For me [Patriarchs] exist. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob exist today. They are people that you see with white beards. I have no doubt of their existence.

[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.

I had to be honest with myself and that I felt hatred then, but as children say "I hate you", it's not really hate, you know, it's anger.

I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don't know.

The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.

You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.

If you read Exodus 15 carefully, it describes a storm at sea. This is the old Yahwistic source. In the retelling of the story in the later Priestly source, it is more miraculous: The water stands up on either side like a wall. There are walls of water standing up. As you move back in time, oddly enough, the story becomes more historical.