ספר שמות

This is why we explained the ‎verse (31) ‎וירא ישראל את היד הגדולה‎, “Israel saw the great ‎hand, etc,” which at first glance is hard to understand, ‎as the Israelites were busy running away from the ‎Egyptians and an impenetrable wall of fire was behind ‎them. Also the Ari’zal’s commentary that the ‎words ‎היד הגדולה‎, “the great hand,” are an allusion to ‎G’d’s attribute of chessed, “loving kindness,” ‎appear difficult to understand. However, when you ‎consider our exegesis that the Israelites’ faith was ‎reinforced when they realized that even in death G’d ‎had given these Egyptians an opportunity to be ‎מקדש את ‏השם‎, to aggrandize His name through their dead bodies ‎inspiring faith in G’d, this can all be understood ‎without difficulty. It was the very fact that G’d had ‎smitten their long time oppressors that opened the ‎Israelites’ mental eyes to G’d’s greatness. As a result ‎they not only believed more strongly in G’d but also in ‎His prophet Moses, absolutely. They realized that G’d ‎had used the Egyptians as an instrument to inspire ‎belief in Him. Having appreciated this, we can also ‎answer the question of the Or Hachayim ‎mentioned earlier. The reason that the oceans had ‎been able to tolerate these dead Egyptian bodies in ‎their midst was that they had now become symbols of ‎G’d’s greatness, not of His failure in educating man. ‎These Egyptians had finally “come alive” through the ‎manner in which they had died, as they now inspired ‎others to believe in the One and only Creator and His ‎Power. Moses alluded to all this when he sang about ‎מרכבות פרעה וחילו רמה בים ומבחר שלישיו טבעו בים וגו'‏‎, “Pharaoh’s ‎chariots and his army He has flung into the sea; and ‎the choicest of his officers are drowned in the sea of ‎reeds.”‎Exodus 15,6. “Your right hand, O G’d, ‎glorious in power; Your right hand shatters the ‎enemy.” Moses is aware of the fact that G’d’s ‎‎“right hand” symbolizes ‎חסד‎, loving kindness, and he ‎expresses his awareness that in shattering the enemy, ‎Egypt in this instance, He did not resort to ‎גבורה‎, the ‎attribute of Justice. As proof of this he describes the ‎manner in which the choicest of Pharaoh’s captains ‎went deep down, something that is the reverse of what ‎normally occurs in drowning, as the sea, as we pointed ‎out, basically rejects dead bodies. It follows that by ‎their very death these captains of Pharaoh’s chariots ‎actually “lived,” i.e. made a worthwhile contribution to ‎their having existed on earth previous to this. Their ‎contribution, of course, was a passive one, recognition ‎of G’d’s greatness not having been their conscious ‎intent when dying a painful “death.” The Israelites ‎realized what had happened, and that is why the Torah ‎describes them as ‎וירא ישראל את היד הגדול אשר עשה ה' במצרים ‏וגו'‏‎, “Israel saw the great hand which G’d had brought ‎to bear on the Egyptians, etc.” The word: ‎במצרים‎, usually ‎understood as “in Egypt,” is somewhat difficult, seeing ‎that G’d’s crowning achievement was the destruction of ‎the entire Egyptian military might at the sea of reeds. ‎Accordingly, we would have expected the Torah to have ‎written: ‎היד הגדולה בקריעת ים סוף‎, “the great hand G’d had ‎demonstrated by the splitting of the sea.”