rarely reach the spiritual experiences that infuse actions with the personal transcendental.
By stressing female spirituality, the Midrash is conveying another dimension of religious experience, the feminine. The mystics say that we are all a combination of the masculine and the feminine. And if we do not make use of female intuition and emotions we will be as inadequate as if we do not add an element of the masculine. Everyone can rise both physically and spiritually. This metaphor of the Hebrew servant shows that in the realms of spirituality, we are all equal.
Exodus 13:17-17
