In the previous Raspberry Patch post, “The Phenomenology Factor,” I alluded to what I implied was an too-clean artificial separation between science and religion, more specifically between theology and philosophy. This was not the main point of what for many may have been a challenging post, but only a sidebar flowing through the essay that a careful reader would have been hard put to miss. I did that purposely to set up this present post, which flips the previous one: Whereas in “The Phenomenology Factor” philosophy and its implications for social science epistemology stood at center stage, and references to religious thought fulfilled a supporting role, here we have below to all appearances an exercise in the exegesis of scripture common to faith communities the world over, but its conclusion arcs wide enough to qualify as philosophical expression.
Before we get down to textual nitty-gritty, it’s worth a moment to briefly parse the relationship between theology and philosophy as it has marched along over time. No mystery shrouds the reasons that many theologians and philosophers have often seemed to want nothing to do with one another. The faithful have worried that philosophers might aim difficult questions at them, even looking to interrogate the core premises on which the edifice of their beliefs depended. Rationalism can hector faith but faith cannot respond in kind—not a fair fight, so theologians have tended to duck out of it. And so the otherwise cryptic remark of the early church father Tertulian, “Credo quia absurdum” (“I believe it because it is absurd.”), meaning that what I intuit to be true I cannot explain or prove in natural, rational terms. Philosophers, meanwhile, have worried that since religious premises compose a diverse and often conflictual set of faith-based precepts, taking any such premises on board, even as hypotheticals, would make standard pretensions to the universal validity of their thought impossible to sustain.
As the European Age of Religion moved toward its Age of Reason, so-called, roughly from the High Medieval to the early modern period during the 14th to the 17th centuries, these concerns made obvious practical sense on both sides. Still, cases of religious sensibilities stimulating philosophical exertions are easy to find. Immanuel Kant, for example, came from a Pietist Lutheran family in still early Reformation times, and the key question that burned in his soul seems to have been how to justify the existence of non-relative moral truth without relying on a belief in any particular revelation from God. Kant’s deontological system of ethics, composed of his famous categorical imperatives, issued from this problem and the demand he put on himself to somehow transform an inherited extrinsic source of moral authority into an intrinsic one.
My own view is that Kant did not ultimately succeed in achieving this, but by giving it his all the light he shed on many key philosophical issues still deserves our admiration and gratitude today. Some kids wish for a bike and thirty years later end up with a Porsche. Some kids have all the luck. Kant didn’t publish his first book until he was 55 years old; some kids earn their luck.
Just as clear, well before Kant religious thinkers and movements with a wider than usual intellectual and emotional aperture dotted the planet. In the Abrahamic world alone, Augustine and Aquinas differed over the compatibility of faith and reason--Scholasticism never sat all that comfortably with solo fide. Ibn Rushd (Averroes to Latin readers) and al-Ghazali just couldn’t agree about this either in the 11-12th-century Muslim world of the Near East and North Africa, and after the Mongol devastation of Abbasid Baghdad in 1258 Ibn-Tamiyah moved the needle so far from Ibn Rushd’s thinking that the influence of the early Mutazila rationalists all but vanished from the scene. Meanwhile, around the same time, in Fez and later Cairo, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon--the Rambam…. Maimonides to Latin readers—embraced the embrace of reason and faith in his Guide for the Perplexed (circa 1190) and other writings, and some unappreciative rabbis in Europe responded by burning his books.
In the Zohar, the main Jewish book of mysticism rather imprecisely translated into English as The Book of Splendor, it is written that, “God conceals himself from the mind of man, but reveals himself to the heart.” William James, about whom we read in passing in “The Phenomenology Factor,” would probably have agreed. But the language of any revelation to the heart cannot be contained in the language we typically use to plumb the mind. So with the presumed consent of Aquinas, Ibn Rushd, and the Rambam, we will just have to do the best we can with standard and inevitably linear English.
You are about to learn of the Torah’s first recursive hint of its own existence. (It is found in the portion of the Torah that will be read this coming Sabbath, January 27 in the secular calendar, and that accounts for this post’s timing.) This hint has been hiding in plain sight since around 400-440 BCE, when the text of what we call in English The Five Books of Moses was canonized. In plain sight, yes, but in an unusually sneaky place.
To prepare for what follows, you would be aided by opening a Bible to Exodus 15: 22-27 and reading these six verses, which will take you all of about two minutes. (You may have noticed that the New York Times online now tells readers in small headlines above the main ones how long a given story will take to read. This is regrettable, reflecting as it does some unfortunate trends in American culture—the defenestration of patience and focus, for example—but who am I to stand athwart?)
It would also be useful to review what happened just before and just after these verses as well, if you’re not already familiar with the basic flow of the story. This is because what follows makes use of hermeneutical method in order to deliver a homiletic message. It will therefore encompass a swath of text for purposes of contexting and comparing language. It would also be best to have an original Hebrew text to hand, for those able to read it; but King James’s English will work well enough for the purpose to hand.
The incident reported in our six verses goes under the general heading of the incident at a place called Marah. The verses taken together appear to be a brief transitional section of text, a kind of bridge, to get the narrative from the first to the second of the two most epochal experiences in Jewish history: from the exodus from Egypt to the revelation at Sinai. Compared to Shirat Hayam—the Song of the Sea—which comes immediately before, the text seems bland, but compared to Shirat Hayam almost any text will seem bland. Compared to the events surrounding the coming revelation, too, the Marah text is decidedly lackluster.
Now, these six verses at the end of chapter 15 are only the beginning of the bridge leading to Sinai. In chapter 16 the people grumble again, this time because of hunger, and the story of the manna is unfolded. In chapter 17 we have at Rephidim a kind of repeat of Marah: a grumbling because of a lack of water. On this occasion HQBH (short for Haqadosh barukh hu, meaning The Holy One, blessed be He[1]) tells Moshe (Moses) to strike a rock to bring forth water; he does and it does. Then comes the incident with Amalek; then, in chapter 18, Moshe’s father-in-law Yitro (Jethro) appears stage left with advice about organizing courts for Moshe and, finally, in chapter 19 we have the preparations for the Revelation in chapter 20. Bridge complete.
But the six verses at the end of chapter 15 constitute a spectacular but underappreciated revelation of their own, and perhaps bear a profound lesson. As the Israelites carefully and deliberately approached Sinai, let us approach this lesson the same way: It’s good for the drama.
The first observation to make about these six verses is that the passage, taken together, is confusing because it mixes and matches several disparate topics: the lack of water for three days in the wilderness of Shur and the removal to Marah; the people’s complaint about the water’s bitterness and HQBH showing Moshe a tree, which he throws into the water to sweeten it; the sudden mention of statute and judgment, and a test; then a promise Moshe makes to the people that harkening to HQBH will protect Israel from the suffering and diseases of Egypt; and then a description of moving on to the Elim oasis and what the people found there. These six verses seem to contain at least three non-sequiturs, including one or two in the middle of a single verse![2]
Most traditional exegesis on these verses focuses on the mention of statute and judgment (hok u’mishpat). Some sages think that only a few commandments (mitzvoth) were given at Marah, while others reason that much of the Torah was revealed there, before Sinai, only not the details. The 11th-century commentator Rashi, taking his cue from an interesting but inconclusive discussion found in Sanhedrin 56b, says that the laws of Shabbat, the red heifer, and the civil injunctions were given, and his reasoning is persuasive. Before the Revelation we see the introduction of Shabbat with respect to the collection of the manna; the invocation of a hok leads Rashi to point to the quintessential example, the red heifer; and the fact that Yitro gives Moshe advice about how to deal with civil proceedings presupposes the existence of at least some of those laws, for what else could Moshe have been adjudicating?
Several commentators say that the sin of Marah—the grumbling—occurred because, busy with their booty on the other side of the Red Sea, the children of Israel had neglected Torah study. This is one of many comments that ignores the plain meaning of the text (called the pshat) by ignoring the sequence that is history itself: One obviously cannot neglect the study of something that has not yet been given or made known. (Now, it is a traditional rabbinic principle of exegesis that there is no before and after in Torah, but as a Litvak by origin this principle has always bothered me as an insult to logic.) Much commentary, too, notes that Torah is often analogized to water--but this misses the real analogical point in these verses by a country mile, as we shall soon see.
