One of my favorite TV shows in recent years is a silly but sweet game show called Floor is Lava. The show is based on a game you may have played as a child: 3 teams of 3 contestants each (often family units or groups of close friends) must get from one side of a room to the other without touching the floor, which is made entirely of “lava”. Scattered around the room are various surfaces onto which contestants can crawl, cling, walk, or jump. Whichever team manages to get more of its members to the other side of the room than the others wins $10,000…and, of course, a lava lamp.
Among the reasons I think I have appreciated Floor is Lava so much is that it is, in a sense, a perfect metaphor for the tumultuous time through which we are living. The show itself appropriately came out at the height of the pandemic. And the pandemic in turn erupted during what was already an era of extraordinary upheaval – a time of technological transformation, political turmoil, and environmental disaster. As has been the case throughout Jewish history, all this unrest has been fueling an alarming rise in antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world.
More recently, the horrific terror attack of October 7th has compounded our sense of instability and insecurity as Jews. The very place that was supposed to have been our people’s safe haven was revealed to be terrifyingly vulnerable. And paradoxically as we witness the staggering number of civilian deaths and displacements in Gaza after October 7th, we wrestle not only with the reality of Jewish vulnerability but also the price of Jewish power. Meanwhile, over these past few months, Jews in the Diaspora have been increasingly targeted for discrimination, harassment, and even violence on account of our real or perceived association with Israel, even from individuals and communities many of us had long regarded as allies, compounding our fear with isolation and anger.
Metaphorically speaking, we are living in a time where it feels like all the floors are lava, where the ground beneath our feet and all around us seems to be on fire, imperiling our every step.
As a people that is well over three thousand years old, Jews have collectively lived through many eras of upheaval. We have endured revolutions and conquests; crusades, inquisitions and expulsions. One of the tumultuous times that looms largest in the Jewish consciousness is the setting of today’s Torah portion, parashat Shemot. In parashat Shemot, we are told of the brutal oppression of our ancestors in ancient Egypt, how Pharaoh and a nation of collaborators, enablers, and bystanders enslave an entire people – young and old; men, women, and children – a subjugation the Torah describes as uniquely cruel, using the rare word b’farekh, with ruthlessness (1:13). To compound this suffering, Pharaoh eventually plots a genocide, ordering the systematic murder of all Israelite baby boys.
Against this backdrop, one Israelite mother, perhaps aided by courageous midwives, bravely resists Pharaoh’s decree, placing her baby boy in a basket and sending him down the Nile in the hopes that he might be discovered and saved by someone, anyone, in Egypt who still possesses a beating human heart. He is discovered by none other than Pharaoh’s daughter, who recognizes right away that this is an Israelite child, and in direct defiance of her father’s command, takes the child and commits to raising him in her household. She names him Moses – the one who is drawn from the water.
Sometime later, when the boy has grown up, he witnesses an Egyptian brutally beating an Israelite slave, and makes the fateful decision to intervene, killing the Egyptian and burying him in the sand. When Pharaoh hears about this, he orders Moses be put to death, so Moses flees into the wilderness, ending up in the neighboring territory of Midian, where he is taken in by a Midianite priest, whose daughter he eventually marries. Moses starts a new life in Midian, tending his father-in-law’s flocks.
One fateful day, as he was driving his sheep into the wilderness, he notices something strange: a bush that was on fire but somehow not consumed by the flames, ha-s’neh bo’er ba-esh, v’ha-s’neh einenu ookal. Astonished by this, he goes to get a closer look, and as he approaches, something even more amazing happens – God calls out to him mitokh ha-s’neh, from within the bush, and commands him to lead his fellow Israelites to freedom from their enslavement to Pharaoh.
It’s a lot for Moses to process in the moment. But it’s no easier for us to make sense of this scene ourselves: of all the ways God could have revealed God’s self to Moses, of all the ways God could have communicated with the person chosen as Israel’s liberator, of all the bushes in all the deserts in all the world, why did God call to Moses from this one? What are we to make of God’s choice to appear in a bush that was burning but not consumed?
Our sages offer a number of possible explanations, but the one that resonates for me, particularly in this moment, is found in the medieval midrashic collection known as Exodus Rabbah. According to this midrash, God sees that Moses is worried that the Egyptians might succeed in destroying the Israelites through their ruthless oppression. After all, he had witnessed it himself, when he fought off the taskmaster, and saw how his solitary act of resistance met with such a swift and fierce response from Pharaoh’s forces. The Egyptian people themselves showed no sign of any significant opposition to Pharaoh’s despotic regime. Many were active collaborators, helping create the systems and norms that entrenched the oppression and rendered resistance futile. Against this pervasive power, the Israelites would have appeared to any rational observer to lack the ability to mount any successful uprising themselves, and there did not appear to be any force willing or able to come to their aid.
The precarious position of the Israelites in Egypt – profoundly isolated and oppressed; engulfed by the flames of danger and doom – must have seemed hopeless. So to see a bush on fire but resisting destruction must indeed have been an absolute marvel to Moses. According to this midrash, God’s purpose in appearing in and speaking from a bush that was burning but not consumed by the flames was to signal to Moses that the destruction of the Israelites through Egyptian oppression was not only not inevitable, but perhaps even impossible. Netzah Yisrael lo yishaker, says the biblical prophet Samuel – the eternity of the Jewish people will not be proven a lie.
Yet the question Moses asks upon witnessing this marvel resonates in our time – madu’a lo yiv’ar ha-sneh? Why does the bush not burn up? How does this bush endure despite being engulfed by flames? How do the Jewish people survive? If we must burn, how do we burn like this bush?
