The parsha (weekly Torah portion) is called B’shalach and it means, “And it was when he sent.”  It beings with Pharaoh finally sending us on our way, out of the womb of Egypt and through the sea of Reeds to a new life.

After Pharaoh did this, god did not lead the children of Yisrael the short way through the Philistines because he she wanted to avoid having them see war.  Instead they go into the wilderness of the Yam Soof (Sea of Reeds).   As a pillar of clouds or a pillar of fire, God led them day and night.

God tells Moshe (Moses) his plans for luring Pharaoh and his army into a trap so Egypt will know haShem (god).

Next we read of things from Egypt’s point of view as they start to pursue the people who were set free.  The children of Yisrael see the Egyptian armies and start to panic.  Moshe tells them to shut up for haShem will fight for them.

HaShem asks Moshe, “Why are you shouting at me?” and tells him to get the people a-moving.  The pillar of haShem now goes between Egypt and the freed slaves, and Moshe lifts his hand over the sea and god blows a strong easterly wind all night and the sea turns into dry land and the waters split.

The children of Yisrael enter the sea.  The Egyptians pursue, and start having problems.  God tells Moshe to stretch his hand over the sea which he does, and the waters return on the Egyptians, wiping out the entire army.

The people are in incredible awe of haShem and have faith in haShem and Moshe, and everybody starts singing what we now call the song of the sea.  Miriam, Aharon’s sister, and also a prophet, takes a drum and all the women come out with drums and dance, and Miriam calls out to them to sing.

Moshe moves the people to the wilderness of Shur, and after three days they find only one place with water, and that water is bitter.  The people complain, Moshe shouts at god, and god shows Moshe a tree to put into the water to turn it sweet.

It is here that god puts rules on the people to test them.  She tells them that if they listen to his voice, none of the diseases that she put on Egypt will happen to the people.

The people then arrive at Aylim which has 12 springs and 70 date palms.  They camp there, and then continue to the wilderness of Syn.  It is now the 15th day of the second month of freedom (for those who track such things).

The people now complain to Moshe and Aharon about a lack of food.  God tells Moshe that every day he will rain down food and that this is a test to see if the people will follow god’s instructions.  On the 6th day, they should gather twice as much and prepare it all.

Moshe and Aharon tell the people that god hears the complaints the people have against him, and who are they that the people should complain about them?  The continue to tell the people that their complaint is really against god.

Aharon then tells the people that they will have meat that night and bread in the morning, and quail rise up and cover the camp, and in the morning the people find the mahn (manna) on the desert surface and we then read all about the mahn.

The mahn leads nicely into god telling Moshe that he is giving the people shabbat, and there is no reason for anyone to go anywhere on that day, for the day before they gathered enough mahn for two days.

Next they travel to R’pheedeem where there is no water and so the people again complain.  Moshe asks them why they argue with him.  God tells Moshe to take the elders, and his staff, and to hit the rock that god is standing on, and water will come out..  Moshe names the place, “Massah oomreevah,” which means, “Test and quarrels,” because the people tested god asking if haShem is with them or not.

Amalek now comes into the picture and makes war with Yisrael.  Moshe tells Y’hoshua (Joshua) to take men and fight Amalek, while he, Aharon, and Hur, go up on a hilltop.  When Moshe’s hand was raised, Yisrael was strong, and when it fell, Amalek was strong.  Moshe’s hands became heavy, so they sat him on a rock and Aharon and Hur supported his hands until sunset, and Y’hoshua weakened Amalek with the sword.

God told Moshe to write down that god will wipe the memory of Amalek from the heavens, and to put those words into Y’hoshua’s ear.  Moshe builds an altar and calls it, “HaShem is my banner,” because god will wage war with Amalek from generation to generation.

These are the words that the parsha ends with.

Now that we know what happened, let us see what the parsha is trying to tell us.  I saw two things.

The first has to do with patience.  What do I mean by patience?  Well, so often in life we find ourselves starting off on a new beginning and we want to just race out of the blocks and dive right into our new project.

Let me give you three diverse examples.

New Year’s resolutions is the first.

How many times have we heard, or actually said we would start working out and getting in shape, or dieting and losing weight, or getting organized, etc.?  What happens?  After a few weeks, we give up and go back to our old ways.

My second example is one that I have seen a lot in the world of baal tshuvahs (a Hebrew phrase that refers to children of Yisrael who have decided to, “Return,” and learn and follow the ways of the Torah).  A person decides to follow the Torah and immediately jumps in and tries to do everything, follow every law and stringency that somebody has put around the law.  The result is that after about six months or so, many jump out of that world and run as far away from the Torah as possible.

The third example is getting over an illness.  So frequently a person starts to feel better and immediately wants to go out and be fully active.  The result (for me at least) is to wind up sick again.

When I was young, and I would start to feel better, my mother would tell me that I had to stay in bed for two more days.  I hated it and didn’t understand why… until after I had left home and gotten sick a few times and had the illness extended by my not following my mother’s advice.

So, the obvious question is where do I see my mother’s advice in the Torah?  Where in the Torah do I see the baal tshuvah being told not to take everything on at once, but to go slowly?  Where do I see the Torah telling us to gradually start exercising and dieting and organizing, and not to expect to have these changes in place all at once?

