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Moses Said They Were All Alive. Jeremiah Saw Children Dying of Thirst.

The Yalkut Shimoni sets Moses at the Exodus against Jeremiah at the fall of Jerusalem and lets the contrast between two departures do all the work.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Two Departures, Two Sentences
  2. Two Sentences, Side by Side
  3. What Changes Between Exodus and Exile
  4. The Cloud That Screened the Prayers

Two Departures, Two Sentences

When Israel left Egypt, Moses looked out at the people gathered before him and said: You who held fast to the Lord your God are all alive today.

Every single person who had clung to God through the plagues and the sea crossing and the forty years in the wilderness was standing there. Breathing. Fed by manna. Covered by clouds. Alive.

When Israel left Jerusalem, Jeremiah sat in the smoking rubble and wrote: The tongue of the suckling cleaves to its palate for thirst.

Nursing infants so dehydrated they could not cry. Their mouths dry. Their mothers empty. The Babylonian army behind them and the desert ahead.

Two Sentences, Side by Side

The Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval midrashic anthology compiled in thirteenth-century Germany by Rabbi Shimon of Frankfurt drawing on ancient rabbinic sources, sets those two sentences beside each other. That is the entire teaching. The juxtaposition is the commentary. No explanation is added because none is needed.

Moses looked at a people and saw life multiplied. Every face in the crowd was evidence of the covenant holding, of God's commitment playing out across forty years of wilderness. You who held fast, and you are all alive. The sentence is a testimony. It records what faithfulness produces.

Jeremiah looked at a people and saw what broken covenant produces in the bodies of the most vulnerable. Not abstract theological consequences. Thirst in an infant's mouth. A tongue stuck to the roof of a mouth too dry to cry. The consequence written in the bodies of children who had made no choices and done nothing to deserve what the adults around them had brought down.

What Changes Between Exodus and Exile

What changes between the Exodus and the exile is not God. The rabbis who preserved and transmitted this teaching understood that God was present in both moments. At the Exodus, the divine presence wrapped Israel in cloud and fire and bread from heaven. At the fall of Jerusalem, the Talmud in Berakhot 59a records that God wept over the Temple and said: woe is Me, that I have caused My house to be destroyed and My children exiled.

God mourning is not God absent. The presence is there in both cases. What is different is what the people did with it. Moses's generation held fast, and that holding fast was the thing Moses was testifying about when he said: you who held fast are all alive. The generation of the fall had not held fast. Not the majority of them, not the leadership, not the kings and priests and prophets who had managed the covenant institution for centuries until it was gone.

The suckling's thirst is the measure of the distance between the two departures. The distance is not measured in centuries or in theology. It is measured in water, in the absence of something a child needs to survive that the world around that child has failed to provide.

The Cloud That Screened the Prayers

Jeremiah does not stop at the thirst. In the third chapter of Lamentations he writes: You have screened Yourself off with a cloud so that no prayer may pass through. The same word, cloud, that appears in the wilderness as shelter and guidance, appears in exile as obstruction. The cloud that once preceded Israel as a sign of God's presence now stands between the people's prayers and the place their prayers are addressed to.

This is not the same as God refusing to listen. It is Jeremiah's description of what a broken relationship feels like from the inside. The channel of communication that once felt open and responsive now feels blocked. The prayers go up and seem to stop somewhere short of where they are aimed. Not because God is gone but because the structure through which communication traveled, the covenant, the Temple, the whole institutional form of the relationship, has been dismantled.

Moses and Jeremiah stand at the two poles of the same arc. Moses at the moment when everything the covenant promised was present and visible and in full operation. Jeremiah at the moment when the mechanism of that promise had been taken apart piece by piece until all that remained was a man sitting in ruins trying to pray through a cloud.

MosesExileProphecyTemple Destruction
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From the tradition

Sources

4 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 1026:12Yalkut Shimoni

This teaching is one link in the Yalkut Shimoni's chain of contrasts between the redemption from Egypt and the destruction of Jerusalem, an anthology device in which a verse celebrating Israel's life under God is set beside a verse mourning its near-death in exile. As throughout the series, Moses voices the blessing of the Exodus and Jeremiah voices the grief of the city's fall.

