emunah

Beshallach for TAA

(Delivered January 31, 2026)

Maybe it’s the soul-deadening effects of constant blaring media, social and otherwise. Maybe it’s the political polarization. Maybe it’s the violent immigration enforcement and the overheated rhetoric around it, including the targeting of journalists. Maybe it’s the crackdown in Iran, or the attack on the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, or the devastating floods in southern Africa, or the endless war in Ukraine. Maybe it’s just the late January two snowstorms in and waiting for the third, and the nasty flu bugs going around. Whatever it is, it seems like just about everybody I’ve encountered this week is upset about something. The individual contours of our discontent will vary, but it seems that discontent is in the air.

In so many parts of our lives, we are caught between, as we ask ourselves how this will all play out, as we wonder what comes next. These are times that call for courage.

Parshat Beshallach gives us much to think about in this regard. We pick up the story with the Israelites, newly released from Egypt, but far from free. With each turn of the scroll, we find yet another crisis of faith. And yet with each turn of the scroll, we find another miracle.

The push and pull of this parsha—from the first breath of freedom to the winding path of the wilderness. And from the terror of being caught between the roiling waters and the Egyptian army made mad with rage and loss, to the astonishment and exultation of the water splitting open to take us in. And from that narrow escape, with water all around, to the crisis of no water to drink. From the question of what to eat, to the miracle of manna and from the sneak attack of Amalek, to Moses and the Israelites’ improbable victory. Throughout the parsha, we are constantly between the frying pan and the inferno. The narrative rolls and swells like the waves of the sea. It’s all about change and moving relentlessly through and being in between.

And the quintessential miracle—of crossing יָם סוּף the Sea of Reeds—this is the centerpiece of our parsha, when the in between-ness is embodied in the scroll as it is in the tale itself. The words spread out over the scroll with undulating waves, while in the story, walls of water surround the Israelites, echoing the narrowness of enslavement. And then, something different happens. 

What haunts me about this passage is the way the situation seems fully impossible… until it isn’t. It reminds me of laboring to give birth, when there comes a moment when you want to give up. It hurts, it’s hard, it feels like you’ve been laboring forever. You want so much to just quit. But you can’t because there’s a baby who needs to be born and you’re the only one who can make it happen. 

The theological and philosophical work of Parshat Beshallach is in interrogating that moment of between-ness: What is it we need and what is it we bring to the process of moving through? Like a baby waiting to be born, or like a people struggling to become free, we pass through narrowness. Even the Hebrew name of Egypt—מִצְרָיִם—speaks to this narrowness, the root letters pointing to confinement, restriction, limitation. 

In the moment of release, God separates water from water and the Israelites discover a path forward. 

וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל הָלְכוּ בַיַּבָּשָׁה בְּתוֹךְ הַיָּם
And the Israelites walked on the dry land within the water

The Hebrew subtly indicates that the path was there all along, waiting to emerge. And the rarely-encountered word יַּבָּשָׁה—dry land—brings us back to another instance of God separating water from water. All the way back in the story of creation, in Parshat Breishit, 

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד
וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן׃
And God said, let the waters beneath the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And truly it did.

Here too, the land was there all along. 

And then there’s how it all began: with תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ—variously translated as unformed and void, formless and empty, welter and waste, chaos and catastrophe. The birth of the world begins in this chaos and catastrophe and, through God’s ineffable movement, becomes substance and form, becomes a world that can support life and growth and progress. From what seemed impossible, comes something new.

It’s the same in Beshallach: the chaos and catastrophe of enslavement give way to something new, a way of being that binds the Israelites to God so strongly that we, their descendants, sing of this moment every week, some of us every day. In fact, our Sages, in Mishnah Brachot, instruct us to recall the flight from Egypt כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ—all the days of your life. This foundational story is a metaphor on how to live our lives. It’s not just a tale of miracles, but also a tale of the impossible becoming real. In both passages, the waters part to make space for life to flourish.

Both the Midrash and the Talmud teach the story of Nachshon ben Aminadav, a story so familiar and convincing that it feels like it comes from the Torah. In Tractate Sotah, according to Rabbi Yehudah, tribe after tribe, facing the waters of יָם סוּף, said, 

We’re not going in first. 

We’re not going in first. 

We’re definitely not going in first. 

Then Nachshon ben Aminadav gathered his courage and went first. Some say he jumped into the waves; some say he walked, step by step, until the water came up to his nostrils. And here again, at the moment of impossibility, when one more step would have meant drowning, the waters split just in time.

With Nachshon as our teacher, the lesson of Beshallach is that when the chaos and catastrophe seem at their worst, when obstacles crowd the way forward and all seems lost; that’s the moment when the tide turns. It has to. 

Vaetchanan for TAA

(Delivered August 9, 2025)

נַחֲמוּ נַחֲמוּ עַמִּי יֹאמַר אֱלֹהֵיכֶם
Take comfort, take comfort, My people, says your God.

Today is Shabbat Nachamu—Shabbat of Comfort—the first Shabbat following Tisha b’Av. After that mournful day has pressed us into the darkest corners of our communal grief, tradition holds that Moshiach—the messiah—is born in the late afternoon of Tisha b’Av. New life amid the wreckage. This powerful metaphor reminds us that darkness doesn’t last forever, that there is always something that comes next. The seeds of consolation are planted in the soil of the worst catastrophes, and watered with our tears. And in this liminal moment, it is our job to sift through the ashes of the ruined city and find reason to go on. 

