Pharaoh's self-deception path to self-destruction
In some sense there really was only one plague, the last one, the slaying of the first-born, where we can see the earlier ones as being meant to wake up Pharaoh, to bring him to relent and let the Jewish People free, and in that way he could have avoided that one terrible plague, which caused the irreversible - death - as opposed to the earlier ones which were economic damage and temporary health issues etc.
This week's portion has the conclusion of the plague-saga - the last three, locusts, darkness, first-born. Even before the darkness was dispelled, the next and last and most terrible plague was initiated, unfortunately the Jews were not freed even after all the 9 warning-plagues, and so the real plague descended on Egypt.
[Note how 11:1-3 seem out of place (especially 2,3), but the explanation is that these words were a communication-prophecy to Moses given while he was speaking to Pharaoh!]
During the plague of Darkness, when Pharaoh tells Moses he doesn't want to ever see his face again, God then warns Pharaoh via Moses of the plague of the firstborn.
However, actually this plague had been long foretold.
After the burning bush encounter, Moses sets out to Egypt, and already then, before even arriving in Egypt, God tells Moses the initial message to be given to Pharaoh, and not only is it premature, but it is a warning to Pharaoh about the very last of the plagues, much later - the plague of the first-born! So this is why I say that really there was only this one plague and the rest were to wake him up, in order to prevent the need for this plague.
[As I mentioned in last week's message, each of the plagues was 'mida kneged mida' divinely-meted out karma, see the commentary last week.]
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So :
Why didn't Pharaoh give in to these warnings? Pharaoh did not initially listen to the request to free the Jews, and didn't heed the first plague, and only after that God "hardened his heart".
Some questions arise:
1. How was this accomplished?
2. Was this not taking away bchirah chofshis (free choice)?
3. What was gained via this hardening of Pharaoh's heart and going through all the plagues?
Answers:
Ramban: God hardened Pharoah's heart in order to give Pharoah free will, not to take it away - to give courage to Pharaoh to overcome the fear caused by the plagues, so that he could freely choose instead of being cowed into submission.
Abarbanel: The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was not the result of Hashem’s action but rather his own reaction to the plagues. When he saw that the plagues were only temporary phenomena, the text tells us that Pharaoh hardened his heart.So I would say that God deliberately brought about a situaiton which would enable Pharaoh to delude himself, in other words God crafted a scenario which would lead Pharaoh to the option of laughing off the divine aspect, and in this way we can say that "God hardened his heart".
My interpretation is: God acted in ways which allowed Pharaoh to fool himself.
Specifically:
a. by deliberately sending an old man with a speech impediment on this mission as the representative of the Jews and of God,;
b) by making Pharaoh feel that this God was so weak that Pharaoh's permission was required in order to get the Jews to leave even for a few days, instead of threatening to kill him if he didn;t immediately release the jews from slavery! And why hadn't this God intervended a few hundred years earlier!? A very weak God indeed, easily manipulated!
c) After each plague was introduced by Moses, Pharaoh managed to get rid of it via beseeching Moses, promising to release the Jews, and then when the plague was gone, he would again refuse to release them. Thjs allowed Pharaoh to feel he tricked Moses/God into taking away the plague, and then going back on his word, again and again, as the Torah describes in detail, so Pharaoh fooled himself to believe he could twist God around his finger -
This was the sense in which God was 'hardening Pharoah's heart',and so it was done in a way that did not remove Pharaoh's free will.
Note: The Torah says "God hardened Pharaoh's heart": as God says "in order to show the divine might" : Pharaoh's obdurate refusal led to as God says the opportunity to show the mighty Egyptian corrupt slave-civilization "the divine might" (perhaps partially as I pointed out, in order to cause change in overall behavior, eg hoping to prevent final plague)
What was the end result of all his? Why this was done?
My interpretation: So that Pharoah would be led to his own destruction, to go into sea as it split to save the Jews from HIM! This would be a supremely insane act, however he was confident he could manipulate God in that situation too.In this way, since it was his choice to enter the sea, his destruction was not technically a punishment but rather cause-effect due his own undertaking.
May we be blessed to use our free will to choose positive directions in our life, not the self-destruction that Pharaoh chose! And when things go well for us despite wrong choices, let us not be misled to think that we will always get away with it - hopefully we can choose right and avoid 'the last plague' and avoid a Pharaonic temptation to spite God by 'entering the split sea' !
