Parshat Beshalach: “You Hold Your Peace!”

Pharaoh and his army of chariots are bearing down on the Israelites.  Our ancestors, the former slaves, have hardly been freed, and their enslavers already have them trapped, backed up against the Red Sea, ready to once again bring them back into slavery.  The Jews cry out to God and then to Moses, and Moses tries to comfort them:

But Moses said to the people: “Have no fear!  Stand by, and witness the deliverance which the Lord will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again.  The Lord will battle for you; you hold your peace!” (Shemot 14:13-14)

But why were the Israelites so desperate?  And why did Moses tell them to hold their peace?  The parsha begins by telling us “Now the Israelites went up armed out of the land of Egypt” (13:18).  If the people were armed, why was there no attempt to defend themselves? 

Rabbi Yair Barkai of Bar Ilan University points out multiple explanations and interpretations of Moses’ words that are in question.  Of these the one I find most satisfying is given by Ibn Ezra:

Stand by, and witness the deliverance which the Lord will work for you – for you will not fight, but only witness the deliverance which the Lord will work for you today.   One wonders how they could see a camp of six hundred thousand pursuing them and not fight for their lives and the lives of their children?!  The answer is that the Egyptians had been the Israelites’ masters, and the generation leaving Egypt had learned from its youth to suffer the yoke of Egypt and hence their spirit was lowly; so how could they now fight against their masters?  For the Israelites would have been weak and not skilled at warfare.  After all, notice that Amalek attacked them with a small number of people, and had it not been for Moses’ prayers, Amalek would have overcome the Israelites.   But the Lord, alone, “who performs great deeds” (Job 5:9), and “by Him actions are measured” (I Sam. 2:3), caused all the males who left Egypt to die, for they did not have strength to fight the Canaanites, until successive generations, who had not known exile and who had high spirits, were born in the wilderness.

The answer is reason-based and calls us to remember the psychological state that the Israelites were trained to be in throughout their lives.  Because they were taught to revere, respect, and submit to the Egyptians they were mentally incapable of raising arms against their former master due to how severely they had been conditioned to be submissive.  Added nicely on top of this explanation, Rabbeinu Bachya adds the following explanation of Moses’ words above:

The explanation of “the Lord will battle for you” is as follows: the plague of the first-born made it evident that the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself was smiting the Egyptians, and yet the Egyptians were still pursuing them, indicating that their intention was not to attack you [the Israelites], rather to attack the Almighty.  That being the case, the battle belonged to the Almighty and you have nothing to do but remain silent. 

The Jewish people did not raise their weapons to defend themselves because of Ibn Ezra’s explanation, but Moses then tells them to “hold their peace” because it is not their battle to fight, but God’s.  It is God who Pharaoh and the Egyptians denied and mocked by ignoring the ten plagues and refusing to accept God’s will to create the Jewish people and lead them to the land of Israel.  Therefore it is God who will exact justice, not leaving it to the hand of men.