For the departure from Egypt the midrash quotes Moses in Deuteronomy, where he reminds the people that those who held fast to God their God were all alive that very day (Deuteronomy 4:4). The verse marks survival as the reward of clinging to God: while others had perished in the wilderness for following Baal of Peor, those who remained attached to the living God were preserved, vibrant and whole. Cleaving to God meant cleaving to life itself.

The contrasting verse comes from Lamentations, where Jeremiah describes the horror of the siege, when the tongue of the nursing infant clings to the roof of its mouth from thirst (Lamentations 4:4). The rabbis draw a pointed wordplay between the two images of clinging. In Egypt the people clung to God and lived; in besieged Jerusalem the parched child's tongue clings to its palate as it starves. The same root of holding fast, which once described loyalty rewarded with life, now describes the body's collapse under famine. Through this bitter mirror the midrash teaches that the difference between the two clingings is the difference between a nation bound to God and a nation cut off from Him, and that the loss of that bond turns the very language of life into a description of death.

Full source
Berakhot 59aTalmud Bavli, Berakhot

And concerning earthquakes. What are "earthquakes"? Rav Katina said: A tremor of the earth. Rav Katina was once going along the road. When he reached the entrance of the house of a necromancer, a tremor of the earth rumbled. He said: Does the necromancer know what this tremor is? The necromancer raised his voice and said to him: Katina, Katina, why should I not know? At the hour when the Holy One, blessed be He, remembers His children who dwell in distress among the nations of the world, He lets fall two tears into the Great Sea, and His voice is heard from one end of the world to the other -- and that is the tremor.

And this differs with what Rafram bar Pappa said in the name of Rav Chisda. For Rafram bar Pappa said in the name of Rav Chisda: From the day the Temple was destroyed, the sky has not been seen in its purity, as it is said: "I clothe the heavens in blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering" (Isaiah 50:3).

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Legends of the Jews 10:13Legends of the Jews

That’s kind of what it was like for the prophet Jeremiah during the reign of King Zedekiah. According to Legends of the Jews, he was facing opposition from pretty much everyone. – the people, the royal court…even some of the high priests! Ginzberg, drawing on a wealth of sources, paints a picture of a society in deep spiritual crisis. He even mentions that these priests weren't even following the basic commandment of circumcision!

Jeremiah was stirring up trouble because he was against an alliance with Egypt against Babylonia. He felt the right move was to make peace with Nebuchadnezzar. Now, The first reading, siding with Egypt seemed like the smart play. They looked like they could offer some real muscle against the Babylonians.

In fact, Pharaoh Necho’s army actually set sail from Egypt to help the Jews. But then, a strange thing happened.

God, seeing this, commanded the seas to be covered in corpses. Imagine the scene! The Egyptians, sailing along, suddenly confronted by this macabre sight. "Where did all these bodies come from?" they wondered.

Then, the realization dawned. These were the bodies of their ancestors, drowned in the Red Sea because of the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery! “What?” they exclaimed. “Shall we help the descendants of those who drowned our fathers?” It just didn’t sit right.

And so, they turned their ships around and sailed back to Egypt. Just as Jeremiah had warned, Egyptian promises turned out to be worthless.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How often do we ignore the wisdom of those who see the bigger picture, blinded by short-term gains or fleeting alliances? And how often does history – even ancient history, perhaps especially ancient history – have a way of repeating itself? Maybe the story of Jeremiah isn’t just a tale from the past, but a lesson for us today.

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Rosh ha-Shanah 31aTalmud Bavli, Rosh

Rav Yehuda bar Idi said in the name of Rabbi Yochanan: The Divine Presence made ten journeys, as derived from the verses; and corresponding to them the Sanhedrin went into exile, as derived from tradition.

The Divine Presence made ten journeys, as derived from the verses: from the ark cover to the cherub, and from one cherub to the other cherub, and from the cherub to the threshold of the Temple, and from the threshold to the courtyard, and from the courtyard to the altar, and from the altar to the roof, and from the roof to the wall, and from the wall to the city, and from the city to the mountain, and from the mountain to the wilderness; and from the wilderness it ascended and dwelt in its own place, as it is said: "I will go and return to My place" (Hosea 5:15).

Rabbi Yochanan said: For six months the Divine Presence lingered in the wilderness for Israel, hoping that perhaps they would repent. When they did not repent, He said: Let them perish, as it is said: "But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, and they shall have no way to flee, and their hope shall be the giving up of the spirit" (Job 11:20).

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