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What we can learn regarding how to prevent disaster from how Pharaoh ends up drowning (From this week's Torah portion):
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Have you ever attended a cult-movie-screening, where the audience knows the movie by heart and accompanies the characters in their journey through the film, yelling out warnings when they are about to face danger?
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Imagine Pharaoh's people watching in livestream as he chased after the Jews. Suddenly the sea splits. As told in this week's portion of the Torah, the waters form a wall on either side, and the bottom of the sea is dry land, and the Jews are able to escape by just walking right through. It is clear to the Egyptian watchers that this is yet another miracle wrought by the God of the Jews to now to save them from their Pharaoh's army. And then to their horror they see Pharaoh order a charge, right into the split sea!
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One can imagine them yelling, screaming at the top of their lungs: "No, no, don't go in! Don't you realize their God is protecting them, their God is the only force holding back the sea, to protect them from YOU!?
What happens if he lets go while you are in it!? If the only reason the sea is being split is to save the Jewish People from YOU, then why do you think YOU will be let through!?".
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But pharaoh and his army, flush with the chase, are completely oblivious to that which is obvious to all of them back home....
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Why?
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Because Pharaoh had had such success overcoming the plans of the God of the Jews, getting Moses to cancel the plagues with a promise to let the Jews go, and then reneging on his promise, scorning the messenger Moses who was an older stuttering man, and arrogantly thinking that God was asking him to let the Jews go because God was not powerful enough to take the Jews out without Pharaoh's permission.
And so he was now supremely confident he could yet again fool God, overcome God's plan in this new circumstance.
And so he ended up rushing to his own destruction.
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What can WE learn from this?.
It was not that God destroyed the Egyptians, but rather when the Jews passed through part of the sea, God had no more reason to hold it back and let it go, back to its natural course, and the Egyptians placed themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, and brought destruction upon themselves.
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In other words Pharaoh was led to his own destruction (going into the sea as it split, confident he could manage God in that too); he was given this last chance to recognize God's actions, to heed the final warning of seeing the sea split to let the Jews escape him - and if not, his destruction would be his own fault, the result of his own vain delusions.
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There's an anecdote about a guy who needs parking, made a prayer and a commitment, and as he is saying the prayer he sees a parking space open up and promptly says 'oh,please cancel my commitment God, I don't need your intervention anymore'. (ie as soon as God grants him his request, he assumes he received it 'naturally')
Tie-in to Torah portion: The Reed Sea (yam suf) split after there was a wind all night, ie making it seem 'natural'. Often, God's intervention is invisible, enabling us to mislead ourselves.
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The message: we (as a people or perhaps also as individuals) shouldn't make the same mistake as Pharaoh, (who fooled himself to believe he could twist God around his finger; but he was thus was led to his own destruction), and think that God's messages are 'natural occurrences'.
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May we be blessed to have the humility not to be be pleased with our selves when we "made it past" something that was meant as a warning sign.
If we act on this, we can avoid leading ourselves to our own destruction, and instead to merit to be with those crossing the split sea towards the Promised land.
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Imagine Pharaoh's people watching in livestream from their homes as he and his army chased after the Jews. Suddenly they see the sea splittimg, and the Jews are able to escape by walking through on dry land. It is clear to the watchers back home that this is yet another miracle wrought by the God of the Jews to, now to save them from Pharaoh's amy.
What an amazing sight they see - the waters form a wall on either side and the bottom of the sea is dry land.
And then to their horror they see Pharaoh order a charge, right into the split sea. One can imagine them yelling, screaming at the top of their lungs: "No, no, don't go in! Don;t you realize their God is protecting them, their God is the only force holding back the sea, to protect them from you!? What happens if he lets go while you are in it!?".
But pharaoh and his army, flush with the chase, are completely oblivious to that which is obvious to all of them back home.... Why? Because Pharaoh had had such success overcoming the plans of the God of the Jews that he was supremely confident he could do it yet again, in this new circumstance.
In this way Pharaoh was led to his own destruction (going into the sea as it split, confident he could manage god in that too) - in other words he was given this last chance to recognize God's actions, and if not, his destruciton would be his own fault, the result of his own vain delusions. It was not that God destroyed the Egyptians, but rather when the Jews passed through part of the sea, God had no more reason to hold it back and let it go, back to its natural course, and the Egyptians placed themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, and brought destruciton upon themsleves.
