January 13, 2022

beshalach: apocalyptic hope

hello friends,

My school decided to go remote for the first couple of weeks this semester, thank g-d, so I just finished reorganizing my classes for that and sending students instructions on how to access our online classroom. B'ezras haShem all will go smoothly, and this two-week buffer at the beginning of the semester will let us be in person after that. It's such a sensible plan, you wonder why most schools aren't doing it...

So anyway in Marvel's "Loki" (spoilers ahead), a transfeminine variant of the supervillain/superhero hides from the all-powerful Time Variant Authority (TVA) by living in moments of apocalypse. This scheme hinges on the way the TVA identifies threats to their preferred course of history: when someone does something they aren't supposed to do, the consequences of those actions cause a "branch" in the timeline that the TVA can detect and correct. In other words, our actions create the timeline of history, so a sufficient deviation from what we're "supposed" to do can create a new branch timeline. But if the world you are living on is about to be completely destroyed in an apocalypse with no one escaping, you can do anything you want, be any undesirable variant you want, because that destruction prevents your actions from snowballing into an entirely new timeline. There's a certain kind of freedom, you might say, here at the end of the world.

But apocalypses without survivors are rare. Most apocalypses are more traditional: instead of being utter destruction with no afterword, they are destruction followed by survival (by some). Our own modern world is the post-apocalypse for many people -- as the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo science fiction author Rebecca Roanhorse points out, her people have "already survived an apocalypse." Jews, of course, have survived our own apocalypses of different kinds over the years. This is not to say, by the way, that the horrors of these apocalypses are any "lesser" because some people survive in a new world. Surviving the post-apocalypse can be its own kind of continuing destruction (more on this bamidbar).

So apocalypses involve destruction and displacement; they are a fundamental re-creation of the world followed by survival. We have read already of the destruction of slavery and plagues (note that apocalypses often mean different things to different groups of people!), and in this Torah portion we have the displacement of flight from Egypt. And when the Israelites reach the sea, the world is fundamentally re-created. At the beginning of the Torah, we read

וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃

and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep and a wind of Elohim was hovering on the face of the water

וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ וַיַּבְדֵּל בֵּין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מִתַּחַת לָרָקִיעַ וּבֵין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מֵעַל לָרָקִיעַ וַיְהִי־כֵן

and Elohim made the expanse and separated between the waters below the expanse and the waters above the expanse

In this portion, we read

Then Moses held out his arm over the sea and the LORD drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that night, and turned the sea into dry ground. The waters were split

The Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael makes this connection explicit in commentary on the prior verse:

"and [turned] the sea into dry land and the waters were split." All the waters in the world were thus rendered [including] the upper and the lower waters and the depths

The same actions, a book later. One way of translating the first three words of Torah is "in a beginning, Elohim created." If that was one beginning, one splitting of the waters, this is another: a re-creation, an apocalypse.

The idea in Loki that what we do doesn't cosmically matter in an apocalypse is (I would argue) false even for apocalypses without any afterward, and certainly false for those with an afterward. But I do think there is something freeing and paradoxically hopeful about recognizing when you live in apocalyptic times, on any level from personal to societal to universal.

The crossing of the sea is usually presented midrashically as a story of faith (incidentally, the standard version of this midrash is, as far as I can tell, an amalgamation of two sections of Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael and Masekhes Sotah, all of which more or less contradict each other on many points). The various tribes were all standing at the edge of the sea, none of them wanting to go in first. Moses was commanding the sea to split, and the sea was refusing. Then Nachshon entered the sea and only after that did the sea split. Nachshon's faith, so the story goes, was necessary for the sea to split -- a real "haShem helps those who help themselves" moment, a big "haShem rewards the faithful" mood. I can be into this at times, and at other times I think it is some real mishegas.

In this case, I really don't think Nachshon acted out of faith that haShem would provide. I think he looked at the world as it was. He saw how broken it was, he saw slavery and death chasing him, he saw the water ahead, and he understood that he was living in an apocalypse. He could have reacted with optimism, like the Israelites who said "maybe it wasn't so bad back in Egypt, maybe we could make that work." But by refusing to hold on to any kind of optimism, Nachshon found a kernel of that Lokian apocalyptic freedom: between death or slavery at the hands of the Egyptians and likely death in the sea, he picked the sea. A terrifying and deadly choice that could only be made at the end of the world.

So maybe this is all hope really is: accepting the world as it is, and making the best choice we can.

Or maybe this is all hope really is: the knowledge that despair is not infinite, that the deepest despair contains a wellspring of hope and freedom.

In other words: when the world is crumbling, you might as well try. What's the worst that could happen? The end of the world?

I have experienced this (l'havdil l'havdil) on a personal level during transition. I didn't transition out of faith that things would get better for me, I truly thought the sea would drown me. But I was in my own little apocalypse, and the strength to choose transition was contained within that knowledge (cue my laughter every time some well-meaning person calls it "bravery"). To be honest, I still don't have faith that things will get better. But I know what I need to do.

In the broader context...I don't know if all times are apocalyptic or if we just happen to be living in apocalyptic times. But in either case, here we are. Climate change is upon us, COVID is upon us. We can go the route of optimistic rejection of apocalypse -- that there will be no new variants, that some new carbon-sink technology will save the climate, that Omicron will be mild, that we can fully re-open schools and everything will somehow work out, that we can all flee to Mars if necessary. Or we can be Nachshon. We can act not out of optimism or faith that everything will be okay, but from a deep connection with our reality, from that bright light of hope and freedom within apocalypse.

How will the world be re-created? And what will survival look like?

As always, let me know what you think :-)

good shabbos? yes. good shabbos,

ada