According to tradition, the kind of bush Moses encounters in the wilderness, in Hebrew a s’neh, isn’t any old shrub. It’s a specific species of plant. A s’neh bush has deep roots that enable it to access water underground, even in a dry desert environment. And a bush with deep roots is not easily burned by fire. So too, the Jewish people can survive even in harsh conditions, even when engulfed by flames, so long as our roots remain deep, so long as we remain true to who we are.
The nature of the oppression that our ancestors endured in Egypt is that it threatened not just bodies but also souls. According to the classical commentators, that is the reason the Torah uses the unusual word b’farekh, to describe the Israelites’ subjugation. The term conveys the sense of physical cruelty, but can also be understood as a conjunction of b’feh rakh, with soft speech – the Egyptians offered the Israelites the option of assimilating, effectively forcing the Israelites to choose between subjugation or annihilation. In that sense, Egyptian oppression was just like modern antisemitism. Yes, antisemitism endangers Jewish lives, but perhaps even more pernicious, it pressures us to blend in and escape notice – to abandon our identity and eventually to lose what makes us special in the first place. Yet while remaining noticeably different is to risk discrimination, persecution, violence, and even death, abandoning our uniqueness is to guarantee our own people’s extinction.
Indeed, according to tradition, the Israelites were able to withstand generations of oppression in Egypt because they held onto their distinctive national identity by maintaining the practice of giving their children Hebrew names. That, we are taught, is why the book of Exodus is called “Shemot,” the Hebrew word for names, and why our national liberation story begins with a list of the names of the Children of Israel who originally immigrated to Egypt. Just as a s’neh bush can survive a fire, Israel’s survival and liberation was made possible by remaining connected to our roots.
But difference for its own sake is not enough to secure Jewish survival. Neither even is maintaining our difference simply as a strategy of resistance. As my friend Bari Weiss once put it, the Jewish people “were not put on this earth to be anti-antisemites.” Yes, it is important to embrace our Jewish roots, but our calling as Jews is greater than national self-preservation. A s’neh bush is able to withstand fire not because of the strength of its roots per se, but rather because its roots keep it constantly connected with its source of hydration deep under the parched soil. So too, the midrash says, it’s not identity itself that enables the Jewish people to endure whatever trials come our way, but rather the fact that our identity is rooted in our people’s longstanding and time-tested life-source: Torah.
Rabbinic tradition often likens Torah to water because just as water sustains life, Torah has always been a powerful anchor for Jewish identity. Through more than two-thousand years of precarious homelessness, Jewish faith and practice has formed the foundation of our understanding of what it means to be, and what makes one, Jewish. For all our beautifully divergent perspectives on what Torah means and teaches, our people’s attachment to Torah is part of what has enabled us to survive all these tumultuous centuries.
More importantly, Torah is a source of stability during tumultuous times because it points us forward. It reminds us not just what we are as Jews, but why – why our survival matters, that we are needed to help God build a world of love, justice, and peace. Possessing that sense of purpose empowers us to persist. Additionally, Torah tells us not only where we are striving to go, but also how we get there. In the Torah, we have a map for getting to the Promised Land of a world repaired. Having such a map helps us navigate the perilous present.
But the true power of Torah is that it enables us to diminish the danger altogether. More than just helping us withstand destructive flames, Torah, like water, provides a path to extinguish them and prevent them from reigniting. After all, it is the absence of moisture that transforms a thriving plant into flammable tinder. Similarly, it is a lack of love and justice in our world that fuels the flames of oppression and violence. When we heed the Torah’s call to make a more godly world by advancing equity and pursuing peace, we diminish the conditions that allow the forces that threaten our world to emerge. By persistently pursuing the loving and just society Torah envisions and calls us to build, we not only make our world invulnerable to flames, we make it impossible to catch fire in the first place.
Yet even as our sages often liken Torah to water, they also frequently compare it to fire. So too, alongside the midrash that instructs us to draw upon Torah as a way to resist burning like the bush, an alternate interpretation suggests exactly the opposite: Perhaps, suggests this midrash, the bush, with its thorns and thistles, symbolizes oppressors – perpetrators of inequality, purveyors of violence, the greedy that dominate the needy. If so, then the Jewish people, powered by a Torah of love and justice, are the fire. Just as fire purifies and illuminates, the Jewish people, in living lives and building communities inspired and guided by Torah, can light the way for the refinement of the whole world. The world may resist the Jewish people’s fire for now, but it can’t and won’t forever. Sooner or later, the fire of our Torah will catch and spread. And one day the whole world will be suffused with its warmth and light. We may not ultimately see that day ourselves. But we can keep the fires of Torah burning, doing our part to facilitate that bright future.
So which is it? Are we to embody a bush that resiliently resists the forces that seek its destruction? Or are we to become the fire itself, fueling the flames rather than fighting them?
Perhaps our tradition offers these two midrashim side by side to teach us that both approaches are needed – we must remain rooted in our distinctiveness while also rallying ourselves to fulfill our purpose; we must be proud of who we are while also passionately pursuing what we are called to build; we must resist the devouring fire while also reaching for a better future.
Fires may threaten. The floors may be lava. In such a world, we endure by burning like a bush – stubbornly and steadfastly resisting the flames with pride and purpose. And when we burn like a bush, we warm and illuminate all that is cold and dark in our world, until every thorn and thicket is consumed by the light of God’s love, and perfect peace is all that remains.
So may it be God’s will. Amen.
Rabbi Michael Rose Knopf 