In retrospect, we can see now why God gave in to Pharaph's repeated pleas, his clearly-emplty promises to release the Jews - it was so that Pharoah would be led to his own destruction, to go into sea as it split to save the Jews from HIM! This would have been seen by most people as a supremely insane act, however Pharaoh was confident he could manipulate God in that situation too.
[Note: In this way, since it was his choice to enter the sea, his destruction was not technically a punishment but rather cause-effect due his own undertaking. :) ]
An anecdote: A guy who desperately needs parking, made a prayer and a promise to God, what he would do if God gave him a parking spot right away, and as he is saying this he sees a parking space open up and promptly says 'oh,please cancel my commitment God, I don't need your intervention anymore'. (ie as soon as God grants him his request, he assumes he received it 'naturaly')
Tie-in to parsha: The Reed Sea (yam suf) split after there was a wind all night, ie making it seem 'natural'. Similalry, oten, God's intervention is invisible, enabling us to mislead ourselves.
The message: we shouldn't make the same mistake as Pharaoh, (who fooled himself to believe he could twist God around his finger; but he was thus was led to his own destruciton), we shouldn't be pleased withour selves when we "made it past" something that was meant as a warning sign, because eventually we will be leading ourselves to our own destruction.
From the incident ofthe tanin-rod, etc..we see that God thought a few steps ahead,ie clearly anticipating the magicians' action of casting their own rods etc.. ie God allowed them to misead themselves,thereby setting the all up for great======catastropic failure....
Joseph's posthumous gift
Joseph refrained from doing what his father Yakov had done - asking his family to bury him in Israel right after his death. Instead, he said that when God takes the Jews out of Egypt, that's when they should take him to burial in Israel. This was in order to grant the Jewish people exiting Egypt an additional much-needed merit in order to get the Reed Sea to split to save them from the pursung Egyptians.We ended up as slaves in Egypt because we sold our brother as a slave to Egypt, and according to the Rabbis the sea splitit only due to the merit of Joseph, and perhaps also of our carrying his bones out of Egypt - a 'closing of the circle', bringing him back to the land from which he was kidnapped.
Joseph's posthumous gift: closing circles
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Joseph refrained from doing what his father Yakov had done - asking his family to bury him in Israel right after his death. Instead, he said that when God takes the Jews out of Egypt, that's when they should take him to burial in Israel. In other words even though their situaiton was ecellent in his day, he was able to foresee (with divine inspiration) that they would end up getting stuck there, and need God's help to exit.
His giving up the great merit of being buried right away in the Land was in order to grant the Jewish people exiting Egypt an additional much-needed merit - according to the Rabbis the sea splitit only due to the merit of Joseph, and perhaps also of our carrying his bones out of Egypt in order to get the Re(e)d Sea to split to save them from the pursung Egyptians.
We ended up as slaves in Egypt because we sold our brother as a slave to Egypt and we merited escaping from there via the sea opening when we 'closed the circle', bringing him back to the land from which he was kidnapped.
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May we all merit as individuals and as a People, to fix whatever we broke, to close the circle in a positive way, and merit deliverance from our own self-destructiver paths.
Now we can understand why God 'hardened Pharaoh's heart as described above: So that Pharoah would be led to his own destruction; in this way, since it was his choice to enter the sea, his destruction was not technically a punishment but rather cause-effect due his own decisions.
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Why we merited the splitting of the sea:
We got to Egypt via sale of Joseph as slave to Egypt (Kabbalah says 'tell dreams only to those who love you' (close friends), because the interpretation given to the dreams brings about their actualization!, the brother’s’ interpreted it as bowing to Joseph, and so that’s what happened.), So God did mida keneged midah to wake the Jews up, causing the descendants to fall into slavery there themselves for no fault of their own. So the larger story of the exodus starts when Yosef’s brothers sent him out of the land of Israel to Egypt and concludes when generations later they transported him back (his bones, for burial);
Selling Joseph was an act of “sin’at chinam” – baseless hatred – by the brothers towards Yoseph, and the story concludes with an act of “chesed shel emet” towards Yoseph by the descendants of the brothers (kindness granted to a one after their death, an action that is not meant for reward since it is enacted when the beneficiary can by no longer repay the kindness). Tradition teaches that this earned them the splitting of the sea when pursued by the Egyptians. In other words: "sinat chinam" leads to exile, chesed/"ahaavat chinam" leads to redemption.
