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| Bridgman's - Pharaoh's Army Engulfed by the Sea |
Then 'Pacific Rim' directed by Guillermo del Toro is the movie for you.
I recently watched this movie on a flight from London to New York, my normal time to catch up with movies now I have a young baby and am flying to the UK once a month, and was impressed by the sheer spectacle of the Jaeger machines crushing monstrous Kaiju.
I've written a lot about Leviathan over the last couple of years, in my series of From the Deep, but this movie really conjures up imagery that is strikingly similar, as robots drop from the sky to smash the monsters rising from the depths of the ocean.
A similar spectacle could have been present in this week's parasha of Beshalach, that tells the story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt and their miraculous crossing of the Sea of Reeds.
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| A Kaiju from Pacific Rim |
If you really don't believe that we could have had God-on-Sea-Monster-smack-downs this parasha, just look at how this story is retold in Psalm 77 (which I mentioned as part of my final part of From the Deep):
16 The waters saw you, God, the waters saw you and writhed; the very depths (tehomot) were convulsed. 17 The clouds poured down water, the heavens resounded with thunder; your arrows flashed back and forth. 18 Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind, your lightning lit up the world; the earth trembled and quaked. 19 Your path led through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen. 20 You led your people like a flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
In Psalm 77 God lays the beat-down on the sea, called 'tehomot' which is parallel to the Babylonian sea monster 'Tiamat'. Through His defeat of the sea, God saves our heroes from destruction.
So why does the Torah describe the same event in quite different terms?
Exodus 14:21 describes the event quite impersonally:
21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and turned the sea into dry land; and the waters were divided.
There's no tension with the water here, no going to war, and the Egyptians aren't connected thematically to the waters.
So why does the Torah not go down the mythic combat route?
Apart from the fact that the Torah in general plays down mythological imagery (something that will make this column a challenge as we move forward) I think there's more going on here than an editorial or stylistic choice.
While Psalm 77 thinks of the defeat of the Egyptians as a replay of God's defeat of the Leviathan at the dawn of time, Exodus thinks the Egyptians are just the foes they are - human beings who have oppressed the Israelites for generations. They are men not monsters, and God's opposition is not pre-ordained from eternity but brought on by their actions.
It's easy to dehumanise our enemies, to see them as examples of mythic archetypes of evil or monstrous aberrations - but doing so makes it hard to see who they actually are, and to learn from their mistakes.
Over and over again, the Torah demands that we look after the vulnerable in society, 'the stranger, the fatherless and the widow' because we were slaves in Egypt. If we monsterise our enemies, then we need have no fear of becoming them - they are totally other, beyond human experience, but the Torah states the opposite, that the Egyptians were only too human, and the temptation to oppress those less powerful than us is never far away.
On the movie screen we may want simple monsters and heroes, Kaijus we can slay with wanton abandon, Orcs or aliens or robots that can be mowed down with no remorse - but the Torah expects us to see our enemies as human beings, whose sins could easily become ours.
Only when we see our foes as just as human as we are, can we learn to avoid their mistakes.
Torah Mythology of the week is a new column for 2014, looking at the weekly torah reading from a mythological perspective.
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