“My Father’s God”
After God had miraculously caused the Red Sea to split in two, the Israelites walked across it in safety; but when the Egyptian soldiers sought to pursue them, the waters returned to their former state, drowning Israel’s enemies. In gratitude, Moses, along with the Israelite men, women, and children, sang a song of praise to God (Exod 15).
This song—called the Song of the Sea—is the central part of the Torah reading for the Seventh Day of Passover, a festival day that marks the end of the holiday. (Note that, outside of Israel, there are two last days of Passover, so the “Seventh Day” this year includes both Friday and Saturday.)
A number of ancient midrashim refer to the Song of the Sea, including this rather unusual one:
Rabbi Yose the Galilean said that when the adult Israelites began singing, their children joined in. “Even the newborn on his mother’s knees and the suckling at his mother’s breast, when they saw the divine presence, [participated]: the newborn lifted up his head and the suckling removed his mouth from his mother’s breast, and all sang aloud, “This is my God and I will praise Him, [my father’s God and I will exalt him]” (Exod 15:2).
Usually, midrashic comments are aimed at explaining something in the biblical text. But what question could this midrash be designed to answer? Apparently, it has something to do with the verse cited, “This is my God and I will praise Him, [my father’s God and I will exalt him]”—but what?
The answer starts with another, somewhat better known midrash. It held that, at the moment when the Israelites uttered the words of this verse, all of them, from the loftiest to the lowliest, rose to a level of prophecy even greater than that reached by the prophet Ezekiel.
The idea behind this assertion has to do with the great significance attributed by interpreters to the ordinary word “this” (zeh) in Hebrew. The word is, of course, used all the time in everyday speech. But for rabbinic interpreters, the Torah was not everyday speech: every word, every nuance, was significant. For that reason, the humble zeh acquired a special significance: it sometimes suggested that the person speaking was standing right in front of something and perhaps even pointing to it. (In English grammar, this, that, these, and those are called demonstrative pronouns, a name that well fits this ancient understanding.) So, for example, when God said to Moses and Aaron, “This month [or “moon”] will be the start of months…” (Exod 12:2), interpreters suggested that God was actually pointing to the thin sliver of the new moon in order to make clear that “when you see it [the moon] like this, declare the start of the new month.” So if the Israelites said, “This is my God,” it must have been that all of them were actually seeing God right in front of them—a level of prophecy even greater than Ezekiel’s.
Rabbi Yose the Galilean’s midrash took the same zeh very seriously—but in another direction. The starting assumption of his midrash is that, just as in court, witnesses can testify only about what they themselves have seen or heard, (but not about what someone else might have seen or heard, or mere assumptions and the like), so here as well, when the Israelites said “This is my God…” they must have actually been seeing God face-to-face.
But then, what about the second half of the verse, “…my father’s God and I will exalt Him”? How did they know that this God in front of them was also the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Surely He was not wearing a sign attesting to that fact! How could they know for sure whose God He was?
This midrash offers a simple answer: they didn’t know. Rather, what happened was as follows: The Israelite parents spoke only the first words of the verse, “This is my God and I will praise Him.” But then, hearing this, their children chimed in, “My father’s God and I will exalt him.” Neither the parents nor the children were saying anything that they had not seen and heard for sure.
As with many rabbinic midrashim, this one is attested in other, ancient sources. The Greek text known as the “Wisdom of Solomon,” perhaps composed by a Jew sometime in the late first century BCE, reports that the Israelites “sang hymns, O Lord, to Your holy name, and praised with one accord Your defending hand; because wisdom opened the mouths of the dumb, and made the tongues of babes speak clearly.”
In the light of the foregoing, I really cannot attest to what I think I remember reading long ago in the writings of the modern Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (so if you can help me with an exact quote, I would be most grateful! Something similar, but not quite the same, appears in the fifth chapter of his book Moses).
What I remember is that Buber offered a slightly different interpretation of this same verse. All Jewish children, he said, hear about God from their parents; even as they grow up, they are still hearing about—from other people, or else from written traditions and interpretations, including of course the Torah itself. That is what the song means by “My father’s God and I will extol Him.” But there comes a moment when he or she can truly say the first part of the verse as well: “This is my God and I will praise Him.” This, I think he wrote, is the overall aim of Judaism.
Happy Passover.