This week we read parshat Beshallach, which in our 2nd triennial year comes out to be Ex 14:15 - 16:10.

It begins with a description of the positioning of the Israelites as they escape from Egyptians and are led into a viselike dead-end with the Egyptians behind them and the sea before them. The cloud indicating God's presence takes up a position, however, that seems to shield them from the Egyptians while they figure out a way across/ through the sea. God says "why shout to me?? You speak to the Israelites and get 'em moving!"

Famously, when the Israelites finally move through the sea, the Egyptians pursue them, at which point God tells Moses to stretch forth his hand over the sea so that it would return to its normal flow, drowning the Egyptians, their chariots and their horses.  Following this rout of the enemy, Moses and Miriam lead two songs (very similar, although Moses' is quite wordy while Miriam's is accompanied by tambourines and consists of only one line) celebrating God who has saved them by tossing horse and rider into the sea.

No sooner have our heroes survived the sea than they must travel without food or water through the desert. Moses performs a miraculous water filtration system by tossing a stick into brackish water, thereby sweetening it.

Finally, God treats the Israelites to manna which, like a PDA, reminds them when shabbat is each week and teaches them to rely on and trust in God.

Lest we think that the crossing of the Red Sea is just some sort of everyday phenomenon, the Torah goes out of its way to describe an impossible situation:

The angel of God leading the Israelites stood behind them ... there was the cloud and the darkness, and it illuminated the night ... he made the sea dry and the water became a valley... and the Israelites walked in the sea on dry land.

The description beggars the imagination: Leading from behind, darkness that lights the night, a dry sea and a watery canyon. It is not that any if these things is impossible to accomplish, but rather that the piling
up of impossibility upon improbability leads us to think not only in a linear fashion, but at the simultaneous negation of reality that suggests that what was happening was not just miraculous, but that the membranes between dimensions were being pierced and the truly weird was released into the world.

All these impossibilities, after all, are suggestive of a shift in perception: the canyons below the waters' surface are no less canyons because they are submerged. You see, I've been through the desert on a
Horse with no Name, it felt good to be out of the rain. The miraculous may consist, in this case, of understanding how something behind you can lead you forward, how the sea floor might look without the water, how darkness or even blindness might be illuminating.

We might understand these images as koans, little logical word puzzles that point out the profound absurdity that we are expected to day in and day out. Or they might be so shocking in their impropriety that we are forced to step outside our normal perceptual constructs and apprehend anew the raw sensory data that doesn't "behave" the way we think it ought to. Into such a realm of newly constructed reality, why can't there be a way of understanding that "the sea" hasn't changed from one moment to the next, but rather both situations are always extant: dry and wet, light and dark, salvation and captivity. 
Freedom and escape from a box canyon are dependent as much on a trust in the saving power of looking at the situation as NOT HOPELESS.

Have we learned this lesson?

Do we need it?

In this time of intractable problems starting with houses disappearing and banks not banking, perhaps we need the hope of the impossible more than ever!

Shabbat Shalom
R' David Bockman