With Shabbat Nachamu, we embark on the seven weeks of consolation that bring us to the new beginning of Rosh Hashanah. The proportion is significant: While there are three haftarot of rebuke preceding Tisha b’Av, there are seven haftarot of consolation afterward. Tradition knows that when we have been to the depths of despair, we need more time than we often allow ourselves, to metabolize it and find our way out of it.

I think the Torah reading is subtly pointing the way. This week’s parsha, Vaetchanan, which always falls on Shabbat Nachamu, is packed to the edges with words and phrases that have found their way into our liturgy. From the Shema, to bits of the Torah service, to Aleinu, not to mention the Haggadah and of course the recapitulation of the Ten Commandments; the parsha overflows with passages that our ancient tradition encourages us to keep close by, practically in our pockets, for the times when we use words to draw near to the divine. This can’t possibly be accidental. 

Its opening lines depict Moses’s unanswered plea to enter the Holy Land, alongside the community he has led through forty years of wandering. But despite this heart-wrenching beginning, Parshat Vaetchanan is engaged in the work of rebuilding faith. 

Take, for example, possibly the most famous passage in a parsha of famous passages, Dvarim chapter 6 verse 4:

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ יי  אֶחָד
Listen, Israel! Adonai is our God; Adonai is one.

The radical theological move away from practical gods—one for every occasion—to the highly impractical, mysterious, unknowable one God is a doorway into faith, albeit sometimes a difficult faith to grasp. Allowing ourselves to imagine that God is well beyond our reach or comprehension demands of us that we believe, not because we can see concrete evidence but because we are swept up in the idea that there is something much bigger than we are, and that’s worth believing in. 

Embroidering the concept of faith in the Shema, Rashi interprets יי אֱלֹהֵינוּ יי  אֶחָד to be a statement pointing toward the future. He writes:

ה’ שֶׁהוּא אֱלֹהֵינוּ עַתָּה, וְלֹא אֱלֹהֵי הָאֻמּוֹת, הוּא עָתִיד לִהְיוֹת ה’ אֶחָד 
Adonai, who is our God now, but not the God of the nations, 
will in the future become One God.

Rashi’s proof text is from the prophet Zecharia בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִהְיֶה יי אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד—on that day there will be one God with one name. This is a statement of profound faith not only in God but in the possibility of a peaceful future time, in which all of humanity comes to embrace that God is indivisible. 

Elsewhere, Vaetchanan reinforces the message of God’s oneness with one of my favorite psukim in the whole Torah, Dvarim chapter 4, verse 35:

אַתָּה הָרְאֵתָ לָדַעַת כִּי יי הוּא הָאֱלֹהִים אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ׃
You yourself have been made to see, to know that Adonai is God;
there is nothing else but God.

The idea that the oneness of God encompasses everything, that God suffuses every nook and cranny, lifts the burdens of logic and narrative, and suspends us in the holiness of becoming. 

And when, in chapter 6, we envision coming into the Promised Land to find houses we did not build, and cisterns we did not dig out, and crops we did not plant—when we are told of the unearned bounty that will be ours—it reads like a fantasy, like the reward at the end of an excruciatingly long and arduous challenge. What lifts it into the realm of faith for me is that we don’t stay in the Disney-fied picture of perfect houses that someone else cleans. Rather, this whole mirage of idealized wealth is a tool to remind us that it’s God Who both brought us out of enslavement and created the compensatory abundance. As it says in one of the brachot that the folks at Backyard Mishnah studied together the other night, בּוֹרֵא נְפָשׁוֹת רַבּוֹת וְחֶסְרוֹנָן—God is the creator of many souls and their needs. In other words, God creates the needs and their fulfillment. The lock and the key, the disease and the cure. אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ. There is nothing but God.

And when, in chapter 4, our parsha recalls the horrific fate of the idolaters at Baal Peor, the text reminds us: 

וְאַתֶּם הַדְּבֵקִים בַּיי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם חַיִּים כֻּלְּכֶם הַיּוֹם
But you, who stuck with Adonai your God, are all alive today.

It’s the generational wealth of tradition, not the illusory ease of windfall and unearned luxury, that fills our souls. The words and the concepts and—yes—the faith in the divine: these are our ultimate source of prosperity. What sustained our ancestors in times of confusion and trouble can sustain us too when we feel ourselves near the breaking point. 

And lest we think this faith and this holy tradition are not for us, that we have not earned these precious words and ideas or are not worthy of them, Vaetchanan reminds us:

לֹא אֶת־אֲבֹתֵינוּ כָּרַת יי אֶת־הַבְּרִית הַזֹּאת 
כִּי אִתָּנוּ אֲנַחְנוּ אֵלֶּה פֹה הַיּוֹם כֻּלָּנוּ חַיִּים
It is not with our ancestors that Adonai our God made this covenant;
Rather it’s with us ourselves, all of us who are alive here today.

It’s our responsibility and our blessing to make the legacy we inherit our own, generation after generation, and then to teach these words to our children, when we lie down and when we arise, so that the ups and the downs of life—joy and disaster alike—are filled with the presence of God.  אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ. There is nothing but God.

NOTE: If these words speak to you, please pay us a visit when you’re in Gloucester. www.taagloucester.org