Achron shel Pesach: The Splitting of the Sea

Achron shel Pesach: The Splitting of the Sea

The technology of this feat defies understanding.  That is the point.  It was so wondrous that it convinced the Israelites that their Gd was powerful enough to take care of them, permanently protect them from the Egyptians - or anyone else foolish enough to start up with the protected people.  If one understood the methodology, how the sea was split for a time,  it would be less invincible. But the lack of understanding for such an outrageous event- for the modern mind-  makes it  incredible.

Immanuel Velikovsky, in the 1950's,  presented a theory of cosmic catastrophe( Worlds in Collision, New York: Laurel)   as an explanation  for the plagues and other miraculous events, including the parting of the Sea,  in the Exodus. (Carl Sagan , and many other recognized astronomers found these explanations inconsistent with the established understanding of physics.)  Attempts at scientific explanation, like the far-fetched Velikovsky's, change the miraculous event, like the splitting of the sea, from an act of Gd into an amazing event in need of explanation. The pre-(pseudo) scientific society attributed the event  to the author of the amazing- Gd. This relegates Gd to, either, (1) a temporary explanation for the primitive mind, or (2) the creator of a miraculous nature. 

Actually, for most amazing things - from genetic engineering to nuclear physics- the vast majority of people have only a psuedo- understanding, a belief that some credible person understands it.  Someone understands how the light goes on when I flip a switch. Often the people who do "understand" the wondrous things appreciate miraculous elements  within the process.  Elements that can be describe, not explained.  By virtue of their comprehension, they are aware of questions that may never be answerable. 

From the other side, from the ancient, preservation side: Why was this fabulous story not relegated to myth? Why was treated differently from the feats of Zeus?

Certainly, maintaining the story as history reflects  a great deal on the people who keep it as a foundational story.  These people needed the idea and hope that a powerful Gd would  protect them from the onslaught  of persecution that characterized their history.  They needed this rescue to be fact. And for those that survived, it remained so.   I imagine that when my father threw himself into the Bug River, when he was running away from Treblinka ( after the uprising), the story of the splitting of the sea formed part of the complex thought process that gave him the courage to plunge into that dangerous water, not knowing how to swim.  He remembered the interpretation of the verse, when Moses, confronted by the sea, asked Gd what to do now, Gd answered: Go forward!.  This is interpreted by the Rabbis to  imply that the waters did not split until Nachshon, the first to take the plunge, was up to his neck in water.  So my father, like Nachshon threw himself in .... when he had nothing to lose.

Maybe, the story is just true.