Ge’ulah/Redemption

After more than two hundred fifty years, the Israelites in Egypt believed that their slavery would continue forever.  Even after the plagues forced Pharoah to relent, just one week later the terrified runaways found themselves trapped between the Egyptian chariots and the impassable sea. The Exodus was simply reaching its most likely conclusion.  Previous escapes had been attempted, and had all ended in failure.  

            Then at the sea, something new happened; the sea parted and the door opened to freedom.

            The redemption prayer brings us daily to the miraculous opening at the sea.  We become our Israelite ancestors, stepping forward and singing mi chamocha, the new song which burst forth in that moment of terror and jubilation.  The God of Exodus throws open the door of the Red Sea for every human being trapped in desperate straits.  The secret which we conceal from each other but which this prayer seeks to expose, is that each one of us finds ourself standing trapped at the sea, with the pounding of horse hooves behind us.  The terror behind us has a face and a personality, unique to each of the six billion human souls on earth.  Sadness. Addiction.  Envy.  Hunger.  Anger.  Illness.  Loneliness.  Shame.  Grief. Poverty.  Violence.  Each of us is pursued by enemies, both real and imagined.  And the sea is the unknown, inscrutable and impassable, stretched out forbidding before us. 

            And yet:  "Our souls are like a bird escaped from the fowlers' snare.  The snare has broken and we are escaped."  (Psalm 124)  How the opening occurs is not explained.  We are redeemed one by one and we are redeemed all together.  God is redeemer; but we must redeem ourselves and each other.  The opening comes when least expected.  It may not even look like an opening.  One legend has it that the sea did not part until the Israelites walked in up to their nostrils.  Redemption comes at the last possible moment.  We bring it about through our own efforts but it comes upon us by surprise and beyond our control.

            Then, after the sea has come crashing closed behind us and we have sung our song of triumph and thanksgiving, we find ourselves facing a vast and uncharted wilderness, stripped of knowledge and bereft of all the certainties which lie now out of reach, in our suddenly surprisingly longed-for past.