The assumption that the people misbehaved, if not sinned, at Marah is almost universal in the commentary. A few admit that thirst was good reason for complaining, but argue that the people went about it in the wrong way. The text itself says nothing explicit about the people having sinned, but most commentary counts the incident at Marah as one of the ten times, mentioned in Numbers 14: 22, that the people tried the patience of HQBH in the wilderness.[3] Yet if one compares the text here with similar incidents of grumbling about thirst and hunger after it, one is struck by the mildness of the language.
At Marah the verb is “to complain” (“vayilonu”, y-l-n), but later at Rephidim the verb is “to argue against [vayarev, r-y-v).” At Marah the noun used is just “the people” without identifying which or how many people. In future incidents it is usually “all the people of Israel” or a slight variation thereof, and the explicit plaint that it would have been better to remain or die in Egypt is raised—which is not raised at Marah. And in future incidents Moshe complains to HQBH about what a burden these people are, but he does not do so at Marah. So as common as it has been over the centuries to lump what happened at Marah with the future incidents of thirst- and hunger-related strife, doing so obscures certain pertinent differences.
One commentator points out that Moshe’s sweetening the water contrasts suggestively with the first plague where, through Moshe’s action, drinkable water becomes undrinkable blood (to all but Egyptian vampires). The transitive, “toggle-switch” nature of Moshe’s actions parallels the transitive characteristic of the ashes of the red heifer, and so echoes with Rashi’s suggestion that this was the hok revealed at Marah. Beyond these themes, the commentary from the classical sources, though ample, does not venture much afar. Presumptuous as it may seem to suggest it, perhaps the sages missed something? Let’s see how that might be.
If one were looking at these six verses from a logical, ground-level point of view, a series of obvious questions would arise. Warning: I will now generate these questions for you but I will not answer many of them directly because a logically mundane set of circumstances is not, I think, what these verses are really about. But we need to pass through this question-generating process in order to transcend it.
The text begins by saying that the people had no water for three days in the wilderness of Shur and then came to Marah. But the text states that Marah was a place known for its bitter water. Could this mean that Moshe led them there after three days of thirst despite knowing they would not be able to drink the water? Or does it mean that the people only learned of the place and its name after the experience there? Or, as the 12th-century exegete and grammarian Avraham Ibn Ezra understood it, it could mean that the place took its name on account of what happened there. The matter is ambiguous.
While the text speaks of the people being thirsty at Marah it mentions not their being hungry—although in the next chapter, at Meribah, it does. That is when the manna starts, introduced by an intriguing one-verse appetizer of quail. Why was there a water problem at Marah but not a food problem? Had they carried victuals from Egypt, that famous matza that had too little time to rise, but not water, which was too heavy to carry? If they had their flocks and animals with them, as the text tells us they did and as Cecil B. De Mille showed us so graphically, perhaps they ate of those animals? But if they had those animals, could they not have gotten milk to drink from them? In short, by what logic exactly were the people thirsty?
The next verse, verse 25, is the most enigmatic of the six, for it consists of three seemingly unrelated parts. To start, the verse says that Moshe “cried out” to HQBH. What does that mean, and not mean?
The text does not say that Moshe was angry at the people for complaining, as he is clearly angry with them later on when the people complain about a lack of water or food. Moshe presumably understands that people need water, and that the bitter waters of Marah spite or taunt them. Of course, if one backreads future incidents of thirsty or hungry people irritating Moshe, one might suppose that he was angry with them, but there’s a problem with that way of interpretation.
