“I’m struggling to breathe, my lungs caught between the shattered pieces, my heart cleaved. There is something ancient, something deeply Jewish, about living in the space where joy and sorrow intertwine.”
These are words that Sarah Tuttle-Singer wrote on Facebook almost a month ago. Raised in the Los Angeles area but living in Israel for many years, Sarah has become an online inspiration, encapsulating the Jewish experience and the Israeli reality. She speaks to the mundane, about random conversations with Israeli cab drivers. And she speaks to the profound, about hostage releases. And she finds a way to pull the profundity out of the mundane.
She wrote these words in anticipation of the release of hostages that included Yarden Bibas on February 1. Released to a burnt-out house. And released to learn for the first time about the murder of his wife Shiri and his redheaded children Kfir and Ariel, whose faces have become infamous to Jews worldwide.
Sarah is right and exquisitely understated. Where joy and sorrow intertwine has been the reality for the Jewish people since October 7th, 2023. Maybe forever? We revel in life. And we have enemies who would like nothing more than our deaths. How does one create reality and meaning between those two poles?
In the Rashi class I teach, we have been studying Parshat Bo on Wednesday mornings for about a year. I was struck by an interlude in the narrative between the ninth and tenth plagues. We are told how the Israelites prepared for Exodus night, including preparing the korban Pesa?, the paschal offering that continued to be the primary ritual of Passover into Temple times (Exodus 12:1-11).
Just before that interlude, we are told how Moshe and Aharon leave Pharaoh’s presence after giving the final ultimatum. God predicts that, once again, Pharaoh will refuse to release the Israelites.
And then God adds these curious words: “lma’an r’vot moftai ba’aretz.” “In order that my wonders upon Egypt will be increased” (Exodus 11:9). It might understandably seem that God is toying with the Egyptians, and extending their misery, for God’s own glory. How could that be the God we worship? That’s a salient, worthy question, one asked by many over time.
But it is not the question Rashi asks or tries to answer. Rashi wonders: Nine plagues have happened. Only one to go. So why does God talk about moftai, my wonders, my plagues, in the plural, when there’s only one plague left?
Rashi’s answer speaks to Sarah Tuttle-Singer’s understanding of the Jewish condition. Or at least to half of that condition. Yes, there is only one plague among the famous ten left. But we still have God’s splitting the sea, which is an eleventh mofet, a wonder. And then we have, in Rashi’s words, ul’na’er et mitzrayim, the utter annihilation of the Egyptians when the sea crashes down upon them–a twelfth wonder. Drill down and Rashi is saying this: Even after the sea split, and the Israelites walked through toward liberation, there were still wonders left undone that needed divine intervention: The defeat of our enemies.
The plagues effected not just the future life of our people, but the assured death of our oppressors. By essentially adding the drowning of the Egyptians to God’s wonders in the Exodus, Rashi is not merely resolving a math problem in the verse. Rashi is saying that the ordeal in Egypt did not culminate when we were no longer captive. It came when those who held us captive were forced to pay the ultimate price.
Rashi is essentially permitting us–notwithstanding the famous midrash that has God scolding the angels for rejoicing in the Egyptians’ drowning– to hope that those who did us harm, and would like nothing more than to do us harm again, will receive a divine judgment, especially when human judgment will likely not come to them.
This is where many of us are stuck, when we see trickles of beleaguered Israeli and Thai hostages released to their families. Walking through the split sea, as it were. And when we see terrorists with blood on their hands, including for many of us blood of those we knew and loved, released back to society in exchange, with free rein to do it again. And when we see Gazans of all ages surround and harass and threaten the hostages even as they try to walk through that sea, a sea God seems to have no ability to miraculously split.
Many of us may wish for a twelfth plague. Rashi intuited the Jewish need for that satisfaction, even in fantasy.
The joy and sorrow Sarah Tuttle-Singer is getting at, and what Rashi nodded towards, was articulated concisely and memorably by Rabbi David Hartman, when he spoke about two basic Jewish paradigms. One of them he called Auschwitz. By which he meant not just a death camp, but Auschwitz as an idea. Auschwitz representing that, yes, they–whoever they are, there are too many of them–want us dead. Auschwitz as a paradigm representing Pharaoh. And Amalek. And Rome. And the Inquisition. And the Shoah. And fanatical Islamic death-cults. Auschwitz representing the notion that it was not “just” the end of the camps and the suffering in 1945 that we prayed to God for, but also the utter defeat of the Nazis. That, too, needed to happen for the Jews to feel they were not just post tenth plague, but post twelfth plague.
