https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7aJ0Hx-VeKo
In this image here, this is which is surely one of the greatest images of all literature, this crossing of the Red Sea. I mean, this is this, it doesn’t get better or bigger or more influential or more perennial than this, you know, few chapters or couple of chapters. There’s this wonderful sense in which, you know, in verse 18, the Lord shall reign forever and ever. Now, let’s remember this is a refrain in the song that is a reminder of the transcendent sovereignty of the goodness of God, the goodness of reality itself. And that’s the principle that throws the horse and his rider into the sea. And there’s a beautiful sense there, I think, just at a spiritual level, you know, when you think about, you know, the difficulties of life, your own sins, the burden of your existence, of the wrongs you’ve committed, you know, there is a profound sense in that this is an image of forgiveness of the goodness of God over, you know, washing away, washing away our own weakness and wrongdoings and to remake the people, but also our own selves and in light of that. And I just want to quickly make a note for listeners here. So if you dispense with your own tyranny, you can cross the Red Sea. Yes, if God, it’s not we who dispense simply with it, but it’s God’s work, or you could say it’s the goodness of the order of reality itself, to which we cast ourselves upon, that can affect that moment of forgiveness. And I just want to quickly note, because when you’re talking about a text as iconic and as fundamental to our whole history of culture, as Exodus is, and of this chapter in particular, this amazing image of crossing the Red Sea, it is, of course, also given rise to all kinds of other works of art. And there’s just one I want to point out for people, and that is, many people have heard of the Messiah, of course, the work of Handel, but Handel wrote another biblical oratorio called Israel in Egypt that dramatizes in musical form the story of Exodus, but which has, as it were, its climax in the crossing of the Red Sea, and Miriam’s song, Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphant gloriously. The horse and his rider has he thrown into the sea, which is positioned in Handel as, as it were, the climax of the whole story, but of which the refrain that comes again in these gorgeous gathering, you know, thunderous chords, the Lord shall reign forever and ever. And I just want to note that if anyone’s interested, you can find many recordings, but my favorite, which I listen to full blast every Easter Sunday morning, is the Monteverdi Choir into the direction of John Elliott Gardner. It is a sublime work of music. Turn it up, man, and listen to it on repeat. So Jonathan, this pillar issue, it just linked things for me together like Matt, so because here’s something that’s really worth considering, given what we’ve been discussing. So imagine you cast a vision onto the unknown to pull yourself forward in faith. Okay, so then the question is, where does the vision come from if it’s a proper vision? And I would say the answer to that neurologically and psychologically is that it comes from the proper interplay between chaos and order. And it really does do that because the order is what you already know and the chaos is what’s yet to be learned, right? And there’s a meaningful conjunction of those two. And I say meaningful because when those two are conjoined, that’s when you get the experience of meaning like you do when you listen to music, because it’s partly predictable and partly unpredictable. And in a conversation that’s compelling, it refers to what you know because you can’t understand it, but it refers to what you don’t know because it wouldn’t be interesting. And when those are optimized, then this spirit of meaning that’s pulling you forward and where what the spirit of meaning manifests itself in its initial phases from the union perspective is a vision of the potential future. And so the visionary experience itself is called forth by the pillars. Yeah, and so I think the best way to understand it, it’s dangerous because some of the terms, they can become a bit slippery. So you can have this notion of chaos as potential in which you’re moving from your point of And then the pillars would be something more like concentric and eccentric forces, things that are pulling towards order or towards centrality or towards identity and things that are moving outside of them. So that way you have a sense of that which goes towards the strange and that which moves towards my own, right? And so those are usually the way that if you at some point when you said… You couldn’t keep yourself oriented without that, could you? If you weren’t being referred back to what you know, you’d be completely disoriented. And if you were only cast into what you don’t know, you’d be completely disoriented. So mercy and judgment would be a version of that. So mercy is that which I extend openness in order to bring things forward to me and I extend judgment in order to push things away from me. And so it’s like I harden to push things away and then they fragment, I open to bring things towards me and they… Let’s say so those two forces, like those two pillars… Yeah, right. You have to find your proper place between them. This is something which is as much in Christian thinking and I’ve seen many rabbis talk about this idea of the right hand and the left hand of God, you know, that this idea of bringing forward with the right hand, pushing away with the left hand, balancing that out in order to, let’s say, rear a child, for example, you have to have those two balanced sides. Okay. I’ve got one question for all of you. I’m very curious if it’ll strike you or not. Verse 20 in this chapter. 