What problem? That assumption contrasts sharply with Moshe’s recent demeanor on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea. With the Egyptian army bearing down on the people, their backs to the sea, Moshe is confident and calm, telling the people not to fear, for the Lord will fight for them (Exodus 14:13-14). HQBH interrupts him, however, and says: “Why do you cry out to me, go forward.” In other words, shut up and get moving. This seems a bit unfair, for Moshe was addressing the people to reassure them; he wasn’t speaking just to hear the sound of his own voice. But sometimes talk is no substitute for deeds, and this was one of those times. The point here us that the identical language is used on both sides of the Red Sea: Moshe “cries out” to HQBH as the Egyptian chariots approach, and he does it again at Marah. This strongly suggests that at Marah, as before at the Red Sea, Moshe cries out not because he is angry but because he knows that HQBH[4] will come through to save the situation. He is simply repeating the point to remind everyone of how frightened they felt on the wrong side of the sea and of how HQBH delivered them, a mere 3-4 days before. By so doing, too, he reveals that HQBH can control nature as well as defeat rampaging armies—a teaching moment like few others we may imagine.
And that is exactly what HQBH does at Marah as verse 25 continues: “And HQBH showed him a tree, and he [Moshe] threw [it] into the water, and the waters were sweetened. . .” Here again the text is sparse and hence vague. Was this tree rooted into the ground? (Some translations render “aitz” as “a piece of wood”, implying that it was just lying there—but “piece of wood” is a poor translation for “aitz.”[5]) And why a tree? A rock worked well enough shortly thereafter at Rephidim. Were there no rocks lying around at Marah that Moshe could have hit? If you’ve ever walked around in or driven through the Sinai Peninsula you know how wildly unlikely a rock-free landscape is.
What kind of tree grows around a pool of bitter water anyway? Some commentary claims that the tree was also bitter, but it sweetened the water nevertheless—a kind of double miracle, says Midrash Tanhuma—mirroring once again the transitive quality of the ashes of the red heifer. If the tree was rooted into the ground, Moshe would have had to cut or push it down first in order to throw it into the water. But the text mentions nothing of the sort; Moshe just somehow knows what to do. (Now Hagar, in a similar situation of thirst back in Genesis, is shown a well, and with a thirsty child under a nearby bush she knows what to do with a well…. So the Torah text is quite capable of succinctly describing cases of clear inferential reasoning, but here it does not do so.)
There is also something a bit odd about the Hebrew in this passage. The text reads in transliteration, “vayashlekh al hamayim.” But the verb “to throw” is a transitive verb and so it needs an object. The verse should have said “vayashlekh et ha-aitz al-hamayim” or “vayashlikhuhu al-hamayim”—“he threw the tree into the water” or “he threw it into the water.” It doesn’t. The text does not even say that after the waters are sweetened the people proceed to drink and cease their complaining. In all the other incidents ahead in the text, in Exodus and in Numbers, this is made explicit. Why is it left unsaid here?
The verse then immediately launches into its third part, in what seems to be a total non sequitur: “There He put to it statute and judgment and there He tested it”—“it” generally understood to refer to the nation, not to Moshe, though it is ambiguous. What does a tree that sweetens bitter water have to do with statute and judgment, and what test is being spoken of?
If that juxtaposition were not cryptic enough, the next verse, instead of describing the people drinking the water as one might have expected, has Moshe imploring the people to observe HQBH’s commandments (most of which, presumably, they have not yet received) and promising that, if they do this, they will be spared the sicknesses of Egypt, none of which Moshe specifies?
Which sicknesses? Some of the plagues might qualify as sicknesses—boils and lice, perhaps. But it seems peculiar at first blush that observing HQBH’s commandments should be explained and justified on this basis alone. After all, elsewhere in the Torah far more inclusive and abstract reasons are given for why Israel should observe the mitzvot. This passage gives Moshe the opportunity to say in HQBH’s name that He is “the Lord thy healer”—a metaphor repeated and expanded upon in Jeremiah (17:14), from whence a standard paragraph in the daily amidah (silent devotion, said standing). But how does the healing metaphor fit into the context at hand?
The rest of chapter 15, in verse 27, says that from Marah the children of Israel journeyed to Elim, with its twelve springs of water and seventy date palms, where they “encamped on the water.” Rashi wrote that the twelve springs refer to the twelve tribes, and the seventy date palms to the seventy elders of Israel.
