Parshah Commentary

This Shabbat, the seventh day of Passover, we take a break from the cycle of the weekly Torah portions, reading instead a selection of verses from the Book of Shemot that describe the Israelites’ flight from Pharaoh’s rule. This passage culminates in the recently escaped Israelites safely crossing the Sea of Reeds, solidifying their freedom from enslavement. The recitation of these verses aligns the Torah’s mytho-historical account of the Exodus with the Hebrew calendar, as rabbinic tradition ascribes the Israelites’ crossing of the sea to the 21st day of the month of Nissan—the seventh day of Passover.

While this marks a sacred moment of redemption, its holiness is marred by the demise of Pharaoh and his army, as the very waters that parted to enable the Israelites to cross come crashing down on their pursuers. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Yochanan famously highlights this complexity by imagining even God, whom the Torah says “hurled the Egyptians into the sea,” expressing ambivalence about their fate: “The angels sought to sing God’s praises. God said: ‘The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you wish to sing praises before me?’” A midrash offers this rebuke as an explanation for the fact that Hallel—the compilation of psalms recited on holidays and joyous occasions—is abbreviated on the latter days of Passover, implying that extensive celebration is impossible or undesirable in the face of so much death. As further support for this practice, the midrash cites a verse from the Book of Proverbs: “In the falling of your enemy do not cheer, and in his stumbling do not rejoice.”

Yet Jewish tradition and liturgy are also replete with praise for our past opponents’ destruction and petitions for our contemporary foes’ demise. In fact, we can find this attitude in the traditional text of the Haggadah read at the seder: Earlier this week, many Jews beseeched God to “pour rage” upon the nations who do not know or follow God, asking the Divine to release a “blazing fury” to “overtake them.” And observant Jews make a similar declaration thrice daily, in the Amidah prayer, which includes a plea to “uproot, destroy, and erase” our adversaries and ends with a blessing praising God “who crushes our enemies.”

These sources reveal a core tension within our tradition about whether a Jewish moral ethos allows for celebration when our enemies fall—and indeed, as Rabbi Yochanan prods us to ask, whether any of God’s creations can be considered enemies. This ambivalence mirrors tensions in our movement spaces, with some activists joyfully celebrating when a healthcare executive is shot or a multimillionaire business executive implodes in his submersible, while others challenge the spiritual and political utility of rejoicing in punitive retaliatory penalties against those who have caused harm.

But while these debates often focus on what constitutes fair punishment, principles of restorative justice and prison abolition would have us question those very terms. In her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, Mariame Kaba helpfully distinguishes between punishment and consequences. She explains that abolitionism is not, as bad faith critics allege, about avoiding consequences; on the contrary, abolitionists support “real consequences” that allow for “transforming the conditions that exist in the first place for [harm] to even have happened.” For Kaba, punishment, which necessarily centers the suffering of those who have caused harm, ultimately keeps us bound to the world we’re in now rather than moving us toward “the world we want to live in,” whereas consequences aim to address the root causes of harm.

Under this framework, we might come to see Pharaoh’s drowning not as a punishment for his relentless pursuit of power and domination, but as a tragic consequence of this behavior. His own inability to loosen his control over the Israelites and insistence that they remain enslaved leads him to chase them through the parted waters, causing his death. But rejoicing in Pharoah’s demise seems to require forfeiting this understanding. Such celebration keeps the narrative centered on the violence of Pharaoh—both his perpetration of violence and the violence done to him—rather than shifting our focus to liberation and the responsibilities that freedom imposes on us. When we find delight in his downfall, we end up embodying a worldview that prioritizes the oppressor, and thus assume upon ourselves his tyranny, remaining enslaved by the very conditions—an obsession with control, strength, and power—from which we are striving to escape.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.