Hello and welcome to the Exodus.
This week’s parsha (Torah portion) is the first of the second book that Moshe (Moses) transcribed from the divine creator-of-everything. I wonder what it must be like to put down in print your own story as told by someone else. Did Moshe ever stop haShem (god) and say, “Wait a minute, that’s not how it happened. It was like this.”? Then again, he is the humblest man in the world, so maybe he figured haShem has perfect recollection, and his memory was faulty. Or perhaps he remembered it just like haShem was telling him to write it. This perhaps would be the weirdest scenario: Imagine somebody telling your life story to you and their words are just the way you remember the experience to be, even the parts that you had forgotten.
So, how does the story go? Well, we begin by recounting the names of all the sons of Yaakov (Jacob) after which we are told how prodigious they were in birthing children until the land is full of them. We are then told of a new king of Egypt that did not know of Yoseph (Joseph) who is scared of the strength and numbers of these sons of Israel, and tells his people to start oppressing them which only led to more children which led to the Egyptians loathing them.
We are then told of how the Egyptians made the lives of the children of Israel hard and how the king of Egypt told the two Jewish midwives to kill the male-born children and how they didn’t listen. Next, the Pharaoh decides that all males born to the tribes of Israel should be thrown into the river. One boy was born and his mother said that he was good and hid him for three months before putting him in a coracle and placing him in the river where the daughter of the Pharaoh found him. The boy’s sister was watching, and went to the Pharaoh’s daughter and offered to find a nursing woman to nurse this boy. She then fetches the boy’s mother. The daughter of Pharaoh names the boy Moshe because she drew him from the water.
Moshe grows up and decides to see how his brethren are doing. He sees an Egyptian hitting a Hebrew and kills and buries the Egyptian. When Pharaoh discovers this, he tries to kill Moshe, who escapes to Midian where he helps the daughters of the priest of Midian. Moshe decides to stay there and marries one of the daughters and they have a son.
Time passes and the king of Egypt dies and the children of Israel groan and cry out from the suffering and haShem hears and remembers his covenant with Abraham, Yitzhak (Isaac), and Yaakov, and we then find ourselves with Moshe who is shepherding sheep when he sees a bush burning but not being consumed. He then stops to look at this strange sight, and because of that haShem calls out to him from the bush and tells him to go back and lead his people out of Egypt and to the land of the Canaanites, among others. Moshe asks why him and gives reasons why he is not a good choice for this job, and god says not to worry for he is with him. God then tells Moshe what to say to his people and to Pharaoh, and that the people will borrow gold and silver and clothes from the Egyptians on the way out. Eventually god gets mad at Moshe and tells him that his brother Aharon will be there with him, and is in fact on his way to meet him. Moshe finally agrees, and tells his father in law that he is leaving.
On the way, god sends the angel of death after Moshe until his wife circumcises their son. We then have to reunion of the two brothers, and together they meet with the elders of the tribes and then with Pharaoh. Pharaoh is not into letting his slaves have 3 days off to worship a god he has never heard of. Instead he makes the work more difficult for the children of Israel. The children of Israel get upset with Moshe for their plight and Moshe asks god why did he do all this, and god’s answer is to now watch and see what she will do to Pharaoh to get him to send the children of Israel away.
So much is going on and there is so much to talk about, that I hardly know where to start. I don’t want this to be too long, so let me just touch on a few ideas that struck me as I was reading the parsha.
One thing I noticed was that haShem wants Moshe to lead the people out of Egypt. However, he doesn’t go and knock on Moshe’s door. Instead he creates something unusual and waits to see what Moshe will do. Moshe not only notices, but he stops what he is doing to see and try to understand this unusual phenomenon. It is only then that haShem talks to Moshe. Why is this? Perhaps god is trying to tell us that to receive a message from god, one must not only be able to be aware of the un-ordinary, but one must also be willing to step out of his busy life when she see something strange, and be with the strangeness. I wonder how many of us have seen unusual things, but been to busy to take a closer look. Perhaps we have missed opportunities to talk directly with god.
Verses 24-26 of chapter 4 tell how god sends the angel of death after Moshe until his wife, Tzipporah, circumcises their son. Only then does the angel leave. What can we learn from this? Above, the lesson was not to be too busy to stop when you see something unusual going on. The lesson here is a related lesson: don’t be in such a hurry that you neglect to take care of business at home. For if you are, it could be fatal.
In verse 2, chapter 2, Moshe’s mom gives birth to him, and then sees that it is good. The words in Hebrew for, “that it is good,” is “Key tov.” What struck me here is that these words are also used way back in the first chapter of Breisheit (Genesis). As god is making the world, she keeps seeing that what he has made is, “Key tov,” or, “That it is good.” Why do we see these two words in both places? I think it is to point out a major way that we are like god: we both can create out of ourselves. God creates the world out of himself and a woman creates a baby out of herself. I believe that everything that the creator does is sacred, and therefore, anything we do that is godlike, we should do in a sacred manner. The conception of Moshe all the way to his birth was done is such a sacred way, that she could see her creation just as god saw its creation and that is why both could say, “Key tov.” I personally believe that we should live in as sacred a way as each of us can. However, I also think this verse is teaching us that even if other parts of our live we live in an oblivious way, when we engage in sex, we should be aware of its potential to make us godlike and we should treat it as something holy.
Along these lines, I want to conclude with my understanding of how appropriate this week’s parsha is in starting a new book, for it is a parsha of new beginnings. It tells us of the start of the process of going from the privileged to being slaves on the way to being molded as a people. If we look closely, we see in this parsha, and the parshas we read in the following few weeks, lots of birthing pains. One of these is the change in leadership (two new kings of Egypt, a new leader for the family of Israel) which, if we take this as a metaphor for how we can grow and change, points out to begin to change requires us to change the way we think, they way we govern our bodies and our relationships to the world around us. This includes changes in the way we view the world.
A few years ago, on the week and shabbat we read this parsha, several people I talked to told me how hard the week was for them. That year, it was also had a hard week for me, and I was very tired by the end of it. And then I thought of the parsha and saw once again how the parsha mirrors life. For what we see there? We see the tribes exhausted from all the hard work the Egyptians are making them do. Until they finally shout and groan to haShem. When I read this, I realized that god will hear and respond to your groans and cries only if you are working your butt off.
I bless everybody that you continue to work your butts off and know that haShem has heard your cries and that change is on its way. It’s not going to be easy, but real change/rebirthing never is. however, it feels so good when we get to the other side. The light at the end of the tunnel (the sun) is getting a little brighter every day, so stay with it!
If you care to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.
About the Author
Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.