Pharaoh finally sends the Bnei Yisrael out of Egypt. With pillars of cloud and fire, Gd leads them toward Eretz Yisrael on a circuitous route, avoiding the Pelishtim (Philistines). Pharaoh regrets the loss of so many slaves, and chases after the Jews with his army. The Jews are very afraid as the Egyptians draw close, but G-d protects them. Moshe raises his staff, and G-d splits the sea, enabling the Jews to cross safely. Pharaoh, his heart hardened by G-d, commands his army to pursue, whereupon the waters crash down upon the Egyptian army. Moshe and Miriam lead the men and women, respectively, in a song of thanks. After three days' travel, only to find bitter waters at Marah, the people complain. Moshe miraculously produces potable water. In Marah they receive certain mitzvahs. The people complain that they ate better food in Egypt. Hashem sends quail for meat and provides manna, miraculous bread that falls from the sky every day except Shabbat. On Friday, a double portion descends to supply the Shabbat needs. No one is able to obtain more than his daily portion, but manna collected on Friday suffices for two days so the Jews can rest on Shabbat. Some manna is set aside as a memorial for future generations. When the Jews again complain about a lack of water, Moshe miraculously produces water from a rock. Then Amalek attacks. Joshua leads the Jews in battle, and Moshe prays for their welfare.

PARSHA INSIGHTS

The Rest of Your Life

“This is the thing that Hashem has commanded, ‘Gather from it, for every man according to what he eats…” (16:16)

My wife had an auntie Sarah who lived in Nes Tziona. She passed away a couple of years ago on the other side of a hundred years old. A couple of years before she died, she called my wife one day and said, “You know what happened to me? I just got back from the doctor, and he’s given me this pill, and I have to take one of these pills every day for the rest of my life!”

In a sense, every day is a lifetime.

There once was a young rabbi who was applying for a position in a certain village. A tour of the village included a walk around the graveyard. As he started to read the inscriptions on the tombstones, he realized that virtually every one or the inhabitants of these graves had died before they were thirty.

“This is terrible!” he said. “What tragedy happened here?” His guide answered, “No tragedy. In this village, the tradition is to list on the gravestones only the days and years that a person used for Torah, mitzvahs and good deeds.”

A day in life, a moment of connection with G-d is a lifetime. Every breath we take is a world of opportunity. Every moment. Time may look like a heartless, relentless march forever forward to our end. As poet William Carlos Williams said, “Time is a storm in which we are all lost.” But is time really a rapidly dwindling, limited resource that we must spend frivolously before it’s all gone?

The English word “moment” comes from the Latin word momentum, implying relentless movement – the march of time. The Hebrew word for time, rega, comes from ragua, which means a state of calm or rest. The rest of your life.

That doesn’t mean that time stops. As Chaucer wrote, “Time and tide wait for no man.” Rather, time itself is a series of stops, of discrete individual realities. In other words, it’s not that you are on the conveyor belt of time. The conveyor belt is like a sushi restaurant with different dishes passing before you, a conveyor belt that is constantly presenting new moments each for you to enter and inhabit. The Biblical phrase for aging, ba bayamim, literally means “entering into one’s days.”

The Zohar interprets the verse, “Abraham was old, ‘coming with days,’ to mean that “Abraham brought all of his days with him.” Days must be collected, harvested. Each moment’s individual calling and potential needs to be utilized to the maximum.

Every moment contains the ‘rest’ of your life, even when you’re ninety-seven years young.