By Bob Braun, January 31, 2026
I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and that is what gives lawyers joy. It’s not what you might think – it’s not a win in court, a successful closing, a brilliant argument, or even getting paid (although that’s pretty good). What gives us joy is typos. We love mistakes. As long as they are in someone else’s work.
When we – or at least when I – get a document written by another attorney, I scour it for errors. When I point them out to opposing counsel – always very politely, never within earshot of their clients – I can demonstrate that I read the agreement carefully; I can also, implicitly, suggest that my documents never have typos — which is, of course, not the case.
But I’ve learned that you have to be when you call out errors, because what might seem to be a mistake at first might be deliberate; on second, or third, or fourth reading – which is already an issue – it may be intentional.
I will say something heretical, but if I were to apply that standard to the Tanach, I would be ecstatic, because the Torah is filled with editorial slips. But just as an error might not be an error in a legal document, there are never mistakes in the Tanach, just opportunities for learning.
There is an example of this in today’s parasha. As we read, in chapter 14, verses 1-3, God sends the people on the long road to Israel – avoiding Gaza, and heading straight to the Red Sea. And in verse 4, God tells Moshe that it’s all intended – God will use this opportunity to display God’s might, so that Egypt will know who is God.
The people recognize that they have the sea in front of them, the entire Egyptian army behind them, and not a lot of alternatives – so it’s not entirely surprising that they should be perturbed at the situation. And they do what we Jews do — we complain. Are there not enough graves in Egypt? But Moshe, having been let into the plot, has an appropriate response in verse 13 and 14; he tells them not to worry – God will handle it.
What happens next is the kind of thing that sends literary editors into a frenzy: In verse 15, God tells Moshe to stop “crying out to me, lift your staff and split the sea.” But Moshe hasn’t complained. More than that, Moshe is simply repeating what God specifically told him a few verses before; God had set this up. So what’s the story?
This is the situation when my first reaction is to look to at Richard Friedman’s four-color-coded translation of the Torah. Friedman, currently a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia is, as many of you know, the author of “Who Wrote the Bible” and champion of the documentary hypothesis. Friedman theorized that the Torah came from four main interwoven sources and published a color-coded translation of the Torah citing each source.
Without going into great detail, the exchange in the first part of Chapter 14 begins with the P version, moves to the combined RJE version, then to the Elohist version, back to the P version, then to the RJE, then P, and so on and so on. So at least under Friedman’s theory, there are at least three different versions of the story, stitched together at some point. From a redactive criticism point of view, we have a simple answer; the Torah simply combined multiple versions of the story, and they don’t quite match.
But however much the documentary hypothesis might explain the gap, and while that in itself is deserving of a d’var Torah, I am more interested in how commentators viewed this exchange.
Robert Alter, who taught The Bible as Literature at UC Berkeley, my alma mater, and who has produced translation of the Tanach often cited in this Kahal, recognized that the exchange is puzzling, because there has been no report of Moses’s crying out to the Lord. Alter writes in his translation and commentary that the least strained solution is that of ibn Ezra, who argues that since Moses is the spokesman of the people, if the people cry out, God can readily attribute the crying out to Moses.
Other rabbis have similar takes. Nahmanides suggests that it means, why are you letting them cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. I have already told you that I intend to gain glory through Pharoah (v 4). Others have explained that it was actually Moshe who was crying out, because he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to proceed. Per Ps. 25:12, he prayed that God show him the path he should choose.
And Rashi’s explanation is that Moshe was, in fact, lingering over his prayer. Hashem told him, this is not the time to pray at length, for Israel is in trouble. Another reading – why do you cry out? This belongs to me, it is My business, not yours.
We begin, I think, to get to the heart of the matter in a commentary by Samson Rafael Hirsch: The word “Hatitzavu” in v. 13 shows us that Moshe’s speech was of the nature of the expected salvation. He thought – as again, he did so by taking God’s words at face value – that God would destroy Pharaoh and his army without him or the people having to do anything at all. Accordingly, while calming the people, his soul cried up to God, praying that God would grant the promised aid. To that he received the reply “Mah t’tzaek alai – d’var el bnai yisrael vayisu – The first step must be taken by the people, they must first show themselves deserving of salvation. If they march into the sea; then God will start salvation.
Finally, Shai Held ties these thoughts together. He writes that:
The Jews, leaving Egypt, are liberated from the familiar, and forced to confront the terror of uncertainty, and the real possibility of imminent death. Why is God angry? Moshe has given them instructions that undermine the very journey they are on; they are on the journey from slavery to freedom, from passivity to agency. Instead of being urged to be free, to fight for themselves, he tells them to stand still, to be passive. In a story about divine power, the Torah “works to make space for the human initiative.” “In order for the Israelites to leave slavery behind – existentially, and not just politically – they must learn to take their fate into their own hands and rediscover their capacity to act and make an impact upon the world, and upon their lives within it. As we read in Masechet Yoma, we do not rely on miracles (PT, Yoma 1:4).
The fact is, we are, today, constantly in jeopardy of sliding to enslavement. Without recognizing it, we often stand with our faces to the sea and enemies at our back, and the question is – what will we do? Will we wait for deliverance, or will we take action? It seems that we are told, over and over, to cede our free will, our agency, to others, to allow others to make decisions for us, to define our actions for us. We are told to follow others. But when we do that, we demean and reverse the journey from enslavement to freedom. There are “leaders” who tell us they have answers, that we should hand the work to them, and passively stand by; but when we do that, we deny what our ancestors earned at the Red Sea.
We can read very short exchange as about challenging ourselves- rising above and beyond our current state. Today, the need to act and not stand passively by, is perhaps more urgent than it has been before in our lifetimes.
Shabbat Shalom