yehoshua: apocalypse
sholem aleichem,
Hello everyone! Unfortunately I've been having some issues with the newsletter software, so I am re-writing this email mostly from scratch pretty late Thursday afternoon....and it is of necessity a bit brief and somewhat less polished than usual. My sincere apologies!
This week's text: Yehoshua 3-4 (looking for parsha commentary? last year's etz hi)
This week in summary: Yehoshua and the Israelites march to the Jordan. After pausing to receive instructions from haShem, they set out to cross the Jordan. As soon as the feet of the priests bearing the Ark touch the water, the waters' flow pauses, allowing the people to cross. Yehoshua is instructed to carry out a ritual of selecting stones from the river where the priests stood and creating a monument with them, to remember this miracle.
I can't help but compare this story to the crossing of the red sea (I mean, the comparison is right there in the text). Both, after all, involve the parting/stopping of water to allow a dry crossing. Both also are kicked off by humans getting wet:
in Yehoshua, we read that "as soon as [...] the feet of the priests bearing the Ark dipped into the water at its edge, the waters coming down from upstream piled up in a single heap a great way off"
in the crossing of the red sea, midrash teaches that Nachshon ben Amminadab descended into the sea, prayed, and only then haKadosh Baruch Hu instructed Moshe to lift his rod, stretch his hand, and part the sea
Moreover, in both cases the text is concerned with explaining the stories to children:
In Shemos 13 we are told: "And you are to tell your child on that day, saying: It is because of what haShem did for me, when I went out of Egypt."
In Yehoshua, we read "In time to come, when your children ask their fathers, ‘What is the meaning of those stones?’ tell your children: ‘Here the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry land.’"
In addition to these parallels, there's a perpendicularity:
in Yehoshua, the Israelites are preparing to invade. The stopping of the waters is a sign "that a living God is among you, and that He will dispossess for you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites"
in Shemos, the Israelites are fleeing a military force bent on their subjugation (though of course their liberation is tied up with many Egyptian deaths, so this isn't a pure/simple perpendicularity)
There's a midrash that when the waters of the red sea were split, all the waters in the world were split, just as all the waters were split when haShem separated the waters below and above during the creation. The crossing of the red sea was an apocalypse: a complete destruction/recreation of the world. So too, then, the crossing of the Jordan was an apocalypse.
I'm going to try to not focus too many of these newsletters on my own wrestling with the military-invasion-and-dispersal aspect of this book. But I do want to establish a framing question that is raised by all these former parallelisms and this latter perpendicularity.
At Pesach, we are told to view ourselves as if we personally were liberated from Egypt. This is an obligation that I take quite seriously, and think about often.
But all this being the case -- am I not also obligated to view myself as if I personally invaded the land, dispersing its inhabitants?
(Can I enter the water before it stops? Can I decide what world is created?
What is my job after the apocalypse?)
good shabbos,
ada