והשיבך ד’ מצרים באניות בדרך אשר אמרתי לך לא תוסיף עוד לראותה
And God shall return you to Egypt in boats, on the way of which I [Moshe] told you,
“You shall never again see it!”
It is the climax, the horrifying crescendo of a horrifying admonition: Moshe foretells of an entire litany of calamities to successively befall the Jewish nation should they veer from the Torah path, finally ending only with their tragic return to the land of Egypt, where they would revert to their pre-Exodus state of slavery. All the glory would be lost, the entire Redemption rendered obsolete, by the misdeeds of a nation failing to live up to its higher calling.
But wait! Didn’t Moshe promise us that we would never return to Egypt again? How can Moshe tell of God returning us to Egypt, while reminding us in the same breath of his promise that we would forever be spared just that?
The key words: In boats.
Never, you see, would we return to Egypt by foot. Never again would we fall into the spiritual abyss that is Egypt, so long as it was we who were determining our destination. Yes, we might make many missteps, but never would we consciously allow our downward trek to take us all the way back to the bottom. Making our own decisions, good or bad, God promised that we would never place foot over foot and choose to take that final step into our spiritual grave.
And yet, if we place ourselves on boats, allowing ourselves to be carried by the prevailing current with nary a thought as to where exactly it is taking us, then preclusion from spiritual oblivion is far from assured. If we relinquish our freedom of choice and surrender ourselves to the mindless propulsions of an insane world’s societal riptide, all guarantees are off. We were promised never to see the path down to Egypt again, yet if we allow ourselves to drift back unawares, we will arrive there regardless, without ever seeing the path that brought us there.
We live in a time when our nation has already seen it all. We have definitely lived through just about every calamity the Admonition spells out. Without a doubt, we are nearing the end. And yes, we are precipitously close to landing back in Egypt. We find ourselves rapidly slipping to levels of depravity we never fathomed possible for us to descend.
How, we must ask ourselves, can this be happening to us? More importantly, how can we stop this terrible decline?
The answer is frighteningly clear: It could not, cannot, and will not happen, so long as we remain consciously engaged in the charting of our own course. For better or for worse, we must at the very least stay awake at the wheel, and we can then be assured that God will never allow us to take that fatal turn off a cliff. All we need to do is make sure not to be induced into the collective technology-driven-“progressive”-multi-tasking-gadget-grabbing-toy-touting-“forward-thinking”-robo-human-stupor of modern society at large, and we can be sure that as Jews, we will never take up residence alongside our gentile neighbors as co-subjects of modern-day Egypt. If only we resist the temptation to hitch along for the cruise down the Nile, we can be safe in the knowledge that we will never be ruled by the Mausoleum Brotherhood.
So we’ll miss the boat……..
Who cares?
Isn’t that what we want?