But that’s just half of the Jewish condition. The bitterest half. The other half R’ Hartman named Sinai. Representing not just a mountain, a revelation, and a law code, but also representing life and meaning and purpose. That which should be the focus of the Jewish experience, the very thing we wanted to return to once released from slavery and imprisonment, and to which we remained committed even in the ghettos, the camps, and the fleshpots of Egypt.
In an odd juxtaposition, on the eve of the Exodus, the Israelites are also introduced to the lunar calendar, when God tells them how they will mark a holiday of Passover in the future (Exodus 12:18). That’s the Sinai paradigm. We exist not to defeat our enemies. We may need to defeat our enemies to exist. But we exist to sanctify time. To fill the year with wonder and celebration. “You are about to leave Egypt, Israelites. You are putting slavery behind you. What’s the one thing I, God, want you and your ancestors to know? Go craft time, with me in mind, to make a life of meaning. Nothing is more important than that.”
I am feeling that powerfully as I am in my second month of mourning for my father. Recently, the kaddish has been whispering to me: we cannot defeat death. So we sanctify time around it. If death is Auschwitz paradigm, then kaddish is Sinai paradigm. Gather with fellow Jews. Dedicate more time in your day and week than before to moments of the soul. Praise God. It is for that reason you were created.
My cousin Dr. Israel Eldad, with whom I had a very dear relationship, was the Zionist patriarch of our family. He has a fascinating read on the binding of Isaac: We tell the story that Isaac was to be sacrificed, but was saved when the angel stayed Avraham’s hand, and instead a ram caught in the thicket was put on the altar. So Isaac went free. The ram paid the price. But Eldad says that if the ram was exchanged for Isaac, then the ram ended up on the altar, yes. But Isaac ended up where the ram had been–in the thicket. Enmeshed. Entrapped. Struggling to be free.
Our people’s predicament was sealed back then in some primordial way. The price of being a descendant of Isaac, the children of Israel, was that though we were spared, we were doomed to exist and find meaning amidst the brambles of one thicket after another. Whether imposed by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Haman, Antiochus, the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, Chelmnitzki, the Cossacks, Hitler, Assad, Arafat, Hamas. Enraged college protesters. Biased media. Insane moral mathematics around exchanges of babies for murderers and toddlers for terrorists. We are in the thicket. But we are alive.
We are people of Auschwitz, who know the Nazis and their like must be defeated. It is okay to pray for that, and for Israel the nation-state to try to bring it about. But we are also people of Sinai, struggling to form words that convey our joy that Yarden Bibas walks free today. He gets to rejoin the pilgrimage to Sinai, in the land of Israel, the land of his people, of our people.
Sarah Tuttle-Singer ended her post this way, describing the state of our hearts after another long-awaited, but wrenching and incomplete hostage release:
“But we will also wait, our hearts pulled between longing and faith, because we know that history moves in spirals—that joy and sorrow are never far apart, that release is not the same as redemption. And so we hold our breath, knowing the story is still being written, knowing that until every family is whole, none of us are truly free.”
May we find life and meaning, here in the thicket, always marching toward Sinai.
Rabbi Adam Kligfeld has served as Senior Rabbi of Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles since 2009. A graduate of Columbia with a degree in History and Psychology, and a graduate of JTS’s rabbinical school, Adam first served in Monroe, NY for 9 years before moving to LA. His most recent work, in addition to shepherding a campus overhaul that saw the community dedicate an award-winning, light-filled, in-the-round sanctuary in 2019, has focused on interfaith relationship-building (mostly with local Muslim communities), as well as integrating Jewish thought, practice, and nomenclature into meditation and mindfulness forms and practices that stem from the eastern faith and cultural traditions. He is married to Havi, a Couples Therapist in private practice, and proud father to Noa (23), Ayden (20) and Lev (12). He is an avid Yankee fan, an avid biker, and an avid dog owner.