Finally and generally in our question-generating mode, why this convolution of topics in a mere six-verse passage? And why, at such a dramatic moment, after leaving Egypt and slavery behind in such spectacular fashion, is the text so diffuse, disjointed, sparse, and seemingly unresponsive to the great moment of history amid which it dwells?
The text is not unresponsive to the moment, but it is subtle. Let us think about these six verses at a different level of meaning.
Why does HQBH lead the people to Marah at a time of such great novelty and uncertainty, and at a time of distress given the water situation? Not just to show that life after slavery can also be bitter, but to show that HQBH is about to teach these former slaves an indispensible lesson—so read not Marah, a place, but moreh, a teacher.[6]
A lesson about what? What would we expect the people to wish to know immediately upon leaving Egypt and slavery behind? What must their confusion have been, having just witnessed the most direct and miraculous divine intervention in human history, climaxing at the Red Sea, to be followed by three days of thirsty desert normality, without a miracle in sight? Whatever its depredations, there is a certain stability and predictability in servitude. There were the fleshpots; people were fed. Their decisions were few to make; not much changed from day to day. Now, suddenly, they confronted freedom in a strange land, the process of getting from one circumstance to the other suffused with the most astonishing events.
Their first question might therefore well have been: What is the nature of our new reality? Will our world outside Egypt be suffused with the divine, as with the period of the plagues and HQBH’s deliverance at the Red Sea? Or will it be—like the past three days—just full of sand, rocks, scorpions, and thirst? Does HQBH make miracles only for slaves in Egypt, and is He perhaps not efficacious elsewhere? Hardly anyone in those days conceived of a universal First-Mover, after all, one who was truly Lord of the universe, only a god who was locally potent.
Or, as Shimshon Refael Hirsch (1808-1888) observed, the people might have thought that HQBH is concerned only with the great patterns of history, caring nothing for the quotidian struggles of the common man. “What shall we drink?” is then perhaps a way of asking, “What shall we understand about the forces loose in the world? What rules of logic about life should we expect to be operating in these startlingly new circumstances?”
This is why, perhaps, Moshe “cries out”: He doesn’t know the answer. Later on, after the incident of the Golden Calf, Moshe cries out to HQBH again with the plea, “Show me your glory.” At Marah we have perhaps a rehearsal of the same question. Moshe is not angry with the people at Marah; rather, he understands their question and he, too, seeks an answer.
After all, what has HQBH thus far explicitly told Moshe that he is doing? As far as previous text tells us, and him, he knows he is HQBH’s instrument to free Israel from slavery in Egypt, he is to take them out to serve HQBH in the wilderness, and he is taking them, as HQBH told him at the burning bush, to a certain land flowing with milk and honey that we know from previous text is Canaan.
But note carefully: There is nothing so far in the text, from the first word of Genesis through Exodus chapter 15, verse 24, about the Torah—and there has been absolutely nothing to even hint about a Divine revelation to come at Sinai or anywhere else. What it actually means to “serve HQBH in the wilderness” has been nowhere yet defined in the text; to the extent that anyone thought about it, he probably assumed it meant some kind of animal sacrifice ritual, which is what nearly all groups did at that time in human history and for a good while thereafter.
It is easy to miss this point because, having read it and heard it dozens of times we know how the story proceeds and how it ends, and so we read this “as if” we already know where it leads. But we risk forfeiting precious insight when we read Torah like that. We must instead read it as if we are always reading it for the very first time, as if we don’t know what happens next.
What is HQBH’s answer to Moshe’s cry? He shows him a tree. And with what (besides “living water,” mayim hayyim) do we associate a tree, an aitz? With the Torah, of course, which is referred to, in Proverbs 3:18, as “aitz hayim lamakhazikim bah”--The Torah is “a tree of life to those who hold fast to it.” It’s what we Jews sing every time we return the Torah to the aron qodesh—the ark—after it is read. What we have here, then, is a breathtaking recursive moment, a revelation that is not lackluster in the slightest: What we have here is the Torah’s first reference to itself!
