Sermon for Shabbat / Chag Pesach (Day 7), 5785, Friday April 18, 2025

Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

In life as in literature, crossing a body of water often heralds a moment of transformation.  

The Greeks whispered of the River Styx that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, where the ghostly ferryman Charon would transport the souls of the dead on their voyage to the hereafter.  

In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river in Northeastern Italy that protected Rome from Civil War.  His crossing was considered an act of insurrection.  There he declared, alea iacta est:  “The die is cast.”

We remember George Washington crossing the frozen Delaware the night after Christmas, 1776, in his surprise attack on Hessian forces in Trenton, New Jersey.

The runaway slave Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio River at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own verse:

So over the roaring rushing flood,

From block to block she sprang,

And ever her cry for God’s good help

Above the waters rang.

And God did hear that mother’s cry,

For never an ice-block sank;

While the cruel trader and his men

Stood wondering on the bank.

A good man saw on the further side,

And gave her his helping hand;

So poor Eliza, with her boy,

Stood safe upon the land.

All of us Jewish Americans find a water crossing at the heart of our family’s story, whether in persecuted flight across the Atlantic or as pioneers or entrepreneurs; the huddled and the hopeful.

And of course water crossings figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible:  Noah’s ark-bound journey from a world doomed to a world reborn; Jonah’s aborted flight across the Mediterranean to escape the prophet’s call; Joshua’s triumphal march across the Jordan River, carrying the Ark of the Covenant.  The Bible even tells us that before he started making house calls at Passover, Elijah’s final earthly act was to roll up his cloak and touch the waters of the Jordan River with it; the waters divide to the right and the left and Elijah crosses over on dry ground, together with his apprentice Elisha (cf. II Kings 2:11-15).

This last scene, of course, echoes the greatest water crossing of them all, in the Bible and indeed in all of literature: the Torah reading for this seventh day of Pesach, the crossing of the Red Sea.  A moment of transformation: entering the water as slaves, the people emerge free men and women on the other shore.  

Of course, they had no choice, no way to retreat.  With the Egyptian army in hot pursuit, the Israelites arrive at the water’s edge.  Then, the Torah tells us, the Divine pillar of cloud and fire positioned itself behind the Israelites, in front of the Egyptians, forming a barrier that prevented the Egyptians from moving forward.  But it also presumably prevented the Israelites from moving backward (Cf. Ex. 14:19-20).

Here, the famous midrash inserts brave Nachshon ben Amminadav, who entered the Sea unbidden (Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, 14:22).  The waters reach his ankles; the Sea continues to rage.  He goes in up to his knees, his waist, his chest… the Sea closing in over him.  Only when the water reaches his nostrils does the Red Sea part and our people enter on dry land.  Presumably the Rabbis who wrote this legend wanted to instill a lesson of faith, faith in the face of an insuperable obstacle, but I say Nachshon had no choice:  with fire and cloud and an army behind him and nothing but open Sea ahead of him, where could he turn?  I am reminded in an uncomfortable way of those terrible images of the World Trade Center jumpers on 9/11, those helpless victims, with cloud and fire billowing behind them and nothing but the open blue of sky in front of them.

Life hands us experiences over which we have no choice.  Time moves in only one direction and we must walk forward, sometimes into a Sea of grief and sadness.  And I do not know why it is so, but there are years in our life that take more than they give, so that over time each of us becomes threaded into a common web of human experience, the kinship of bereavement, the universal society of every generation that must lay to rest the people we love.

I have walked alongside many—maybe even you and your family—in that Sea of grief and I always emerge with cause to marvel at the faith to keep moving forward, whether by choice or consequence.  And I do not know why it is so, but instead of drowning in tears I have always found that just the courage to enter the Sea causes the waters to part a little bit, that by going through the process of bereavement, an encounter with death becomes a little bit easier to bear.  

Jewish tradition recognizes that human grieving passes through stages and therefore our reckoning with it must also take the form of a journey of stages.  Even before a person enters shiva, one is called Onen, a state in which one remains from the time of death until the time of burial when shiva properly begins.  

Rabbi Maurice Lamm whose book The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning provides the definitive writing on the subject, observes: 

“The onen is a person in deep distress, a person yanked out of normal life and abruptly catapulted into the midst of inexpressible grief. He is disoriented, his attitudes are disarranged, his emotions out of gear. The shock of death paralyzes his consciousness and blocks out all regular patterns of orderly thinking. ‘The deceased lies before him,’ as the sages said and, psychologically, he is reliving the moment of death every instant during this period.”

The Onen is like Nachshon before entering the Sea, trembling on the water’s edge.  

But then the ritual begins:  the family is gathered; a rabbi or cantor or caring officiant summoned; the funeral arranged, the loved one’s story told, the act of k’riah performed, tearing a black ribbon or piece of clothing so that grief finds its way from inside the heart to outside the breast, a badge of love and loss, of honor and hope.  

Sometimes when I walk with a bereaved family down the long aisle of our sanctuary, a sea of mourners and friends on either side, I think of the Israelites marching through the Red Sea and I feel comforted.  It happens again, when leaving the grave, custom invites those gathered there to form two rows in order to allow the mourning family to pass between them and feel their shelter and support.  How like the Israelites passing through the Sea, I sometimes think, and what a necessary miracle of faith to place one foot in front of the other, in that awful moment of leaving a loved one to rest.  

Oftentimes in the rituals of bereavement I share words of the 23^rd Psalm, as we will in tomorrow morning’s Yizkor service.  Even before the famous line, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” we read a little epigram:  “Mizmor L’David:  A Psalm of David.”  According to Jewish tradition, the Psalm was written by King David.

My friend Rabbi Les Gutterman has observed that “kings, now as then, have many privileges and prerogatives.  One they have never enjoyed is exemption from sorrow.  Death has a passkey into every home in the community including the royal palace.”  King David buried his son Absalom.  “Thus he says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’  One must walk through that valley.  We cannot run.  Bereavement sometimes comes quickly.  Healing is always a slow process.”  Shakespeare said it well:  “What wound did ever did heal but by degrees?” (Othello, II:iii).

Like the Nachshon and the Sea, the Psalmist cannot escape the Valley of the Shadow. It has an entrance no one can avoid.  The only way across the Valley, the only way across the Sea, is through.  And on the other side, we emerge transformed.  We discover that love does not die; people do; and that our loved ones may leave our world but in so many ways they never leave us, for we have been changed by them; and who we are—the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act, the way we move through the world—integrates the memories, the gifts, the holiness and the love that our dear ones gave to us.  And that is why we have Yizkor, not only to remind ourselves not only of how our loved ones lived, but also to acknowledge and even celebrate how we have been transformed by their lives.

When the Israelites came to the Sea, the guiding presence of God’s pillar of cloud and fire retreated from in front of them, to behind them, leaving nothing but the Sea before them.  

Rather than as an abandonment from on high, it is possible to understand this maneuver as a tender demonstration of God’s love.  I think the Torah wants us to know that God had their backs, as it were.  The only way across was through.  They walked into the Sea—a Promised Land before them, God’s gentle presence behind them.  

So May our Shepherd in dark valleys transform our cherished memories into sources of healing and lasting blessing.   Amen.