Strength in Silence
God performs two amazing feats of prodigious power in this week’s Torah reading. Most famously the Eternal parts the Sea. That was awesome. However, perhaps, even more incredible, He gets the Jews to be silent. We are a loquacious group, to put it mildly. God has Moshe declare to the nation huddled by the shore of the Sea: The Eternal will battle on your behalf, and you will remain silent (Shmot 14:14).
So, there is the demand that Jews silently witness the miracle of the Sea. Just a few verses earlier the Jews were ‘crying out’ (verse 10). But now they must observe in total silence the salvation of God. Why was the silence so important?
One could say that this added to the drama of the moment. Masses watching in perfect silence while the Creator of the Cosmos bends nature to perform the Divine Will. We can barely imagine how incredible it must have been.
The Chizkuni suggests that God doesn’t want to hear their beseechings because they have been using their vocal skills to complain and even degenerate God’s gift of freedom from Egyptian bondage (Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt that You brought us to the desert to die?!, verse 11). God just didn’t want to hear their whining. Think of God driving an SUV filled with kids across the Desert. Quiet is good, thank you.
The Shem M’Shmuel offers that God prevented them from praying because this event was on the seventh day of Pesach, and was, therefore, comparable to Shabbat, when we are supposed to consider all our work already completed. On Shabbat we behave AS IF all our work is done; that memorable day they enjoined to act AS IF their prayer was already answered. Until it really was.
Rav Jonathan Sacks Z”L makes a truly remarkable comment:
The Jewish mystics distinguished between two types of Divine-human encounters; “an awakening from above” and “an awakening from below.” An........
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