It should now be clear: The cause and nature of the people’s thirst at Marah is not literal in but symbolic. (Rider, not horse, remember from last time?) This is why nothing literal or physical need have been thrown into the water to sweeten it—why a normally transitive verb lacks an object. Because the Torah is telling us, on one level at least, that what happened at Marah is not about actual bitter water or an actual tree, but about something that cannot be described materially—that it is about the entwining of life and Torah itself. So what, then, is the answer to Moshe’s cry? That the Torah is the covenantal sweetener without which life in freedom can only be bitter. The Torah transforms the world for all those who hold fast to it, that world symbolized by the bitter waters of Marah.
That is why in the very same verse the nature of Torah is described: It is hok and mishpat. Torah consists of things we cannot use reason to understand and things we can understand, just as will be true with life in freedom after slavery in Egypt. Some things will have to do with relations between man and HQBH and others between man and his fellow man. Some things will seem suffused with holiness and the miraculous, others will seem mundane and ordinary. Put in terms of “The Phenomenology Factor,” it’s not all just straight up materialism and it’s not all just straight up idealism; it’s both, mixed together. It’s complicated, and you’ll need to work at figuring it all out.
The test spoken of, then, is to grasp that life is not all this way or all that way. It is not fatalistically tragic and it is no short hop, skip, and jump to utopia. This is in one sense a simple idea, for us. But imagine how challenging an idea it must have been for a generation of slaves now confronted with the freedom, but also the burden, of choice. The lesson of the test is a warning: Just because you are no longer slaves does not mean that life will now be as easy as it used to be hard. This is of course what the marror, the bitter herb on the Seder plate whose name is from the same root as the place name Marah, means as well: It not only reminds us of the bitterness of slavery that was our forebears’ lot in Egypt, but also warns us of the bitterness we may encounter even in freedom.
And if you pass this test—if you, the children of Israel, understand and accept the ambiguous, mixed, and muddled character of life as a free human community—then you will escape the suffering and diseases of Egypt. And here diseases refer not to the plagues that might fit the category of a sickness, but to the higher depravities of Egyptian life: the belief that Pharaoh, or any idol he orders and approves, is like HQBH, which amounts to a grossly distorted understanding of the divine; and the belief that slavery is natural, which amounts to a grossly distorted understanding of human beings. Get this straight and you as a community will be healed, you will emerge from your experience as slaves to live a much healthier spiritual life. Alas, as the incident of the Golden Calf (among others) illustrated, it took a long time for Israel to master this lesson, and arguably the effort remains incomplete.
As life must go on, on to Elim went Israel. Yes, the twelve springs of water there represented the twelve tribes, as Rashi and others postulated, but perhaps the seventy date palms stood not for the elders of Israel but for the Midrashic seventy nations of the world. What may we learn from this? That as a tree can sweeten bitter water, so the world as a whole may be sweetened by the Jewish people—if it proves true to its tree, its Torah—through its mission of spreading ethical monotheism. Not that Israel has gotten a lot of thanks for its efforts over the years, much of it spent in exile from its homeland, but is that not, in part at least, the history of much of the world since Sinai? Has not the Abrahamic revolution spread far and wide these past three or four millennia?
So of course, like individual and family life itself on the quotidian level, the larger historical existence of the Jewish people will also be mixed: positive and negative, understandable and not, clear and opaque in different ways even at the same time, bitter and sweet. So it has been, and so it remains.
“And they encamped on the water.” Not literally, of course; I’d be willing to wager that the people lacked houseboats, hovercraft, or even rubber pool rafts at Marah. But being neither as solid as earth nor as ethereal as air, water is the preeminent symbol of the in-between nature of life on earth. To “camp on the water” is to tell us that we live between heaven and earth—the ideal and the real, the symbolic and the material—but are fully part of neither. It is what we do with life in this in-between world, very real whilst attended to, that matters.
The profane Egyptians sunk beneath the waters of the Red Sea like stones; Korach and his rebel gang sunk into the earth. But the children of Israel passed through the water on dry land in order to rise up into more rarified air to accept the mission HQBH had prepared for them. The children of Israel then confronted water too bitter to drink; they were thus warned that fulfilling their mission would not be easy. But after Marah they knew that they could sweeten bitter water with the Torah that would soon in full be their possession.
