Honey and Oil from the Rock
A few weeks ago, I was preparing for a live video session for the class on Torah and resilience I am teaching this year and I came across a remarkable teaching. It is from Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, an 8-9th century midrash. It quotes a Rabbi Shila, who gets stuck while telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. His heart gets snagged by all the children whom the Egyptians threw into the river to die. We often tell that story as a backdrop to the miraculous rescue of Moses, who was set in a basket to float away to safety. But Rabbi Shila isn’t ready to move on that quickly. What about all the other children? What happened to them?
Rabbi Shila remembers a verse from Deuteronomy which says that God nursed the Israelites with honey out of the rock and oil out of the flint. He brings these two texts together – the children intended for drowning and the honey and oil out of the rock - in a beautiful piece of imagination. “Just imagine,” he proposes. What if the river cast up all those babies and threw them into the desert? Then God brought a rock to the mouth of each one to nurse them with milk as sweet as honey. But that wasn’t enough. God brought another rock to the side of each baby and rubbed them with oil, just like a new mother soothes her child with oil.
Then later when the Israelites crossed the Sea and God split it open for them to escape, all those babies who had been raised by God in the desert recognized the One who had saved them. “This is my God, whom I will praise!” they sang with the words of the Song of the Sea. This song is usually understood to be a song of war, praising a warrior God, but Rabbi Shila turns it into a joyful song of reunion between the nurturing Mother and the babies who were rescued from a terrible fate.
I just love this. So often when we are confronted by real difficulties, we move to one of two responses: we fight against it, focusing on what we don’t want, or we completely disengage. But Rabbi Shila offers us another possibility. He suggests that we ask ourselves what we really want. It doesn’t matter whether or not it is realistic. Rabbi Shila wanted a scenario where we experience God as a nurturing Mother and where the babies are saved and end up part of the community. This is not escapism, nor is it delusional. By offering this bit of imagination, he actually makes it possible for us to pause and grieve for the children who were murdered by Pharaoh. And by offering this vision, he gives us the opportunity to consider what it is we are working towards, not just what are we working against.
As we move towards Passover, the festival of freedom and miracles, may we make some space for our imagination, to ask ourselves - and each other - what we really want. Let’s come up with something new, surprising, as unexpected as milk and oil from a rock. Maybe we will find a new direction. Maybe we will find comfort. Maybe we will find a new way to connect with the Life Force within and find resilience for the road ahead.