Conclusion/summary: How Joseph saved the Jews:
he overcame his original flaw of telling bad tales about his brothers to his father and did the reverse, hiding from his father their sale of him. This is his teshuva repentance. And he accomplishes it by giving the brothers the opportunity to do teshuva by protecting benjamin as they should have protected him.
The brothers sold Joseph to Egypt as a slave, and so they ended up slaves there, and closed the circle when they exited Egypt with Joseph's bones, taking him home... and this is how they merited that the sea opened for them.May we merit to overcome our flaws, and that the seas open for us and for our family.
Answers:
Ramban: God hardened Pharoah's heart in order to give Pharoah free will, not to take it away - to give courage to Pharaoh to overcome the fear caused by the plagues, so that he could freely choose instead of being cowed into submission.
Abarbanel: The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was not the result of Hashem’s action but rather his own reaction to the plagues. When he saw that the plagues were only temporary phenomena, the text tells us that Pharaoh hardened his heart.
So I would say that God deliberately brought about a situaiton which would enable Pharaoh to delude himself, in other words God crafted a scenario which would lead Pharaoh to the option of laughing off the divine aspect, and in this way we can say that "God hardened his heart".
How?
a. By sending in an old man with a speech impediment as the representative of the Jews;
b. By having this representative ASK Pharoah to let the Jews go, instead of threatening (ie making it seem that God required Pharaoh's permission,)
c. After the first plague was introduced by Moses, Pharaoh managed to get rid of it via beseeching Mose, promising to release the Jews, when the plague was gone, but then after the plague was indeed ended by Moses at Pharaoh;s request, Pharaoh refused to release them. And then the next plague he made the same promise, and got his request, and reneged again! He got away with doing this several times in a row! What a fool this man Moses, and hs god, for falling for such a supremely obvious trick, and several times in a row!
As a result, Pharoah believed he could twist God around his finger - that is, by giving in each time, God allowed Pharaoh to fool himself. This was deliberate, and so in this sense God was 'hardening Pharoah's heart', However, it was done in a way that did not remove Pharaoh's free will.
Joseph refrained from doing what his father Yakov had done - asking his family to bury him in Israel right after his death. Instead, he said that when God takes the Jews out of Egypt, that's when they should take him to burial in Israel. This was in order to grant the Jewish people exiting Egypt an additional much-needed merit in order to ge tthe Reed Sea to split to save them from the pursung Egyptians.
We ended up as slaves in Egypt because we sold our brother as a slave to Egypt, and according to the Rabbis the sea splitit only due to the merit of Joseph, and perhaps also of our carrying his bones out of Egypt - a 'closing of the circle', bringing him back to the land from which he was kidnapped
Moses asks Pharaoh for a 3-day pass to the desert. The Jews 'borrow' jewelry. Did Pharaoh understand that the jews were actually leaving for good? If not immediately, when did he realize it?
Did Moses tell the Jews that God intended to take them out of Egypt, and to israel, or did they too think it was only for a three-day journey - which would also explain why they didn't pack lots and lots of food and were caught with unbaked dough as they had to leave.
Would the Jews have agreed to leave Egypt if they had known it was for good? And that thye would have to enter a new land and conquer it themselves? A land without the abundant water and vegetation of the Nile?
Just as nowadays there are those who deny the miraculous aspects of the establishemnt, victory and sucess of the State of Israel, attribuiting it all to natural causes, since God is not manifest, and since there are many tribulations and negaticve aspects, so too during the exodus period: people had expected they would be transported on Ealge's wings to the land of Israel in a few minutes and there they would relax forever in a garden of eden flowing with milk and honey. But uit seems that God has a different modus operandi. His messenger may be a stuttering 80 year old man, and the Pharoah's of the world seem to be able to easily divert the plan claimed to be that of God.
