Parshat Beshalach 5767

Samuel Butler once said that, “You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.” Judaism is many different things, but first and foremost, it is a faith. And yet, if there is one aspect of Judaism with which we wrestle, it is what it means to believe in God in this complex age of our and how we go about gaining faith in the face of so many obstacles.

One could argue that today’s Torah portion, B’shallach, represents the genesis of faith in Judaism. It is in this Parshah that we are told that the people of Israel ‘believed in the Lord and in Moses his servant’ for the first time.’ Standing on the shore of the Red Sea the presence of God was as clear to the people as the giant waves that came crashing down upon the Egyptian army. The Torah goes on to say, “Thus the Lord delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea. And when Israel saw the mighty hand of the Lord which God had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord; they had faith in the Lord and in his servant Moses.”

I’d like to suggest, this morning, that these verses teach us a very important lesson about the nature of faith. They suggest that it was more than just a miracle that convinced the people of Israel to believe in God on that fateful day. It was something deeper and more personal.

If we look at these key verses in today’s Torah portion we will find something very interesting. First we note that the word, “vayar,” “they saw” appears twice in just a few lines. We are told that Israel saw ‘the Egyptians dead on the shore of the Red Sea.’ And then, the Torah says that Israelites saw, ‘the mighty hand of the Lord,” or as it is translated in the Etz Hayim Chumash, “the wondrous power which the Lord wielded.”

There are two questions we can ask about this passage. First, why was it necessary for the Torah to tell us that “they saw” something twice? Wasn’t what they saw really the same thing – the dead Egyptians were a product of the mighty hand of God? And second, shouldn’t the order of these two expressions have been the other way around? First the people of Israel witnessed the mighty hand of the Lord at the Red Sea and then they saw the dead Egyptians on the shore?

I believe we can learn an important lesson from these verses about the nature of faith. Faith is not a product of what we see in our daily lives but how we choose to perceive what we see. First we see things; then we make a judgment about what it is that we see. What we see can be judged or explained in many different ways. It can be explained through the tools of science. It can be judged as an economic opportunity or liability. It can be seen as an opportunity for recreation or possibility something we can abuse. We can choose to simply ignore what we see. Or we can view the world through the prism of faith. Faith is a way of framing the things we experience and see in our daily lives. It is a choice we make. It is not something we see with our eyes, but something we perceive with our hearts and in our mind’s eye.

We understand faith very much in the same way that we think about love in our lives. We like to think that people just fall in love, as if we have no control over love – it simply happens to us. Maybe that is true sometimes but most of the time it is not. I would suggest that one does not simply fall in love any more than one witnesses a miracle. One must be open to the possibility of love, and one must also make oneself worthy of love. Similarly, we don’t simply witness miracles; they don’t just happen. Rather, events take place all the time all around us that might be miracles. But if we are not prepared to witness them and if we have not spiritually open to them then we will not to perceive them and identify them as miracles.

Maybe that is why we place so much emphasis upon prayer in Judaism. As Jews we are supposed to pray all the time: not just three times a day but every time we eat a piece of bread, or see a rainbow or wash our hands or go to the bathroom. The most mundane experience is an opportunity to offer words of prayer and thanksgiving, or to express wonder about the world around us. The truth is God does not need our prayers as much as we need them. Prayer opens our eyes to what is present all around us. It is the second way of ‘seeing’ what may not have been apparent to us when we first perceived the world. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that, "Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living." But I would suggest something different: prayer opens our eyes to the inconceivable surprise of living. First we see the world, and then, when we live a prayerful life, we come to see “the mighty hand of the Lord” in everything we do.

This does not answer the hard questions about life and God’s presence in the world. There are so many ‘why’s’ are unanswered. What right do we have to perceive God in the blessings and goodness of life when there is so much suffering and sorrow all around us? In prayer we not only perceive God; we also wrestle with God as well just as our forefather Jacob did.

At the end of the day there are so many blessings all around us. There is the miracle of a tree whose blossom comes with the spring, the laughter of a child, the first steps we take each morning and even the sound of our own breath. Maybe faith is a kind of optimism that in the face of suffering we still understand that there are far more blessings than curses in this world of ours.

In the end it is a choice that we make. It is how we see what we see. We do not fall into faith any more than we accidentally fall in love. We embrace it.

Shabbat Shalom