When the Water Is Safer Than the Land
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This week’s Dvar Torah is written by Dr. Bella Tendler Krieger Director of Adult Learning.
Photo by stephanie dawn on Unsplash
This past Tuesday was my Hebrew birthday, the 20th of Nissan, which I have always remembered for two reasons. First, because it is the sixth day of Pesach, the day our tradition teaches that the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. And second, because growing up it meant suffering through those truly terrible dry potato starch Passover birthday cakes. Thank God for celiacs and gluten-free trends; Passover desserts have gotten much better.
But the sixth day of Pesach has come to mean something deeper to me as well. It is the moment when the Israelites stand trapped between the sea ahead and the Egyptian army behind them. After all the miracles and the hasty escape, they are suddenly out of options. I imagine the desperation they must have felt, and I find myself returning to the line from Warsan Shire’s haunting poem, Home: “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”
Our Jewish story begins in vulnerability. Again and again, Torah reminds us what it means to leave home, to flee danger, and to live as strangers. Because of that, Pesach is not only a celebration of liberation; it is a call to memory and to empathy. We are commanded not just to remember that we were strangers in Egypt, but to let that memory shape how we see the stranger now.
As Pesach comes to an end, I find myself thinking about those in our own country who were forced to leave home, those for whom what lay behind was more dangerous than what lay ahead. I think about families who did not leave lightly, who crossed borders and waters because the alternative was worse. And I think about the reception we are giving them. Too often, we meet their vulnerability not with recognition, but with fear; not with welcome, but with walls. Yet Pesach insists that memory is not meant to stay safely in the past. We are meant to remember our own story strongly enough that it changes how we respond in the present.
On this Hebrew birthday, I am praying that Pesach leaves me with a softer heart: one that remembers our people’s journey through the sea strongly enough to meet the vulnerability of others with compassion.
