Reflections on Being ‘In Between’

The seder nights with which Pesach (Passover) starts commemorate an ancestral exodus from slavery: the Biblical saga tells of oppression, a hard-hearted Pharaoh and a series of plagues that strike the Egyptians but miraculously spare the Hebrew people. The end of the seven day festival focuses on the drama at the Sea of Reeds, with the hosts of Pharoah’s armies pursuing the Israelites and the people having to trust that the way to freedom lay through the waters.

Between the oppression of Egypt and thoughts of drowning in the sea, the narrative sets up a scene crafted with much literary skill. The waters open up – but only by dint of what the text describes (from the participants’ point of view) as a “strong east wind” and the omniscient narrator’s point of view as “caused by Adonai, the Eternal One” at the behest of Moses, whose role – “stretching out his hand” – is also seen to be a vital element (Exodus 14:21). The natural event is the vehicle for the miraculous. A strip of dry land appears, a very narrow ridge of dry land – but for how long would it last?  And who would venture in when all was so uncertain?

The middle days of this festival – the in-between days – set us up as inheritors of the textual drama. Those that left Egypt were ‘in-betweeners’ too. They were in between slavery and death, between slavery and the desert, between slavery and the possibility of a new kind of life. But first they had to go in between the walls of water. The story dramatizes in-between-ness.

And for Jews following the traditions of old, this in-between-ness sees us between the beginning of Pesach and its end, between that renewed experience of the taste of the matza with all its associated memories of seders of the past, and matza of the past – in between the experience of that, and the waiting for the festival to be over. I mean how much matza can you eat? Don’t you get fed up with it quite soon and long for the taste of a good bit of sourdough, or a bagel, or just a Pret a Manger sandwich (other makes of sandwiches are also available)?

Like the children of Israel we are also in between - when the appreciation of the tastes of the seder and what they represent gives way to the feeling of deprivation, when we begin to have a heightened awareness that part of the way we celebrate this journey from slavery to freedom includes relinquishing the pleasures of the foods we normally eat. It is not exactly oppression, but we are still choosing to be bound up with servitude to an idea, a tradition.

Why is this notion of being in-between resonating for me this year? Maybe because I sense that this year we are also in-between in other more intangible or hard to articulate ways.

There can’t have been many sederim this year when the historical moment we find ourselves in wasn’t present, perhaps very present. And it is a moment when I would suggest this experience of being ‘in-between’ may have been very emotionally demanding. Emotionally and spiritually challenging.

Because, most obviously, we are living In between a profound concern for the citizens of Israel, with sons and daughters at war, with hostages still unredeemed,  with the traumas of the last six months tearing at the heart - in between those feelings of identification (and even if you don’t have family there or friends, your Jewish heart might beat in time with the hearts of those going through this tragedy) – so, many have told me of feeling in between those feelings, and other feelings about what has been happening in Gaza: other sons and daughters lost, other children killed, and not just firstborns, feelings that the Jewish heart might also respond to about the victims of famine and displacement and loss of homes and fear for one’s survival every moment of the day. If Pesach teaches anything it teaches us sensitivity towards all those who experience oppression, ‘because you were subject to oppression in Egypt’.

So this is also an experience, a painful existential experience, of being in-between : of being pulled by a concern for the Jewish people who have chosen a homeland as a solution to the so-called ‘Jewish problem’  - and a concern for the cost of this for other people, citizens of Gaza, and for those terrorized, killed, displaced, in the West Bank by Jewish vigilantes. This is a concern that one might also have been sensitive to for decades, a concern about the lack of justice that has been ongoing for 75 years or so. We are pulled in between contrasting, conflicting realities. Between ethnic identification and concern and compassion - and a larger human connectedness and concern and compassion.

And here in London, we might also be in an additional and strange psychological state of in betweenness. On one level we just get on with our lives, our own important and mundane everyday living – family, community, friends, holidays, shopping, work, studying, dealing with illnesses and losses, celebrating the good stuff, having to manage the difficult stuff, all the stuff of everyday life. We live between that and something else that over this last 6 months or so has threatened to destabilise our everyday lives: an awareness of antisemitism, both real and imagined, both anecdotal and exaggerated, both experienced and feared. We have been living between getting on with our lives and an awareness that something intimidating is happening around us, and not only here in the UK, but around the world.

We might be feeling our own feet are, amazingly, on dry land, but out of the corner of our eyes we might also glimpse (or wonder if we see, maybe it is all a mirage) the walls of water that could come crashing down on us at any moment. Though miraculously they don’t.

And being in between means the Egyptian armies haven’t caught up with us, but when we turn back towards where we have come from we glimpse those who seek our harm. Or we think we do - because the antagonists we fear in the present are always overlaid in our mind’s eye by the antagonists of the past, who are always behind us, so to speak, pursuing us. Traumas of the past will always effect, distort, what we see in the present. It’s a problem. How does one learn to see clearly what is going on? Or is that a fantasy - a wished for state of clear-sightedness?

So we are always in between – between Egypt and the wilderness ahead; between the pursuers who seek our harm and the freedom to live without fear; between the giant waves that could drown us - no longer only a long-rehearsed metaphor from an ancient saga - and the powerful natural forces flowing through the world that sustain us. We are always in between.

