there is only being carried on eagles wings

I arrive at the end of this week, my heart is feeling heavy. One headline captured it well, “The Olympics are a show of global harmony. The world is anything but.” The weight of so much cruelty, our inability to sufficiently disrupt it. 

Which is why when I sat down to study this week’s parsha, an expected line attached itself to my heart. In parashat Yitro the Israelites are camped at the base of Mt. Sinai, eager and terrified to receive Torah. Moses climbs the mountain and there God speaks to him. Based on how things went in Egypt, we might expect more Divine instruction but what comes out instead is poetic inspiration. 

The Holy One begins, “You have seen…how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me” (Ex. 19:4). 

About this moment Avivah Zornberg comments, 
“The fact that a metaphor is used at this most significant and serious moment, theologically considered, in world history, is in itself surprising. Indeed, except for the poetic text of the Song of Sea, this is the only metaphor in the Exodus narrative” (Particulars of Rapture, 257). 

So why, here, does the Holy One speak in hyperbole? 

I can imagine that after all of it, the Holy One might wish she had just picked up her people and delivered them to safety and freedom. But I would not, after all, describe the great fear and suffering of the plagues, the uncertain crossing of the sea with the Egyptian army chasing after them, as breezy. 

I think the use of metaphor here is in a way addressing the trauma of it all. God knows it was hard, maybe too hard. The sentiment of the Israelites is heavy. The people are weary. And so precisely in this moment, the image of God’s metaphoric flight catches our attention. 

Zornberg comments, 
“The effect of the image is, of course, to convey intimacy, protection, love, speed; but also I suggest, the enormous power of the adult eagle, effortless carrying its young through the air…it evokes the physical sensations of carrying and being carried, the imagined empathy with eagle and young, to convey a spiritual modality…to induce in the people a momentary and partial sense of a transcendent perspective…”

It is this image that prepares, maybe even allows, the Israelites to reopen their hearts to God and to Torah. 
The mention of the eagle reminded me of the words of Franz Rosenzweig, from a letter written to his sister-in-law, which was shared with me by my teacher Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld: 
 
“Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to us in the mire. This is the “neighbor” the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire of our self, we can each pull out our neighbor or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under our feet; each of us is only held up by the neighborly hands grasping us by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next one, and often, indeed most of the time…hold each other up mutually. 

“All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding human hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some nonexistent “solid ground under one’s feet” that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up. As an eagle…hovereth over her young (Deut 32:11).” 

On eagles wings, on ICE watch, on Shabbat, may we feel held up, carried and cared for. ​