Toward the Far Shore: Notes on the Creation of ‘The Sea of Reeds’
“You blew with Your breath — the sea covered them over.” Exodus 15:10
What a joy to get to blog for 3200 Stories! I’m going to be posting a few items as I develop a new theater piece, titled Sea of Reeds, which will be performed early next year at the JCCSF.
It’s kind of scary to be sharing my raw experiences as I create the show: I feel a bit like The Monologuist With No Clothes. Eventually, when my collaborators and I have completed Sea of Reeds, I’ll get to “wear” the finished (and, presumably, polished) piece. But right now, as always happens, I begin in a condition of utter not-knowingness, stumbling in the dark through the marshes of my memories and confusions.
As a matter of fact, the marsh analogy is especially apt in this case! The Sea of Reeds (often translated, in older versions of the Torah, as the “Red Sea”) is, famously, the body of water that seemingly blocked the Israelites from making a life-saving escape from the Egyptians. But then, in what is considered the greatest miracle ever experienced by the Jewish people, the sea parted — allowing the Israelites to cross to safety — before closing again to swallow their pursuers.
The popular imagery of this event comes to us from the old Cecil B. DeMille movie The Ten Commandments, in which Charlton Heston (who, to be honest, doesn’t really look Jewish) raises his staff, signaling God to part the waters into two giant walls.
But, as my rabbi, Menachem Creditor of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, points out, the parting of the waters didn’t happen so quickly: “… the Lord led the sea with a mighty east wind all night” (my emphasis added). Which could lead someone to imagine a very different movie scene — one in which a shallow marsh, choked with reeds, is, over the course of many nocturnal hours, buffeted by relatively gentle winds, making it passable (though possibly quite muddy) for the fleeing Israelites.
So was the parting of the Sea of Reeds a DeMille-type miracle or more of a natural, gradual event? Well, I don’t know (I wasn’t there!).
But what I find so compelling about this Biblical passage — and the epic story that contains it — is that it evokes in me such strong emotions about how difficult it is to make big changes, individually and collectively.
Just to pick one subject that I currently find overwhelming, particularly as a father: How will we deal with global warming? Can we make the significant, and often jarring, changes in our behavior that will reverse (or at least ameliorate) the catastrophic melting of our planet, even as powerful economic forces resist any such efforts?
I look at my teenage son, and I think of the fragile world he is inheriting, and I pray for a miracle. But as I’ve begun, in middle age, to explore Judaism, I’ve come to believe that prayer is impotent unless accompanied by action — that, regardless of whether there is a God (or even a Charlton Heston), we humans must do our own muddy slogging if we hope to reach the other side.
And what, you may reasonably be wondering, does all this have to do with the Sea of Reeds show I’m working on? Well, I must tell you, in all honesty: I don’t know! (Yet!) But I do know a few things:
- The piece will have something to do with the Exodus story — and certainly with the episode at the Sea of Reeds.
- It will also have something to do with playing the oboe, a double-reed wind instrument that I (and, indirectly, my neighbors) suffered with in my youth — and which I have now taken up again, in my 50s.
- It will also have something to do with my newfound fascination with Judaism – including my bar mitzvah, two summers ago, in Israel.
- There will be at least one cantata by J.S. Bach, as found in a book of oboe solos I have with the evocative title of Difficult Passages.
- In Biblical Hebrew, the word for “wind,” ruach, is also the word for “breath” and “spirit” — raising the question: Which of those actually caused the sea to part?
- For the first time, after decades of monologue-making, I will be sharing the stage with other performers — musicians and actors.
- I’m hecka-nervous!
So that’s what I’m working on — and what I will be describing to you, mid-process, in upcoming posts. How will I make it across? I don’t know for sure — but I think I feel a wind coming.
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You can find out more about Josh’s doings at JoshKornbluth.com.
Comments
Josh:
I’m really excited about this project and am thrilled that you are writing this blog. I have a question about one of your comments, when you said “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” I have always been taught that Jewish tradition says that we all were there, whether we know or believe it or not. That is why we commemorate the Exodus with a Seder each year, so that we are reminded that we were there. I want it to be true. You?
