Beshalach sermon

Rabbi Miriam's sermon - delivered Shabbat morning on 31st January 2026. Some people here will have heard of the 5 stages of grief, developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While Kübler-Ross herself said herself that they’re not always linear, she has faced criticism for a theory which seems so neat, with its stages to progress through, ending in acceptance. Closure. Then with grief wrapped up, you can move on. 

Grief, I think we now know, isn’t like that, and closure isn’t a one-moment thing. 

The psychologist and writer Christina Rasmussen has an entirely different 5 stage process. Building on her own experience of losing her husband very young and rebuilding life, she challenges traditional views of grief as something you “get over” with time. Instead, Rasmussen reframes loss as a transition between two worlds - the life before the loss and the life after. 

She calls these 5 steps the Life Reentry process:

1. Acknowledging Your Fear - recognise how grief affects you, including fears about the future.

2. Letting Go of the Waiting Room - move beyond the mindset of “waiting to feel normal again.”

3. Honouring Your Past While Opening to a Future - hold grief with compassion but begin to shift focus outward.

4. Taking Active Steps Toward a New Life

5. Creating a Life You Love. This doesn’t mean forgetting the past - but it does mean opening up new possibilities

The idea of closure feels pertinent in the week that the body of the last hostage, Ran Gvili z”l was brought home and laid to rest. For some people, yellow ribbons couldn’t be taken off until this week. Extra candles continued to be lit. My sister in law shared that this week signs on the roads read “עכשיו אפשר לנשום”, “now we can breathe”. And after 843 days, 12 hours, and 6 minutes, the Hostages Square clock finally went dark. 

It is an extraordinary moment - the first time in not 2 years but over 10 years that there have been no Israeli hostages in Gaza. Four hostages were held there from 2014 and 2015 - two of them alive for the 10 years of their captivity.

We read in this week’s parasha:

וַיִּקַּח מֹשֶׁה אֶת־עַצְמוֹת יוֹסֵף עִמּוֹ כִּי הַשְׁבֵּעַ הִשְׁבִּיעַ אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר פָּקֹד יִפְקֹד אֱלֹהִים אֶתְכֶם וְהַעֲלִיתֶם אֶת־עַצְמֹתַי מִזֶּה אִתְּכֶם

Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, who had made the children of Israel swear an oath, saying, “God will be sure to take notice of you: then you shall carry up my bones from here with you.”

The timing of this line in the parasha with this week’s news is eerie. It is a message saying - burial matters. We don’t leave our people behind - living or dead. We haven’t since we were slaves in Egypt. 

And there’s an amazing midrash which describes how Yosef’s bones are found. Not just because after hundreds of years of slavery there is no memory of his burial place, but as we discover, the Egyptians had sunk Yosef’s body in a metal coffin in the Nile by way of preventing the bnei Yisrael from leaving. According to the midrash, for three days Moshe searches for Yosef’s bones, and eventually comes upon Serach, the daughter of Asher, who had been blessed by her grandfather with everlasting life (that’s another story). Serach tells Moshe where Yosef’s coffin was - she was the only person alive throughout the whole period of slavery in Egypt and remembers. And because the story needs a bit more magic, Moshe invites Yosef to rise, and his coffin comes bubbling up to the surface of the water, as light as a reed. 

Finding the bodies of precious souls lost in war is close to impossible. Like a metal coffin deep, somewhere in the Nile. But this week, for Israeli victims, it has been achieved. 

And so now is there closure for Israelis and for Jews around the world? Well no, because grief, whether personal or communal grief, is not linear, and closure probably doesn’t exist. But it does, I believe, allow Israelis and Jews around the world to start living beyond a place of ongoing trauma. 

Similarly with our ancestors leaving Egypt - finding Yosef’s bones and walking out of Egypt wasn’t closure. Even the epic, epoch-making experience of walking through the split sea wasn’t closure. As we know, the legacy of slavery stayed with that entire generation. It ultimately meant they were incapable of inheriting the land of Israel. And it took a new generation unfettered by trauma to truly start afresh. 

But what can we learn from this week’s parasha about how to metaphorically find the bones and walk forward? 

Let’s return to Christina Rasmussen’s Life Reentry process. 

1. Acknowledge Your Fear - Our ancestors do this only too well. “it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness” they say, and “you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death”. Their fear in all its lurid detail is not hidden.

2. Let Go of the Waiting Room - There is movement in our parasha. Through the sea. To a world not of full freedom, but of reliance on Hashem for mana and water.

3. Honour Your Past While Opening to a new Future - A beautiful example of this comes in the midrash. How, the midrash asks, did the women have tambourines when they left Egypt in such a rush? The answer comes that even in the darkness of leaving Egypt, the women had faith that there would be something to celebrate in the future.

4. Taking Active Steps Toward a New Life - This is the moment when negative freedom - freedom from captivity, gives way to a positive freedom - freedom to take on mitzvot. In this parasha, our people keep their first ever Shabbat. They may grumble and rebel but they are starting the process of becoming Jews.

   
   

5. Create a Life You Love - This bit of the story doesn’t happen in our parasha, arguably not in the entire Torah. Perhaps we are still writing this part of the story today. 

   
   

What can we take for this moment in our own Jewish history, this week when the final hostage has been brought home? First: we acknowledge the fear of October 7th happening again. We acknowledge the changed world. But second: we let go of the waiting room. We refuse to be held in trauma. Third: we open up to wonderful things happening in the future. We pack our metaphorical tambourines and know there will be singing and dancing ahead. Fourth: we take active steps to affirm our Judaism with mitzvot, starting perhaps with leaning into Shabbat that little bit more. And finally we keep writing the story of creating a Jewish life we can love. 

This parasha is a turning point, and this week is a turning point. There are so many mentions of night giving way to day in the splitting of the sea story. And I hope that we’re at a similar moment in our history. Tomorrow night is tu b’shvat, which brings with it a promise of renewal. We might not feel it on this chilly day, but the seasons are once again turning. The days are lengthening, and spring is coming. 

I’ll close with one last line from our parasha: 

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה מַה־תִּצְעַק אֵלָי דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל וְיִסָּעוּ׃

Then יהוה said to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward.”