The Tree of Life (Beshalach)

“Eitz chaim hee lemachazikim bah…It’s the tree of life to them that hold fast to it…” This has always been one of my favorite verses in davening. Torah is the tree of life, but we must actively grab on to it. This act of holding fast is what I relate to as faith, which is a prominent theme in this week’s parsha, Beshalach; one that is connected to a eitz, a tree. 

Three days after singing an exalted song of faith following the awesome miracle of the splitting of the sea, Bnei Yisrael were struggling with having found no potable water along their way. Finally, they found water but determine that it was undrinkable. The Torah states: “And they came to Mara, and they could not drink of the waters of Mara, for they were bitter. Therefore, the name of it was called Mara” (Shemos 15:23). It occurred to me as I read this parsha that the phrase “For they were bitter” (which is offset by a zakef katan : in the trope) might not have been describing the water, but rather the sentiments of Bnei Yisrael. (I then found this idea suggested by Daas Chachamim.) They couldn’t drink the water because they were bitter.

Why bitter? Let’s look at some possibilities about their emotional state. Three days, no water…what now! I found myself focused on the fact that the complaining began three days after the final destruction of Egypt’s power. We know that day three of a wound is considered the apex of pain (per Avraham’s bris), and perhaps for Bnei Yisrael there was a level of shock in the knowledge that there truly was no going back. (Regardless of the fact that they were now in the loving care of Hashem, Egypt was what they knew.) With the underlying anxiety of being forced into a major new mindset, the Israelites felt their most critical, their most fearful, and, thus, their most bitter for having not yet found water.

Another thought is that they had heard Moshe tell Pharaoh that they would be going on a three-day journey into the wilderness to serve Hashem, so perhaps some of them started keeping count anew after they saw Egypt vanquished, for now they were truly free. However, three days later they expected to be making camp and preparing for this service Moshe had described to Pharaoh. But their calculations, as happened later at Mount Sinai, were based on their own assumptions. Perhaps it was a combination of both, and perhaps all of that was subconscious, a state of anxiety that we all experience sometimes without knowing it.

They came to Mara and they murmured against Moshe, who turned to Hashem: “And Hashem showed him a piece of wood (eitz) and he threw it into the water and the water became sweet. There He placed for him Chok and Mishpat (ordinance and law)” (ibid 15:25).

The eitz is Torah, which is comprised of chukim (ordinances for which there is no specific explanation) and mishpatim (laws that create a moral civilization). Water is life, for no creature can live without it. Life lived with bitterness – dominated by anger, regret, jealousy, etc. – misses the joy of living. A truly joyful life comes from grasping onto the Torah and holding fast to the sweetness it provides.

The verse concludes “Sham Nisahu,” which Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch translates as “There it tested them.” He explains that one way this phase can be understood is that “the people are the subject, and the Law the object of Nisahu viz. ‘There God gave it (the Nation) the fundaments of His Law, and there it (the Nation) proved or tested it,’ learnt to know the power of faithful carrying out of the Will of God, by the sweetening of the bitter waters.”

According to Rabbi Hirsch (an earlier comment on the same verse), a Torah life “requires complete confidence in the constant presence of God ever ready to help, and in the knowledge that carrying out His will, as expressed in the Torah, has the power to guide us safely and happily through the most desolate deserts of Life and to sweeten for us the bitterest draughts that Life can offer us. To induce such confidence was the preparatory work which was to be accomplished in the wilderness for the acceptance of the Divine Torah.”

Imagine the emotional work required by Bnei Yisrael. Commentators often speak of their continued slave mentality, which strikes me as terribly similar to a sense of low self-esteem. They left Egypt after a long sequence of open miracles, and yet they struggled to see themselves as part of the Divine cause. At the very beginning of the parsha we are informed that “God said ‘Perhaps the people will reconsider when they see a war and they will return to Egypt’…[but] the Children of Israel were armed when they went up from Egypt” (13:17-18).

Even as God brought them out of Egypt, He understood how shaky their faith was. Their coming out armed was purely decorative, meaning they dressed the part of a nation that had been set free, but it was clear that they lacked the courage and fortitude that matched their gear (Hirsch). And yet if they truly had faith in the Divine intervention, which they had been privileged to witness over and over, they would not have armed themselves for they would have believed that God would protect them (R’ Bechya). And yet, according to the Midrash cited by Rashi, these were the most faith-filled of the Israelites, the 1/5 that were willing and able to follow Moshe (based on an alternate understanding of chamushim as fifth rather than armed).

The miracle of the splitting of the sea was a Divine intervention to drive awe and fear into Egypt and the rest of the world. The miracle at Mara was the first step in teaching the Children of Israel that having faith in Hashem would shield them even from the smaller trials of life and that His ordinances and laws were the necessary ingredients for a sweet life. Mara was the first in a series of complaints and interventions because we all know that honest faith requires not a leap but small, earnest, incremental steps. The first step is knowing that adding Torah (eitz) to life (mayim) is key to making life spiritually sweet.