Parshat Beshalach: Spiritual Responses to Urgency

Some of you know that I am in a mixed marriage. Not because Dimitry and I grew up with different first languages, or in different countries, or different cultures — though all of that is true. But in a different way. A way that many couples know. In almost every relationship, there is one person who is compulsively on-time, and another person who is…less so.

I have often wished that I had a different relationship to urgency. 

In my college days at NYU, when someone invited my fellow artists and I to a party, I would always calculate my commute perfectly to arrive at the host’s doorstep right at 11pm, only to find that I was the one and only “very helpful” person setting out drinks and bowls of snacks until other people began to trickle in at midnight.

I learned the full extent of my challenge nine years ago, when I was introduced to a tool called the “Urgency Index” by the Rockwood Leadership Institute. This assessment asks one to score themselves on a Likert Scale of 20 different indices, like “When something cancels or I get unexpected free time, my first thought is what I can fill the empty space with.” Those who scored 0-30 on this index have a “low urgency” mindset, 31-50 is a “strong urgency mindset,” and 51 and up are “off the charts,” almost like Steven Covey himself and all of his 7 Highly Effective Habits are going to chase you down and ask, “but really — how are you?”

I scored a 64.

In Beshalach we see two different approaches to urgency, both shaped in extreme circumstance and crisis. 

[Raise hand] Anyone here feel like the world is in a state of extreme circumstance and crisis for them right now? Each of us can surely think of things that feel extreme and beyond us in our lives these days. For some of us that may feel especially acute on the level of our personal and family lives, for others, we are feeling this as we watch our national stage intensify and accelerate in ways that feel disorienting and almost centrifugal, and for others of us we are most conscious of crisis as we collectively experience it as Jews at a moment of peak inflection and challenge in our long history.

The first approach to urgency takes place in the opening image of our parsha, as the Jewish people have reached the edge of the sea, and Pharaoh’s army rapidly advances toward them. We all might pause take a moment to feel—in our bones—the terror of this moment. A newly liberated people. The imminent death by an enemy on one side, the depths of a watery boundary on the other.

And yet, as the people panic and flail in the face of this crisis, Moshe—according to Rashi—davens. Maybe he personally feels unequipped, inadequate in the magnitude of cascading disaster, and he needs to get quiet with himself to discern what to do. Or maybe he has perfect faith, so even as crisis approaches he is capable of focusing on his trust in and relationship with God. Either way, Moshe slows himself way down and stands in prayer.

And God is not having it. Rashi imagines “The Holy Blessed One said to Moshe, ‘Don’t cry out to me! It is no time now to pray at length, when Israel is placed in trouble.’” And, as we see in our psukim, Moshe is then instructed with choreography — lift your rod, hold up your arm, and walk forward.

In other words, when crisis approaches, take the next right action. 

A second approach to urgency appears a month and a half later, as Bnei Israel find themselves in the wilderness, hungry, and—through the introduction of manna as their sustenance—they are instructed to keep their first Shabbat. 

Throughout the week, the people are told - collect the manna that you need. You get no more or no less than what you need, and it goes bad by the end of the day, meaning - you can’t horde it. It is not a currency to be amassed at all costs.

But on the sixth day, the people are instructed to collect twice of what they need and—unlike the rest of the week—they are promised that it will last through the seventh day.

It is instructive for us to ask: What is the essential nature of Shabbat we see in this first-ever iteration of the holiday?  What is God trying to teach these liberated slaves? What basic message does God want the Jewish people to grasp in this Shabbat practice?

Here, once more, the liberated people are in crisis. They have no food. And we might again take a moment to imagine and embody their panic. They have been led to an unfamiliar terrain, with no poetic resolution on the other side of liberation, just a persistent condition of uncertainty. Their hunger is dire and all-consuming.

In this first Shabbat, we see God showing people a different way to live. They have spent generations enslaved to forces beyond their control, taught over and over that their needs won’t be met. And God seems to say—with the introduction of Shabbat as a practice—”you can trust. You can unclench your first. You can let go for one day from your need to hustle to meet your basic needs, and simply trust that your needs will be met.” 

For 25 hours, says God, shift your relationship with the world. Slow your well-developed urgency muscle. Trust that your needs can be met.

As someone with “off the charts” urgency, I am not sure I fully grasped what it meant to do this until a few years ago, when I spent several summers on a travel grant to study dance in Tel Aviv. I immersed myself in an improvisational technique developed by the choreographer Ohad Naharin of Batsheva Dance Company called “Gaga.” Gaga movement is generated not by shapes that the body makes in space—a visual cue that dancers are asked to recreate—but rather by sensations in the body. The first time you take a Gaga class, they take all newcomers aside for an orientation, and they share two rules for the hourlong experience.

The first rule is: stay in motion. Keep moving. At no point should you find yourself static. 

And the second rule is: stay connected to the internal sensation of “plenty of time.”

The sensation of plenty of time. 

Not the idea of plenty of time. Not the concept of plenty of time. But can we feel on a cellular level—in our organs, our breath, our bloodstream, our nervous system—plenty of time?

When Moshe stands at the mouth of the Sea, in crisis, he davens—transforming his relationship to urgency. And the message he receives is “stay in motion.”

When the people gather manna in the desert, they may be panicked that there won’t be enough for Shabbat, given the quality of this substance that—on all other days—rots before their eyes overnight. The message they receive is, “there is plenty of time.”

So fundamentally, these two rules—stay in motion, plenty of time—when coupled together, offer an important orientation to us in this moment of uncertainty and precarity. In these last three weeks that have felt like 3 years and also somehow like [snap] 3 seconds. Amidst the private crises that each of us are navigating.

Ohad Naharin teaches that we hold these two rules because they help us—in his words—become available.

We become available to offer support to others. We become available to hold steady on our most important priorities and to protect them. We become available as Avdei Hashem - as those in partnership with the Divine to heal that which we find broken. We become available for the next right action.

As a community, we have one another to remind us of these fundamental lessons when urgency knocks. Can we—together—look out over the sea’s edge, can we look around us at the wild desert, and tell our panicked bodies and souls: we have plenty of time. Now: stay in motion.