I felt a little guilty about my posting last week the day after Inauguration Day--did I put a damper on others’ joy? Can I just take a day to feel pure, unadulterated joy and relief at the fact that this wonderful thing happened and Trump is gone from office? 

Should I just drink the Kool-Aid sometimes? What’s everyone else doing? Are they drinking the Kool-Aid, or am I just voicing what others are thinking also?

No, if I really think about it, they’re not, and I’m not ruining their day by speaking the truth.

I realized that Torah doesn’t take a break, either.

No sooner does Pharaoh let the Israelites go, no sooner do they walk to freedom, through the Sea of Reeds over dry land, with a magical wall of water on each side, than reality hits them in the face again. 

They take a break of about one sentence (okay, a few paragraphs) when they awaken to the glory of God, finally realizing that God is capable of performing immeasurable wonders. They sing the famous Song of the Sea (Who is like You…?), Miriam takes out her timbrel and leads the women in dance and song, and it’s all very merry and wonderful. 

For a second. 

Then: wham! Scene change: the Israelites are in the desert, and they start complaining to Moses immediately: “How could you take us out of bondage only to bring us into this (God-forsaken?) place where we will starve? What, they didn’t have enough graves in Egypt? Better to have stayed and died there! What exactly is the point of this? Woohoo! We’ll get an unlimited supply of fluffy white stuff to eat instead of real food, maybe like freeze-dried military/space food, and we have to learn these rules, like only gathering enough for the day, because if we gather too much, it will get maggots, except for Shabbat, in which case if we don’t gather enough, we’ll go hungry for the day. 

Oy! So much to learn! And this really sucks. You didn’t tell us, Moses, that things would continue to be so hard! We didn’t sign up for this! Not even a little break after our trauma of escaping slavery before things are hard again!

It’s enough to make the Israelites think that things in Egypt had been a beautiful dream (were they thinking, “We have to make Egypt beautiful again”? Aaah, that willful forgetfulness I talked about in last week’s blog).

I heard a podcast with Krista Tippett interviewing Katherine May on her book called “Wintering” (are you getting tired of my mentioning On Being?). The author loves winter and snow and darkness (so do I!), and talks and writes about how “wintering” replenishes us and the earth; we all need to take a break. 

She points out that we have lost touch with our bodies and the earth in our modern lives and we often can’t even allow ourselves to be sick and to rest without needing a doctor’s confirmation; we don’t know how to rest just because; we don’t know how to take a break without planning a grand vacation (because it’s not like everything’s going to magically get better if we just go to a spa!). 

In the interview, Tippett and May also discussed the pandemic and the talk at the outset of how people were getting to be at home with their children and bake bread and do homey things again, getting back in touch with what’s important. 

In fact, this was more of a hopeful Christmas miracle movie, like the Israelites dreaming of the good ol’ days in Egypt than any kind of reality for most people. 

Nonetheless, the pandemic has offered a kind of pause to look at the ugly reality that our society has become and to re-evaluate our value system---to give some real thought to how we’ve gone wrong and how we want to live our lives going forward as a whole, not just individually.

Yes, we have a ton of rethinking to do. 

The Israelites, also, have a ton of thinking to do. They start with the ugly reality of leaving behind a lot of destruction: all the dead Egyptians, drowned when God allows the waters to fill in the dry land again--and Torah tells us that they see it! I wonder what that clean-up looked like, and what impact it had to know that their survival depended on the death of others.

If God made the Israelites wait forty years--yes, forty years--in the desert before entering the Promised land, why do we think we’re so special? 

Why should we think that we can just wish away the pandemic and the bad Trump years, and imagine that they will all go away as quickly as they came---because they didn’t come quickly, as I pointed out last week--nor will they go away quickly. 

Walking through the split sea, as grand as it seems, is only a first baby step for the Israelites, like Inauguration Day, with all its pomp and circumstance, was for us. 

There’s a lot of clean-up to do, both spiritually and physically, and it’s on us to do it, not just on our new administration, any more than it was for the Israelites to simply rely on God to do all their work.

I guess this week’s blog, like this week’s Torah reading, is just one more reminder that we know there’s a lot of clean-up to do, we have no choice but to do it, but maybe we can take a momentary pause to regain our strength--and just take a little break to replenish ourselves, get back in touch with what really matters, and be ready for the blooming of spring.