1520? Yes. And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand. See any problem? You mean she’s not the sister of Moses? Exactly. Isn’t that odd? I don’t have an answer. I’m asking an open question. She’s the sister of both Moses and Aaron. Why does it say sister of Aaron? Well, Aaron’s the spokesperson, so is she being cast as the sister of Aaron because she’s also the word here? I don’t know. Well, symbolically that would make sense. Or is that the further down the chain as it spreads from Moses to Aaron to her? Maybe that’s the hierarchical connection. Is there significance in her being a prophetess? Well, no, because he, well, that’s interesting because Aaron was described as prophet, but so was Moses. But also Miriam is a prophet that can use words, though, and songs, so maybe she’s more assimilated, she’s assimilated in that text to Aaron more than to Moses. Now women couldn’t be priests, could they? Right, right. But they can be prophets. It is another example of Torah egalitarianism of the sexes, which I could drive you crazy showing you how many examples. But anyway, I did not have an answer to my question. I just find it interesting. Intriguing. I have a question. Oh, so, Jonathan, this is back to the narrative question. So you said that you project faith and then you fill it with body, then you embody it, is that right? So I was thinking about the structure that this amount of complexity in the text, like the way we’re taking this apart and there’s so much meaning, is also part of why it’s repeated again and again and again in the way I was saying is inherently in certain regards undramatic, right, because it’s speaking to the procedural and to the ritual. And so what’s so interesting is we get through this big climactic action sequence and then there’s a poem or a song that’s about what we just saw that describes what we just saw again. So it’s like this is in some ways if you’re giving screenplay notes on the Bible, it’s like we’re going to tell you what happens, we’re going to show you what happens and then we’re going to say what just happened, right? It’s the worst way to dramatize something. And what’s interesting is that’s because the aim is not merely to dramatize, right? The aim is to encode, the aim is to create ritual. Is this song sang ritually in the synagogues? Yes. So the text has a liturgical aspect to it. And it’s said in the daily prayer. I know it by heart in Hebrew because it’s in the daily prayer. What do you suppose, what do you suppose, all of you, what do you suppose that you, like I’ve been struck by this friend of mine, Murphy, Rex Murphy, and he has great poetic education far deeper than mine and one of the things that’s so striking about Rex, I can’t get him to do it often enough, is he can spout off great swaths of poetry and I was always cynical about that as a kid. Why memorize anything, I thought, because you could just read it and I didn’t really know anybody who could do it. But then I met a few people who could and it’s phenomenally impressive. And he said that it deeply structures the way he thinks, having that encoded into it, you know, and so I’m wondering if you participate in these practices and you know these songs, it means you can sing the song, it means it can come out of you, it’s in you in some real sense. It’s not external anymore. And I wonder what that does to us perceptually and, because that, one of the things that shapes the way we perceive the world, literally perceive it, is by practicing habits, because we see the world through our habits in some sense and so you want to develop proper habits and this joyful singing is a kind of habit, but I can’t exactly understand what it does. Dennis was just saying before we started that if you write something down, he’s writing something down, you remember it better, right? You remember it better if you write it down than if you type it or tap it into your phone. There’s different ways that we’re encoded to receive information. And what’s so interesting to me with this is it’s if you’re trying to ritual, you sing it’s one version. So how do you build a mythology? So what is Star Wars? Is it a film? Yeah. Is it comic books? Yes. Is it spinoff TV series? Yes. There’s all these different mechanisms for engagement because when something’s a myth, it fragments out into all these different parts, right? And then it’s sort of pellet shot through the culture to some extent. And you could argue with Star Wars overly commercially so and a little bit cynically. But nonetheless, it’s like that’s how a mythology is built and moved through the land. And so this is a version of that in a lot of ways. It’s like here’s the story. It’s also a memory representation because one of the things you do if you want to remember something is, well, if you code it in poetry, that’s an aid to memory because of the rhythm, because that’s an aid to memory. And then the song, the melody is an aid to memory. And so if you tell the story and you act it out and you sing it, then it’s much more likely that it’s going to be remembered.