The Cry in the Night
Friday night, January 19, 2024
Our Jewish tradition contains infinite tenderness, beauty, and grace. The Divine Presence that enters our homes and our synagogue at sundown on Shabbat. The enfolding love of a Yiddish lullaby. The dove returning to Noah, with the olive leaf in its beak. Magical folk tales from Yemen, and Persia, and Poland and Morocco. Small children licking Hebrew letters written in honey, so that the words of Torah would be sweet in their mouth. The erotic love poetry of Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. The vast ocean of the Talmud and the fiery mysteries of the Kabbalah. Infinite beauty, infinite grace, infinite love.
And there is also in our memory deep trauma, profound suffering. The burning of Jerusalem. Children torn from their parents’ arms during long nights of terror. Cossacks, Crusaders, Nazis, and now Hamas, murdering, raping, torturing Jewish women, Jewish elderly, Jewish children.
Somehow all of this horror is stored up in our minds, together with all of the beauty and the love. It seems impossible that such wildly different memories and ideas and feelings could coexist in our consciousness without tearing our minds to pieces. But somehow they all coexist together inside of us. No wonder our hearts are aching.
In the Torah this week, we find ourselves in Egypt, in the heart of darkness. The night of the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn Egyptians. This is the story that we relive every year at our Passover seder. In fact, the Torah text itself pauses at the dramatic climax of the story, just before the plague begins. The story freezes, and the voice of God speaks to us of the distant future, in which the descendants of the Israelites will gather for a festival and will tell the story over a ritual meal. Children will ask their parents “What is this?” and “why are we doing this?” And their parents will respond with “this is the Passover sacrifice to our God, Who struck down the Egyptians, but Who passed over our houses, and saved us.”
The voice of God speaks to us in this portion about our own storytelling, our own attempt to awaken the curiosity of our children. The way we use matzah and horse radish and parsley and salt water to capture their attention, to make them notice that something is different. God speaks in this portion, saying “And when your children shall say to you “What does this ritual mean?” In that magic moment, when a child asks a real question…then a new link is forged in the ancient unbroken chain of love and tradition.
Side by side with this three-thousand year old story of storytelling and question-asking, and eating and singing under the full moon of springtime, just a few verses later we read of unbearable suffering. The death of countless innocent children. The firstborn even of the slave girl who is behind the millstones, and the firstborn even of the captive who is in prison. In one night, thousands upon thousands of children die. Children who have not beaten a slave. Children who have done nothing wrong. The Torah makes certain, twice, to inform us that even the firstborn of those with no power…the slavegirl, the captive in prison…even their firstborn die. And the Torah describes the cry that was heard that night. A great cry went out, throughout the land of Egypt, the like of which had never been heard, and the like of which shall never be heard again.
The Torah demands that we hear that cry.
Strangely, the Torah expresses no sorrow, no pity for all those children or for their powerless mothers and fathers. The Torah describes the cry…in all of its heartbroken misery…but offers no word of regret or apology or of sympathy. That terrible cry went forth and will be remembered forever as the unforgettable sound of the Passover night. The Torah does not love that cry. It does not celebrate the great and terrible cry of Egypt, but neither does it sympathize with it. It almost feels as though the heart of the Torah has grown hard, like Pharoah’s.
But the Torah demands that we hear that cry.
Later Jewish readers of the text, hundreds and thousands of years later, were troubled by the death of the innocent children in Egypt, and one classic midrash, a legend in response to the Torah text, offers a justification. “Why was the firstborn of the slave girl punished?” asks Midrash Tanhuma, and the midrash answers “because they had rejoiced when Pharoah decreed the genocide against Israel.” The slave girl and the captive did not physically harm the Israelites; they were themselves at the bottom of the Egyptian social hierarchy. But the midrash explains “they rejoiced.” They sang when they heard the Pharoah enslaving the Israelites. They laughed and they danced when they heard that Israelite babies were being thrown into the river. Because they rejoiced, says the midrash, the slave girl and the captive suffered seeing their own firstborn children die.
That is one version of what happened, but that is not the way the Torah tells the story. The Torah does not try to defend or to explain or to justify or even to understand the death of the Egyptian children. It just wants us to pay attention, to listen to the crying.
As we hear the news from Gaza every day, our hearts are pummeled, constantly, by the crying. The traumatized children. The wailing mothers. The grief-stricken fathers. What should we do? Do we follow the path of the midrash and explain that those children rejoiced following October 7th, celebrating Hamas’ brutally sadistic pogrom? Perhaps they did celebrate; can we honestly say that that justifies their deaths?
I would say this: Hamas started this war, and in war, civilians die. Children are dying, and I blame Hamas. But this does not answer the question, “what do we do about the crying?” Do we harden our hearts, in defense of our own sanity, and refuse to look and refuse to hear the crying from Gaza? Or do we open our eyes and our ears and our minds to all of the suffering, in both Israel and in Gaza, the hunger and the cold, the catastrophic injuries, the abject fear and all of the death? Can we hold all of that pain in our hearts and not be driven to despair?
Just a few days after October 7th, Marian and I attended a concert of the Santa Barbara symphony, conducted by Maestro Nir Kabaretti. Before the orchestra began to play, Nir shared with us the words of Leonard Bernstein from 1963, shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated. “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
I believe that Bernstein was speaking in that dark hour, of our human capacity to hold in our hearts and minds more than we imagined possible. Immense contradictions that seem like they must tear us apart. Infinite suffering and infinite beauty. Necessary self-defense and equally necessary compassion. War and also loving kindness. Death and birth. Despair and hope.
In our Jewish memory, we have stored up both immeasurable pain and also infinite tenderness, beauty and grace. One dark night in Egypt, over three thousand years ago, we heard the terrible, unforgettable cry of suffering innocents and in the very same instant, a nation of loving parents and children, question askers and storytellers, began to be born. May we allow our own hearts to expand, to acknowledge all of the brokenness and all of the beauty of this our only world. Shabbat shalom.