U-Turn at Sea: 2 Reasons, 2 Rebbes

This week’s Torah portion is about the Splitting of the Sea and the Song at the Sea. Today is also Yud-Shvat, the 10th of Shvat, which is the yartzeit of the 6th Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1950) and also celebrates Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneersohn “The Rebbe” assuming leadership of Chabad in 1951. Here’s a thought that ties the two together.

Some Midrashic texts and biblical commentaries learn that the Splitting of the Sea was U-shaped, and the Jews actually ended back on Egyptian soil, only to later cross on a land-bridge further north (today the Suez Canal). If so, what was the need for the miraculous events at sea? It seems sort of unnecessary. Here are two answers:

a) The Egyptians were in hot pursuit. The events at sea was a way to shake the Egyptians off their tail, so the Exodus could procede unimpeded.

b) Splitting of the Sea wasn’t a mere escape route. Chassidus explains that it was a time of great spiritual revelation, peeling away the layers, the hidden depths of the sea became temporarily accessible. It says a maidservant at the Splitting of the Sea saw more holiness than Ezekiel saw in his prophecies. This experience allowed us to see beneath the proverbial surface, plumb spiritual depths, access that which is ordinarily inaccessible.

These two answers made me think of the two Rebbes of Yud-Shvat:

a) Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak was known as the Rebbe of Mesiras Nefesh (self-sacrifice). He became Rebbe of Chabad in 1920 at the start of Communism, and led the struggle for spiritual Jewish resistance in Soviet Russia. He was Rebbe in time of great spiritual and physical persecution. His Splitting of the Sea was to shake off the Russians or Nazis, or whoever was pursuing us, so that we could continue to be Jews despite the many challenges and obstacles.

b) The Rebbe (Rebbe Menachem Mendel) is known for many things, but in this sense I’d like to focus on his “peeling away the layers” revealing the Jewish spark in souls that many wrote off as lost, his ability to recognize and highlight holiness and spiritual opportunity in everyday life and in all places far and near, even in places remote from Jewish civilization. And as one Shabbos House student once crystallized it to me, “The Rebbe went all out to make Torah as accessible as possible. It is always near.” Splitting the Sea means opening up those resources and those hidden opportunities.