God knew that after hundreds of years of slavery the Jewish People were not in a state of being capable of recognizing divine intervention if it was subtle, or if it was seemingly intermittent, or was challenging in some way, Therefore the exodus was planned in a somewhat devious manner, with the Jewish people being deliberatley kept uit of the loop or even being misled about what was occuring:
The Jewish People are told to borrow jewelry, as if they will be returning, which is a way of deliberatley misleading them to think that they would not be undertaking wat would prove to be a difficult arduous long journey ending in painful wars of conquest.
There is the constant refrain of 3-days of prayer in the desert, not an escape.
God took the Jews in a roundabout way, since they would have been deterred by the challenges they would have noticed if going via the direct route
Note:
God took the Jews in a roundabout wayand says Pharaoh will say [14:3] “they are lost” “nevuchim hem” but instead Pharaoh is told [14:15] “the Nation escaped” “ki barach ha’am”. Why the discrepancy?
The Torah says: “Pharaoh will say to the Jewish People ‘they are lost’” instead of ‘Pharaoh will say about the Jewish People ‘they are lost’”: (“ve omar par’oh lebnei yisrael” rather than “odot bnei yisrael”) why this odd usage?
Answer: Pharaoh had given permission only for a temporary furlough, not freedom. However the Jewish people did not know that Pharaoh had been asked only for this short-term permission: Perhaps God did not want them to know, and be panicked – just as God was concerned lest they panic at the sight of war - and so he told Moshe to tell them that Pharaoh would chase them only because he thought they had lost the way and were vulnerable but really; however in actuality Pharaoh chased after them because he just found out that they were not returning!
So God asked Moshe to do the maneuver to return to the place called pi hachirot to trick the Jews as to the reason for Pharaoh’s change of heart, and to trick Pharaoh into thinking he could prevail again against God’s Will.
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God took the Jews in a roundabout way and we are told that God said: “lest the nation see war and be afraid..”: To whom did God say this?
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ki barach ha’am: God says paroh will say “nevuchim hem” but instead paroh is told “ki barach ha’am”. P gave permission only for three day pass, no freedom (he bargained about with or without children, animals etc, clearly this was about a three day pass….
Maybe the Jews did not know that p gave permission only for a three day pass, and god did not want them to know so he told moshe to tell them that p was chasing them only because he thought they had lost the way ansd were vulnerable but really it was because he just found out that they were not returning! So god asked them to do the maneuver to return to pi hachirot to trick the jews not paraoh! (maybe this explains usage of “ve omar p lebnei yisrael” rather than “odot bnei yisrael”.
Par’oh saw that there were no more plagues, and he was not stopped from chasing the jews and this non-intervention by god constituted the hardening of his heart by god.
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Because God said “lest the nation….”
And does God ‘speak’ – does God have vocal chords? Was there air ‘near’ God to carry the sound waves……? Of course not.
This allows us to understand that elsewhere similar usage is meant non-literally: for example: “let there be light”.
We can know what it does NOT mean (actual vocalization, namely vibrations of air molecules at standard temperature and pressure etc), but what it DOES mean is not as clear.
Maybe Pharaoh figured that the Jews needed to go into the desert for the religious observance because their God was located there – and perhaps this was why this God’s power could be so easily challenged in Egypt, for example by him and by his magicians.
Then when he saw that even in the desert they were lost he took heart and chased them.
Pharaoh let the Jews go due to the overwhelming power of God’s plagues. He had agreed only to a few day holiday but suspected that they wouldn’t return. He had been able for to twist Moses and God around his fingers with his reneging, and therefore he figured that their God’s power was sometimes potent and sometimes not, and so he kept an eye on this ‘power level’ and waited for the right moment to recapture the Jews.
As soon as he was told that the Jews were lost he reasoned that the power was at a low and he could prevail, and so he gave chase. (As before, God’s acting in a way which allowed Pharaoh to delude himself that he is more powerful, is what is meant by “And God strengthened Pharaoh’s heart”)
Pharaoh even pursued the Jews into the sea as it was split because he did not see any plagues coming his way despite the fact that he was chasing the Jewish People.
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Beshalach
Since setting the calendar is the first mitzvah given to the Jewish People, Traditional Commentators ask why the Torah didn’t begin from here rather than from the creation account.
Answer: Tradition teaches that not only is the power to determine the calendar given to the Jewish Court, but the court even has the power thereby to determine physical reality: bodily changes (tissue regeneration) dependent on elapsed time can reverse themselves: this seems impossible.
