FROM JUMPING TO BETRAYAL

The final scene of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” is well-known and beautiful. Indiana Jones must cross a cliff to get to the place where the Grail is, which among other things will allow him to save the life of his dying father. Legend indicates that that is God's path, and “Only by leaping with a leap will he prove his worth.” Facing the void, our Indy brings a hand to his heart and takes a step forward. Only then does an invisible footbridge appear out of nowhere, supporting him and enabling him to reach the Grail.

Pèsach, Passover, means “leap,” among other things, because it requires the Israelites to take a leap from the safety of the albeit difficult Jewish condition in Egypt into the unknown of the desert and what awaits them. Pèsach concludes tomorrow on a special day that celebrates the greatest leap among the many that dot it: the crossing of the Sea of Rush. The people, caught between the Egyptian armada that is about to reach it and the sea that will not allow them to advance, are thus paralyzed, as happens to all of us at certain times in our lives. We know that in the biblical account at that point the sea opens to let him pass. But an ancient rabbinic narrative says that the sea opened only when a man, whose name was Nachshon ben Aminadav, entered the sea until the water reached his head. Only then did the waters subside, and the Israelites had the courage to move forward to safety.

Nachshon's leap is, like Indiana Jones's, a leap of faith. Perhaps, however, Nachson and Indy know that trust always opens up the possibility of betrayal, as psychoanalyst James Hillman points out in his essay “Puer Aeternum.”

In the biblical narrative, betrayal by the divine Transcendence will occur shortly thereafter, beginning with the aggression the Israelites suffer from the people of Amaleq immediately after the crossing of the sea, just when they felt safest and most secure, and will continue in the wilderness with its life of hardship. Unfortunately, betrayal, as Hillman admirably points out, can become a source of growth of the individual and the relationship, or generate further betrayals, of the Other and the self. The sequel to Exodus will recount just such a journey, in which the greatest betrayal of the self, probably enacted as a response to the aforementioned ones, will be that at the very moment when divine Transcendence is offering Israel the Tablets of the Law, the Israelites build an idol, the golden calf.

Hillman admirably argues that the possibility of betrayal is created only when the relationship is intimate and based on deep trust, and he illustrates this idea with a story (which he presents as Jewish). A father teaches his son to jump off a ladder, promising to catch him every time he jumps. But when the son jumps off a very high step, the father pulls back and the child falls. This act of betrayal teaches the son that when we really trust the possibility of betrayal becomes real.

But then what drives our two jumpers, Nachson and Indy, and with them each and every one of us?

Meanwhile, courage, which represents the noblest and most important of virtues, since it encapsulates all the others. And in these cases courage is motivated not by blind faith in an inscrutable deity or in imperfect and often unreliable human beings, but by trust in a project.

For any truly noble project is of immensely greater value than the entities that are part of it, and only this consciousness can lead us to have the courage to risk betrayal by exercising our trust, by placing our footing where we do not know whether it will be sustained, or by stepping into the waters that threaten to overwhelm us.

In that act of courage is born relationship, intimacy, love, life.

There is no greater miracle.