It’s the same still for us today. We don’t see miracles every day in the sense that we recognize HQBH as dramatically manipulating physical nature, as did miraculously for the generation that left Egypt and came to Sinai. But HQBH’s love for Israel is expressed in countless ways that flow seamlessly into our lives thought the rustle of the wind, a bird’s song, the love within our families, the face of a child.
It’s up to each of us to learn how to camp on the water, to be well grounded in reality and yet to be elevated at the same time. This is perhaps what the incident at Marah was really about. Perhaps this is what HQBH wanted to teach that generation then, and what he has been trying to teach their descendants ever since.
Coda: By the way, speaking of Torah as a “tree of life”….. Shabbat Shira, the Sabbath of the Song (a.k.a. parshat B’shalach) always falls just before, on, or just after Tu Bishvat, the delightful minor post-Biblical holiday that celebrates the new year of the trees (rosh ha-shanah ha-eelanote)? This year it falls today, and merges into the Sabbath just at sunset tonight. Is this just a coincidence? Or is it a remez, a hint, a foreshadowing in the Torah concerning a holiday whose origins lay many centuries in the future? You decide.
To me, Shabbat Ha-Atzim—the Sabbath of the Trees—could be a fitting name for the Sabbath on which parshat B’shalach is read. I may lobby for it. If I do, I’ll use a paraphrased version of Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem, to wit:
I think that I shall never see, a Torah hint as wondrous as a tree.
Tee-hee?
[1] This is funny, tee-hee. Why? Well, when Orthodox Jews speak they typically avoid using Hebrew words to name the deity because they do not want to inadvertently violate the third commandment, not to take the name of the Lord in vain. But another reason deepens their caution: In rabbinic tradition the four-letter holy name of G-d—which literally means the eternal because it is a mash-up of the verb “to be” conjugated in the past, present, and future tenses—called the Tetragrammaton in Greek and shaym hameforash in Hebrew, is for the same reason not to be pronounced ever by ordinary people; when the Temple stood it was pronounced only by the High Priest and only on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. So it is customary to say Haqadosh barukh hu, meaning The Holy One, blessed be He, whenever one wishes to refer to the deity. This is funny because my use of HQBH is a four-letter acronym but one that is impossible anyway to pronounce because it has no vowels. Tee-hee, see? Note the use of “G-d” just above in this note. Some Jews are so careful about not violating the third commandment that just as a reminder of how important it is they won’t even spell out G-o-d in English—hence G-d. Similarly, some Orthodox Jews in France write “D-eu,” and so forth.
[2] The division of the text into discrete verses is not a feature of the original text, but was added later. Ignore this fact, please, as we are lounge for the moment in the midrashic tense.
[3] Here is the traditional list: (1) (Ex 14:11-12) accusing God of tricking them, leading them into a trap at the Red Sea so the Egyptians could kill them; (2) (Ex 15:23-26) murmuring at Marah for water; (3) (Ex 16:1-18) murmuring for flesh and bread before Sinai; (4) (Ex 16:19-22) leaving manna until morning against God's instructions; (5) (Ex 17:1-7) murmuring at Rephidim for water; (6) (Ex 32) made golden calf; (7) (Num 11:1-3) murmuring at Taberah; (8) (Num 11:4-35) murmuring for flesh to eat; (9) (Num 13:1-25 and Deut 1:20-25) not believing God by asking that spies be sent into the land, and not taking God at His word; and (10) (Num 13:26-14:37 and Deut 1:26-46), rebellion at Kadesh.
[4] All references to HQBH in the text here are to the Tetragrammaton. Other ways of naming the deity exist in the Hebrew Bible, but here only this one is used.
[5] The 1962 Jewish Publication Society translation does this; worse, it inexplicably breaks verse 25 into pieces, even starting a new paragraph between the second and third parts of the verse.
[6] The sages loved word play, and because Hebrew is a consonantal language the same consonants can be playfully mispronounced to make a homiletic point. Another well-know examples is not to call your children “children” but “builders,” not “banim” but “bonim.” Arabic is also a consonantal language and Muslim exegetes have had fun doing similar things.