What makes it possible for us to understand this concept is the creation account. It presents God as all-powerful creator of:
all that is physical, including bodily tissue;
the sun, moon and stars which determine the calendar;
the laws of nature;
causality, and time itself.
It is then comprehensible how it is possible for the court’s decisions to affect nature: the God of time, nature, physical law described in Genesis delegates this power to the court.
In this way the creation account serves as an introduction to this mitzvah.
The first mitzvah given to the Jewish People is that of sanctifying the order of time (hachodesh hazeh lachem), according to the emergence of a ‘new moon’: Traditionally the Jews are also compared to the moon:
Perhaps one can offer the following in the ‘light’ of this metaphor:
When we see ‘light’ we should know (that as with the moon) it is only a reflection of the light from a higher source.
The moon wanes not because the light has stopped but because the earth blocks the sun’s light from reaching it – when we perceive a lack of ‘light’ from above it is only because our ego is blocking its flow.
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The Rabbis teach that God makes shidduchim, and it is considered as ‘difficult’ for God as the splitting of the Sea: (Kasheh zivugo…..yam suf).
In what sense was the splitting of the sea difficult for God? And why is aranging marriages just as difficult for God?
In splitting the sea God created such a great miracle and yet the Jews were hesitant to plunge in; seeing this hesitation and lack of belief was very ‘difficult’ for God;
In the same way God creates matches that are in the end good for us, but this is not always obvious to us, and so some of us are so hesitant, and so from God's perspective this is a very similar siutation.
An important aspect of the plagues is stressed in the story - the plague of darkness did not affect the Jews, nor did the firstborn plague. This can help us understand an aspect of the drowning of the Egyptians in the reed sea, why the Egyptians were not more afraid to enter into a situaiton of the sea splitting to let the Jews escape from them - they erroneously thought that they too could use this dry-land passageway. However it is not that the Jews managed to get to the other side while the Egyptians were still in the sea-bed and the sea closed in after the jews emerged from it, but rather the waters fell back on the Egyptians while the Jews were still inside the sea, ie the miracle affected the Jews but not the Egyptians, the sea where the Jews were was dry land while the sea where the Egyptians were.
moroh - sweetened water
ani Hashem rofeacha
12 eynos hamayim
Slov, meat
"mi yiten musenu bamidbar"
Mon, shabbos collecting
Water, hit rock
"Od me'at uskoluni"
Amalek attacks
The history of the two nations, the Jews and Amalek, are intertwined:
Esav, was the enemy of Yakov.
Esav’s descendant Amalek is the enemy of the Jewish People.
At the beginning of Biblical history Esav “cried out a very bitter cry” when he heard that the blessings were taken by Yakov, and he vowed to kill Yakov.
At the end of Biblical history Yakov’s descendant Mordechai “cried out a very bitter cry” (same words) when he heard of Esav’s descendant Haman’s decree to kill the Jews.
When the Jews complain in anger to Moses in our portion, Moses “cries out” to God [17:4], and the Torah uses the same word “vayits’ak” for “cried out”.
Esav disdained (dishonored) the birthright and the Torah uses the word ‘vayivez’;
his descendant Haman decided to kill the Jewish People as a whole, disdaining to kill only Mordechai, and the megilla uses the same word ‘vayivez’ for that decision.
After leaving Egypt, in a slide downward culminating in the attack by Amalek, the Jews complained about the lack of water: later they did so again at the bitter waters “marah”, [23:25] the word used to describe the “bitter (‘marah’) cry” of Esav, and of Mordechai.
The Jews sinned by trying to gather the man on Shabbat, the word “the man” being “haman” in Hebrew: the word is conspicuous by its absence in [16:27] – perhaps to emphasize that this name is to be blotted out!
Esav dishonored the birthright in that he preferred food, and the Jews, who had been called “my firstborn son” by God, were now complaining about food.
We are told that Esav came from the field “weary”, and we are told that God said that the Jews complained because they were “weary”. [see Ex 17:11-13, Deut (Dvorim) 25:18] for more on the theme of weariness in this connection.
The Jewish People have to be on their guard: throughout history, when times are difficult for the Jews and the tendency is to relax one’s guard out of ‘weariness’, our national alter-ego the Amalekites – whether the actual nation or the negative power they represent - is ready to pounce.