Here we are, like every year, fleeing Egypt, crossing the Great Sea, and miraculously making it beyond Pharaoh’s reach! This is our Torah portion this week – B’shallach – a moment of our epic story that captures our imagination over and over.
We will be telling a bit of that story tonight. Not all of it. Not all the legends. Not the details of the smoke and fire and trembling ground. Not the 216-letter name of God that is formed from 3 verses of this story, and thus seems to be the go-to God-name to call on when you really need a sizable miracle.
But we will lean just a little more into a moment that happens later in the portion, after the crossing and after the singing, after traveling some days, struggling to find drinkable water, wondering whether leaving slavery was such a good idea after all. This is the moment when we arrive at an oasis. The place is called Elim, a rare word meaning palm trees, even though it sounds like a Hebrew word for God. Elim is described as a place with 70 palm trees and 12 springs of water.
The commentator Nachmanides, at first seeming to be a bit of a Debbie Downer, points out that 70 palm trees is not actually very much. There are valleys in the desert with 1000 palm trees and enough fresh water to keep them lush. But then he points out in the name of Rabbi Eliezer that to the Children of Israel – tired, hot and thirsty – this place was beautiful. Maybe not the most fabulous oasis in the desert, but it was enough. We know because it says vayachanu sham. “They set up camp there.” We stayed for a few days or weeks or however long. Later on in Torah, when we review all the movements of the Children of Israel through the wilderness, the memory of Elim is still vivid – the 70 palms and 12 springs are specifically mentioned, while the geographic features of other places on our 40-year journey are not.
And there is an important learning here for us. That a place of respite does not need to be the perfect place or the best place. It just needs to be enough. And the relief and rest we feel will be real.
I am feeling like we are in a kind of oasis moment right now. It is Shabbat, which is an oasis for us every week, should we choose to notice the welcome shade and luxury of its fresh streams.
For me, personally, I notice that something is shifting for me in having finished crossing the Sea of my studies to become a rabbi. Ahead is still a lifetime of learning and growing and serving. Years of struggling, trying, failing, and succeeding. But in this moment, just after being ordained, and after being outrageously celebrated, I feel like I have reached a place where I can rest for few days, a beautiful place of 70 palms and 12 springs.
Together we have made significant shared crossings. I am happy to say I have now lost count of how many members of this congregation have gotten their first COVID vaccination. And even though we still have so far to go, and we still have to keep up all our precautions, it may be years before we are all moving and gathering and hugging the way we used to – after the last 10 months of fear and grief, this is a moment to be relished. Not the Garden of Eden, but an oasis in the wilderness. Worthy of some rest and some gratitude.
And most profound for many of us is the change of leadership in this country. We went through a harrowing march to get here, full of trepidation, worry, and actual insurrection. We feared to even hope. There is so much repair work from the last four years before we can even get to the deep work of justice and planetary healing that were already awaiting us. What lies ahead is a long journey, during which we will not always agree with each other or with our leadership about the next turn in the road. Like the Children of Israel, we will periodically rediscover our discontent and we will grumble. But for now, in this moment, in this beautiful oasis of palms and springs, the mist of the water catching rainbows of light, we can pitch our tents, lifting “our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”
I am content – no, overjoyed – to camp here for a short time. To breathe the moist air and taste the sweet dates. To enjoy the sweet desserts of the last leg of struggle and to refresh myself for the next leg. I invite you to join me under the palms, toes in the stream. We have years of wilderness ahead. Let’s not pass this up.
“And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us / but what stands before us.” – Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb.