HaMirpeset Shelanu -15: Jacob Cytryn, Program Director

A number of the teachers I respect the most when it comes to thinking about and learning how one exercises leadership in the Jewish community have promoted embracing the notion of "reset," or "what got you here will not get you there" as a mechanism to navigate through the choppy waters of crisis. Marty Linsky, whom I have learned from through the generous support of the Wexner Foundation, defines "resetting" as "bringing closure to the past, deciding what of all that you value is worth preserving, then using the turbulence as an opportunity to change the rules of the game and invent the future. Reset is operating as if nothing is certain except uncertainty."

The notion of "pushing the reset button," now a favorite topic of political commentators analyzing President Obama's campaign and transition, the economy, healthcare reform, and the 2010 congressional election cycle, (among others,) is compelling to me. It requires us to take an objective stance towards the strategy, circumstances, and values that have allowed us to succeed; assess the value of those commodities; and move forward with our eye on the next goal instead of nostalgically weighed down by our past experiences. This is the very lesson I take from this week's Torah portion, B'shalach.

The narrative of most of the first book-and-a-half of the Torah is framed by two looming challenges for the people of Israel: escaping Egyptian slavery and inheriting the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. In the opening chapters of Shemot, ostensibly focused exclusively on the struggle with Pharaoh to free the slaves, we see a clear sign that the dual narrative still propels us. As God commits to freeing the Israelites in a passage that serves as one of the textual hearts of the Passover Seder (Exodus 6:6-7), the promise to "bring you to the land that I raised My hand in pledge to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob" is the culmination of the language that intertwines the fate of God with the slaves Moses is to lead to freedom (6:8).

The act of severing the children of Israel from the yoke of slavery they have known in Egypt is one of miraculous intervention and tremendous speed, once Moses receives his charge and begins negotiating with Pharaoh. As this week's Torah reading begins, however, we learn that, quite literally, the speed and miracles that catalyzed the escape from Egypt will not be the hallmarks of overcoming the next challenge: entering into and inheriting the land of Israel. We read (Exodus 13:17-18): "[W]hen Pharaoh sent the people off ... God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines though it was close, for God thought, ‘Lest the people regret when they see battle and go back to Egypt.' And God turned the people round by way of the wilderness of the Sea of Reeds ...." It is only through the lens of reset that we can fully make sense of this verse. At face value it seems ridiculous to imagine the Israelites wanting to return immediately to the Egypt they have just left and just as crazy that (especially knowing as we do the rest of the story) they will not encounter the military might of Egypt if they turn towards the Sea of Reeds.

God resets the Israelite experience and the process by which they will achieve the promised goals through this verse. The rising climax and narrative swiftness of the final plagues and eventual exodus will no longer be the modus operandi of God's involvement in history. There will be no speedy move to conquer the Philistines and possess the land. Instead, a different paradigm, hearkening back to the slow action of Genesis and its cycles of sibling rivalry, famine, and eventual reconciliation, will be repeated through forty years in the wilderness. (Reset does not always mean brand new.) The very individuals who saw God's miracles in Egypt and on the shores of the Sea of Reeds will not live to experience the feeling of taking back the land. This is a tragic consequence if viewed through the lens of sentimentality but it seems to be an essential shift in God's relationship with Israel and in Israel's own relationship to transition from slaves to landowners.

On the cusp of the seminal moment in Jewish history, with God's spirit literally at their back and momentum pushing them forward, God pushes the reset button. The impact, we learn later, is a painful, slow grind for forty years through the wilderness. Ultimately, however, a different divine personality than that which orchestrates Moses and Pharaoh's interactions in Shemot fulfills the final part of that divine promise to Moses. Ironically, but befitting the reset theme, Moses himself does not survive to witness this ultimate completion.

Too often we remember only the God of the Exodus, the God of Pesach. But Judaism ritualizes and records the entirety of this great narrative arc, not only in the Torah but through the full cycle of pilgrimage festivals, through Shavuot, when we celebrate revelation on Sinai; Sukkot, when we commemorate the long slog through the wilderness; and, I suggest, Simchat Torah, when we embrace the end of that forty-year journey by ritually rejoicing with our great inheritance, the Torah Scroll standing in for the Land of Israel whose agricultural welfare we begin praying for at the same time of year.

In a constantly changing world, too often we rely on the lessons of the past to predict the future. The implications for the Ramah community are endless: parents and counselors hoping to relive their glorious memories of camp vicariously through their children and campers, respectively; refusing to let go of now-meaningless traditions because they are just that, traditions; counselors or administrators clinging to the skills and outlooks they developed as campers or line staff, respectively; and more. One of Judaism's great lessons is "what got us here will not get us there." Such is God's lesson in B'shalach, a lesson embraced by the rabbinic construction of the historical aspects of the pilgrimage festivals.

May we continue to thrive on a religion less committed to nostalgic attachments to inheritance than it is to being innovatively relevant in the here and now. May we continue to have the strength to objectively assess the communities we love deeply, acknowledging that giving up some aspect of the past is our (or, in the case of the Israelites, our children's) only chance at insuring our chance at a successful future.