‘Leaving Egypt’ is a powerful image, metaphor. The story of the Jewish  people, whether you read it as history, or literary saga, folk memory or myth, the story we have inherited uses Egypt as the symbol of oppression, of narrowness. I imagine you know that the root meaning of Mitzrayim in Hebrew is tzr – narrow, constrained. It is as if the Biblical writers were already inviting us to be midrashists, to relate imaginatively to their language, to hear that the question of the liberation from Egypt is not just  a national saga, but a personal one.

We know this story is not just about our forerunners, the Israelites, but a saga relevant to all oppressed people – in the 19^th century and into the 20^th it inspired generations of African-Americans (we listened to Paul Robeson’s ‘Go Down Moses’ at our seder); it fed into 1960s and 1970s Catholic liberation theology in South America, and was used in the Protestant churches leading up to 1989 and the resistance to communist oppression in Europe. Yes, it has been part of many strands of collective history, Jewish and non-Jewish. But its potency also resides in the way that it talks to each individual about personal liberation.

 ‘Egypt’ is what keeps us narrowed down in our life, it’s about old habits, destructive guilt, small-minded thinking, false certainties we use to mange our helplessness, fears from the past that constrain our choices in the present, all the ways we stop ourselves having more life-enhancing, fulfilling, generous lives, more loving lives. So ‘to come out of Egypt’ is to come out of whatever confines me, traps me, shuts me in. Pesach also speaks about a personal, existential drama, psychological, spiritual. We long to be freer, but we oppress ourselves. There’s a Pharaoh within everyone, who won’t let us go, won’t let us live a fuller life.

And it is a struggle to leave Egypt. We are always caught in between: in between a wish to escape the burden and inhibitions and haunted memories of the past - and the regressive urge in the human psyche to stay in Egypt, because it is safe and familiar, it is the womb, it is home, it is a place of psychic retreat. We want to leave Egypt – and we don’t.

The Biblical text acknowledges this when the children of Israel, even before they have reached the Reed Sea, see the pursuing Egyptians and cry out to Moses: ‘why have you done this to us? Didn’t we already tell you, leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians, better that than to die here in the wilderness’  (Exodus 14: 11-12). There it is, incarnated within the saga, the wish to get back to something familiar, to stick with what we are used to, however much it diminishes our potential  rather than face the daunting challenges of opening ourselves towards the unknown future.

Maybe that casts light on a strange midrash I came across recently:

‘Only one out of five of the children of Israel went out from Egypt. Some say one out of fifty. And some say only one out of five hundred. Rabbi Nehorai says: Not even one out of five hundred’ (Mechilta, Massekta de Piska 12).

It is as if the rabbis of old already intuited that within their ancestral story there was a recognition of just how difficult it is to leave the familiarity of what is known, safe and secure – even when what is known safe and secure is oppressive and constricting. Maybe leaving Egypt is only for the bravehearted, or the reckless, for the visionaries or for those who have got nothing left to lose. Would we have left Egypt? Can we leave it now?

You need a special kind of energy to keep going, to break through the waters in that symbolic birth into the new, the unexplored, the uncharted daunting territory ahead.  And you need a special kind of energy to keep going in this in-between place we find ourselves in today, in all the ways I have been outlining.

Do we ever leave Egypt? Maybe not.

Even if we have left Egypt, do we have the courage, the resources, the faith, to take the first step into the sea, which has not yet opened up a way through it. Again, the rabbis intuited that being ‘in between’ is a place where we can end up stranded, frozen by fear.

They created the midrash about the children of Israel standing at the edge of the sea, each person rooted to the spot saying ‘I won’t be the first one to go into the water’ and it wasn’t until Nachshon ben Aminadav stepped in to the sea that it began to part for the people.  And actually, continues the midrash, they had to wade in up to their noses before the sea became dry land (Sotah, 37a).

That took faith, that took a capacity for risk taking, that took bravery, which often looks like foolhardiness.

I sometimes think the Jewish people now have lost that faith, and particularly they have lost leaders with the courage to make that move – too much oppression, too much trauma in the soul, too much frozen fear, too much looking backwards.

The State of Israel needs new leadership, self-evidently – preferably with some form of Jewish moral compass; and the Jewish people need leaders with the courage to be guided by the ancestral vision that the community of Israel has a destiny (as Isaiah puts it in a passage we read on Pesach) of living where “Nothing evil or vile will be done/ for the land shall be filled with devotion to Adonai, the Eternal One of Justice, as waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)

In these in between days – when we are far from the enactment of that vision – we still have to keep it in mind. That’s the goal, that’s the aim, beyond Egypt, beyond the wilderness, the creation of a space where the values of justice and compassion flood the land. Unless we keep this vision alive, unless we keep telling our story this way, unless we keep faith with the humanistic and universal wisdom of our tradition, we will remain in Egypt, suffering from what the text describes the children of Israel suffering:  ‘kotzer ruach’ (Exodus 6:9) – “anguish of spirit”.

Leaving Egypt means following the vision, leaving behind that ‘kotzer ruach’ - ‘shortness of breath’ and ‘narrowness of spirit’ - that we have been living with all these months. Only that vision will redeem us, only that vision will take us out of our narrowness, through our Sea of Reeds, through our fears and doubts and stiff-neckedness, through the wilderness. The destination is not in our hands – but, meanwhile, we can make this journey together, supporting ourselves, in the knowledge (as Rebbe Franz of Prague once said) “that it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 27^th, 2024]