## Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah

###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 2
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**English Edition; Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2017:**
TORAH READING FOR THE SEVENTH DAY OF PESAḤ
בְּשַׁלַּח פַּרְעֹה *When Pharaoh let the people go*. The verb *sh-l-ḥ* can also mean liberating a slave (see Deuteronomy 15:13). Thus it conveys a twofold sense of release: physical and legal.
וַחֲמֻשִׁים *Armed*. In preparation for later battles. It was not because they were unarmed that God led them on a more circuitous route, but rather that they were psychologically unprepared for war at this point.
עַצְמוֹת יוֹסֵף *Bones of Joseph*. A moving fulfillment of Joseph’s last request, shortly before he died (Gen. 50:25). It was a mark of honor that they were carried by Moses himself. A metaphor, also, of the Jewish condition: we keep our faith with those who came before us by carrying their memory with us. We do not live *in* the past, but *with* the past.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 3
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מַה־זֹּאת עָשִֽׂיתָ לָּֽנוּ *What have you done to us*? The people blame Moses, as if the decision were his, not God’s – an ominous precursor of many complaints that were to follow during their time in the wilderness.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 4
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מַה־תִּצְעַק אֵלָי *Why do you cry out to Me*? An elision, since no prayer of Moses at the Reed Sea has been mentioned. God’s reply does not mean that Moses was wrong to pray, but rather, now is the time for action not words.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 5
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וַיַּאֲמִֽינוּ *And believed*. Free of Egypt, on the far side of the sea, knowing that God had delivered them, the Israelites are suddenly liberated from fear and break out in song. This is one of the turning points of Jewish history – the first spontaneous, collective expression of faith. We recite it every day in our prayers.
וּבְמֹשֶׁה עַבְדּוֹ *And in His servant, Moses*. The phrase is pointed. The rulers of the ancient world saw themselves as demigods who commanded obedience. The Torah insists that the truth is the opposite: greatness is humility, and to be a leader is to be a servant.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 6
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יהוה יִמְלֹךְ *The LORD will reign*. A key verse, marking the first time in the Torah that God has been described as a King. Crossing the sea has been for the Israelites not just a miraculous experience, nor merely an escape from defeat and death, but also a fundamental “rite of passage”: Israel has become the nation whose sovereign is God Himself.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 10
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HAFTARA FOR THE SEVENTH DAY OF PESAḤ
David’s great song of deliverance, taken here from II Samuel 22, also appears in the book of Psalms (with minor differences) as Psalm 18. Its kinship with the Torah reading, the Song at the Sea, is obvious. Both are songs of thanksgiving after great danger. David uses imagery that echoes the Song at the Sea. He speaks of being almost overwhelmed by “breakers” and “torrents.” He says, “Channel-beds of the sea appeared…from the force of breath from His nostrils.” He feels as if God had “reached from the heights, He took me, He drew me out from a mass of waters.” The intertextuality – the linguistic and metaphorical parallels between the two songs – is unmistakable.
The superscription describes this as a song David sang “on the day the LORD saved him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul,” though it reads as if it was composed late in David’s life. If so, then it would show that his deliverance from Saul stayed vivid in his memory until the end (Rashi, Radak). Abrabanel, however, believed that David wrote it in his youth, sang it at various points in his life on occasions of deliverance from danger, and eventually edited it for public use in the form we have as Psalm 18.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 13
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**English Edition; Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2017:**
READING OF THE TORAH: LAST DAY OF PESAḤ AND SHAVUOT, AND SHEMINI ATZERET OUTSIDE ISRAEL
The core of this reading is the passage dealing with the festivals in the book of Deuteronomy. The festivals are extensively described in three places in the Torah, in Leviticus (23), in Numbers (28–29), and here (Deut. 16). The sages explained that the first is to establish their order, the second to prescribe their sacrifices, and the third to explain them to the public (Sifrei).
Throughout Deuteronomy, Moses explains the laws to the people as a whole, reminding them of the historical background against which they are set, and the future of which they are the parameters. In the case of the festivals, Moses’ presentation here has a strong emphasis on the seasons of the agricultural year: Pesaḥ is the festival of spring, the countdown to Shavuot begins from “when the sickle begins to cut the standing grain,” and Sukkot is celebrated at the time when “when you gather into your granary and wine-vat.” These are dimensions of the festivals the people have not yet experienced as desert nomads but which they will once they enter and make their home in the land which the LORD has blessed.
Moses also emphasizes the important dimension of social inclusion. They are times when people are to invite those at the margins of society: the widow, the orphan, the Levites who have no land of their own, the temporary residents, as well as slaves. No one is to be left out.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 15
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וְשָׂמַחְתָּ *You shall rejoice*. There is greater emphasis on rejoicing in Deuteronomy than elsewhere in the Torah. The root *s-m-ḥ*, “to rejoice,” appears only once in each of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, but twelve times in Deuteronomy as a whole. The previous books have been about the long journey, begun by Abraham, toward the fulfillment of the divine promises of children and a homeland. Deuteronomy is about the destination: a land where the people of the covenant can be free to pursue their vocation as a holy nation in a holy land, keeping God’s law, sensing His presence and celebrating His blessings. Note, however, that the word “rejoice” does not appear in the context of Pesaḥ, for it recalls two periods of suffering, the suffering inflicted on the Israelites by the Egyptians, and the subsequent suffering of the Egyptians themselves. Halakhically there is a mitzva of *simḥa* on Pesaḥ, but it comes on the first day(s) mixed with the taste of affliction and bitterness (matza and *maror*) and on the last with the memory of the Egyptians who died at the Sea of Reeds, and as Proverbs 24:17 states, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls” (*Yalkut Shimoni*, *Emor*, 654).


###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Torah Readings, Seventh Day of Pesah 23
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HAFTARA FOR THE LAST DAY OF PESAḤ
The exodus was not only an event in the past; it is also a prefiguration and promise of future redemption: “As in the days when I brought you out of Egypt, I will show them miracles” (Mic. 7:15). So on the last day of Pesaḥ, the Haftara speaks of future redemption in one of the most justly famous passages in the entire prophetic literature, in the words of Isaiah, the poet laureate of hope. Isaiah spells out the connection between past and future in the words, “On that day the LORD will reach out His hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of His people” (11:11), this time bringing them back not from one place of exile but “from the four quarters of the earth.”