Beshalach: The Miracle of Timing

I often return to the Biblical stories of my childhood assuming that, although I have grown up, the stories have not—especially the ones we tell at the Seder table each year. I imagine that adulthood simply means reaffirming what I believed as a child, only with greater confidence and authority.

But what if the opposite is true? What if faith demands that our imagination mature—that we relearn how to picture the great moments of the Torah, not as spectacles frozen in childhood fantasy, but as profoundly human, morally complex experiences?

Nowhere is this more true than in the story of the crossing of the Red Sea.

In my childhood version of the scene, it was a sunny day in the desert. The Israelites camped along the shoreline, waiting comfortably, perhaps eating their matzah, as the Egyptian army drew closer. The Israelites then crossed the sea in orderly fashion, and the waters held back to form a kind of sanitized hallway. They reached the far shore, the sea closed over their enemies, and Moses burst into song. Miriam and the women followed, singing and dancing with tambourines she had cleverly packed in anticipation of the miracle.

Though I had added layers over time—a touch of fear here, a bit of tension there—I had not truly formed a new image. The scene remained clean, heroic...and strangely distant. I admired it, but did not feel it.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks challenges this way of thinking about miracles. In an essay on this week’s parsha, he cites a scientific study suggesting that a strong easterly wind—similar to the one described in the parsha—could have pushed the waters aside long enough to expose a muddy land bridge. When the wind died down, the waters would have rushed back, sweeping away anything in their path.

Does this mean, Rabbi Sacks asks, that there was no miracle at the sea? On the contrary. The miracle lies not in the suspension of nature, but in its timing. Nature does what nature does—but in this case it did so at exactly the moment it was needed. 

Faith, on this view, does not deny how the world works. It just asks us to notice when the world works just right. This reframing asks us to move beyond a childish hunger for spectacle. It is not what happened that constitutes the miracle—it is when it happened.

It was only when I encountered Nicolas Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea (1633–1634) at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne that my imagination finally caught up with Rabbi Sacks’ idea.

 

 

Rashi, the medieval biblical commentator, teaches that the Torah does not waste words; nothing appears unless it teaches something essential. Poussin seems to follow a similar Torah-like discipline. Nothing in this painting is excess, and everything serves a purpose. There is no single “correct” way to read a painting, but artists carefully guide the viewer’s eye. Poussin leads us in continuous motion through the image.

We see Moses standing knee-deep in water, staff in hand, arm raised toward a darkened sky. Around him are people who have only just emerged from the sea. Some look back in fear, others in disbelief. One man clutches a bundle under his arm. Another balances possessions on his head. In the center, men struggle to pull a shield from the mud, while nearby someone drops to one knee, arms raised in thanksgiving. Scattered across the foreground lie abandoned helmets and armor of the Egyptian army.

In the background, the sea closes in. Figures pull one another from the water and stumble onto the shore. A heavy cloud looms above the waves. It’s not a desert shoreline at all; it’s something closer to a European riverbank—muddy, cold, familiar.

Poussin does not depict a confident, triumphant people, but something else entirely: confusion, fear, gratitude, exhaustion, and disbelief all at once. With this, he shows us what the Torah itself insists upon, if we are willing to see it. Yes, a slave nation has become free. But freedom is disorienting and frightening. It feels fragile, as though it could be lost at any moment.

Rabbi Sacks asks us to take this kind of freedom seriously—a God who works through nature and timing, and leaders who call on people to hold fast to their faith even when the ground beneath them begins to give way. Through the artist’s brushstroke, we are invited to see what the Torah has been teaching all along.

Many of us still expect miracles to look dramatic and reassuring. But that’s not what the Israelites experienced with the crossing of the Red Sea. God was challenging them—and us—to recognize that even miracles that come amidst uncertainty and fear.

 

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Ilana Epstein is Rebbetzin of Mizrachi Melbourne, serving alongside her husband, Rabbi Daniel Epstein, Rabbi of the community. Prior to moving to Australia, they served at Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London, previously the Cockfosters and North Southgate community, following seventeen years living and working in Israel.

Ilana is a writer and programme developer with experience in Jewish leadership and Holocaust education. She has led educational delegations to Poland with the Holocaust Educational Trust and March of the Living UK since 2015. In 2024, she was commissioned to write historical material for the adaptation of The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Ilana has served as Director of Educational Projects at Jewish Futures and previously as an educator for the United Synagogue. She devised and leads a development programme for the wives of European rabbis on behalf of the Conference of European Rabbis, and was selected as an inaugural Sacks Scholar in 2023.