The answer is in our parsha!  Here let me show you.

We start off the parsha as newly freed slaves who have no clue how to protect ourselves.  We have never even seen war.  HaShem knows this and realizes that if the first thing we saw was war, we would freak and say there is no way we can protect ourselves.  Even leaving Egypt well-armed, we would run back to Egypt, the only place we know safety.  Hence haShem takes us on a longer path away from the Pleeshtim (Philistines).

HaShem wants to introduce us the the idea of war, slowly, and to not fear fighting for ourselves because haShem is with us.

This is why he has the people turn around and return to the Yam Soof and why she has the Egyptian army attack.  He knows we will be scared, and she also clearly protects us and gives us a simple task to win the fight and shows that he will not let any harm come to us while she destroys the attacking army.  This is the crossing of the sea, and this is plainly seen in verse 14:14 (of Shmot/Exodus) where Moshe tells the people that god will fight for them and the people need to remain silent.  To be silent means to be calm and to stop panicking.

Just a little side note:  verse 15 has haShem ask Moshe why the people are crying out to him.  Better they should start moving.  This is a quick teaching that sometimes it is good to talk or pray, and sometimes the right thing is to act, to do.

Getting back to our main idea, after they survive Pharaoh and his army, they sing the song of the sea.  Now outside of wanting to express their joy, the song and their singing also serves to instill in them the idea that haShem will protect them and defeat their enemies with ease.  This further builds up their trust that they don’t need to fear their enemies when they are forced into war.

I realize that I seem to be speaking about war here, but underlying the surface idea of war is the idea of being safe in a new environment (which is where you find yourself as you grow and change), and an even deeper idea of what it takes to create a permanent change in ones life.

If you follow this, it is a slow, step-by-step approach to change.

First, don’t jump into the deep end.  Second, see what is hard and scary from a distance and discover that you can survive it.  Re-enforce that within yourself by sharing the event out loud, with words.  This is where we have gotten to so far.

Next is to test yourself a little bit at a time.  We see this played out with haShem first providing bitter water that has to be sweetened.  Then no food, then food you have to trust you will receive daily.  Then a lack of water.

Each one of things is a slightly more severe test of survival in a new life.  Bitter water might not be pleasant to drink, but you can survive.  You can live many days without food before dying.  You can only live a few days without water.

Each step builds a trust in god and a belief in the people that they can overcome difficulty.  This is the patient process we need to take as we begin a new way of living:  slowly building up our trust that we can live this new life we desire.

Finally we come to the big test.  The people finally express their big doubt:  Is haShem with them or not?  They ask this question at the end of verse 17:7 and verse 17:8 immediately begins with, “Amalek came and fought with Yisrael.”

This is pivotal because the parsha also ends with us being told that god will fight Amalek from generation to generation.

Who is Amalek and why is he so important here?

To answer this, we need to look at something I have shared in the past, something called Gematria.

In Hebrew, each letter also is a number.  The idea of Gematria is that words with the same numeric value are related.  I have talked of this in the past, so I won’t go into it further; if you don’t recall or missed that post, feel free to ask me.

The Gematria of Amalek is equal to the Gematria of suffek which is the Hebrew word that means doubt.

The people have finally gotten the idea that they will be safe provided that god is with them.  However, they now start to have doubts if god will be with them always.

As soon as they have this doubt, Amalek/doubt shows up in the flesh and wants to fight them.

This is a fight that haShem cannot wage for them; they must fight it themselves.

Why?

Because doubt is internal, and each person has to deal with it themselves.  Nobody can remove your doubt except yourself.

The people, who are really us, finally learn that they/we can survive because of haShem.  The question they, and we, have is will the divine within us stick around and will we start to lose trust?

This is the ultimate fight that haShem has been preparing the people for.  Our moving slowly into our new life has also prepared us to fight our doubt of whether we can have this new life.

The people are successful in weakening their doubt/Amalek because Moshe, with help, was able to keep his hand up.

From this, we can learn that we should not be afraid to ask for help when we are fighting our doubts about our new lives and ourselves.  The hand is a symbol of doing and if we keep lifting up our actions and not let them fall back down, we will be succeed in weakening our doubt.

And just as haShem prepared the people to be able to fight Amalek, we too need to trust that haShem will not throw anything we can’t handle at us.

W only have to trust and not doubt!

A final tidbit (the second thing I saw in the parsha) is an example of how this is not some ancient text (ie – that what happens to the ancients cannot happen to us).

Think of how many centuries have gone since Adam first named everything up until the people receive the mahn.  Just as we think that what was possible for Moshe and Aharon and Y’hoshua and all the way up to the sages and even the rebbes of a few hundred years ago is not possible for us, so too, the generation of Moshe must have thought that they could not do or have what was possible for Adam.

And then we come to verse 16:31 which says that the children of Yisrael called its name mahn.

This generation, got to do something that up to that moment only Adam had done:  to name something in creation.

Certainly if they can do something that was only done many generations before them, it should give us hope that we too have the potential to do what earlier generations have been able to do.  I don’t know why this jumped out at me and wanted to be shared; I trust that the person who needed to hear this will understand though.

If you want to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.