An excellent and provocative question, Lenore! And to be honest, I feel divided. On the one hand, I would wish to be on hand for the great miracle of a people’s (“my” people’s) liberation from slavery. But on the other, it would destroy me to be separated from my loved ones in this present time. So if I am there, at the Sea of Reeds, then they must be there, too. And my wife is not Jewish, and my son is half-Jewish — so do they cross with me? Again, if they don’t, I don’t want to cross, even though I desperately love “my” people, the Jews. … So I guess I’m saying that I want the miracle to happen — I want “us” to be free — but not at the cost of separating myself, and my tribe, from the rest of humanity. Perhaps there is a way to reconcile these oppositions — but no, I’m not there now. And yet … yes, I do want the story to be true! A paradox.
Hmmmm….it seems to me, Josh, that when you say,” If I am at the Sea of Reeds, then they (your present wife and son) must be too,” you are confounding the metaphorical or spiritual, with the literal — and that can ONLY lead to contradiction and paradox. If religious teaching holds, as Lenore reminds us, that “we” (the Jews of today) were there at the time of liberation, this cannot be literally true, and so can only be taken to imply the continuity of the tribe, or in the most spiritual of readings, the persistence of the soul beyond the life of the body. So I really don’t think you have to worry about your wife and son drowning as the parted waters closed over the UNchosen people — if , indeed, you would have even had the possibility of marrying her in those times! More relevant, I think, is your comment that you want to be free but “not at the cost of separating myself and my tribe from the rest of humanity.” I think this has always been an issue for us — now perhaps more than ever even in this age of assimilation –and one that I hope you will explore in your play.
Fascinating, Laura! … As I wrote in my blog item, I am quite new to the study of Judaism, and I’m sure that I make enormous errors (such as conflating the literal with the spiritual or metaphorical) all the time! I almost included, in my post, a kind of disclaimer, saying that I welcomed all the corrections that would inevitably come pouring in.
But let me just say that, on an emotional (if, perhaps, not logically or theologically kosher) level, what thrills and challenges me about the Sea of Reeds episode (and about Lenore’s wonderful comment) is that, in a deep-inside-me way, I _do_ feel, somehow, the potential actually to be there! And, in my heart, being AT the Sea of Reeds means putting myself both inside the experiences of the fleeing slaves (with all of their loud ambivalences about trading the “comforts” of slavery for the jarring unpredictabilities of life in the wilderness) and — at the same time, and no less important — also within the many complexities faced by their enemies (not the least of which being that the Hebrew God apparently keeps _forcing_ their Pharaoh to chase after the Israelites, no matter how many times he tries to get out of it!).
To me (maybe! — I’m just trying to work this stuff out even as I say it) the remarkable continuity of “our” tribe is, as much as anything else, a profound source of optimism that, despite all of our miseries and setbacks, human beings may still preserve, collectively, the tender flame of social justice. Even as we/they come “into the sea on dry land”! … Okay, Laura: possibly _this_ is true: I _want_ to find “contradiction and paradox”! And I’ll do whatever I need to do to find it!
As for Jews marrying non-Jews: Didn’t Moses hook up with a Midianite? (In fact, from what I can tell, those Midianites had an intoxicating effect on lots of Jews.) If so, then I daresay the fact that I am married to an atheistic Japanese-American (albeit one who was born at Brandeis University!) feels more like a continuity with tradition than a departure.
Josh, you’ve got it right. Not only did Moses marry a Midianite, plenty of ancient Israelite men took wives from outside the tribe. And in those years there was no formalized process for converting — the women just took the faith of their husbands. Presto, you’re a Jew! So when Ruth told Naomi “your people shall be my people, and your god my god,” that’s all that was needed. It was the rabbis who came up with the whole ritual mechanism.
Wait — the women didn’t even have to prove that they could be ambivalent???
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