From the Rabbi:
The book of Exodus as well as its opening Parsha is called in Hebrew Shemot, 'names'.
The Torah relates that we had descended to Egypt as seventy souls who were listed by name. By the time we get to this week's parsha we had been reduced to a swarm of nameless slaves. Two verses later, the description of Bnei Yisrael almost sounds like Tolkien’s orcs, a faceless, nameless hoard. (Ex. 1:7) ”The Children of Israel increased, multiplied and swarmed and grew exceedingly overwhelming, and the land teemed with them”. This sounds like an infestation, which is exactly how the Egyptians saw us.
That’s what slavery does, it reduces people to a commodity of labor and denies their essential Humanity until they are just a swarm. Just as the Nazis (yemach shmam) gave us numbers instead of names to dehumanize us, to Pharaoh we were just pests to (1:10) “be dealt with shrewdly lest they continue to multiply”. That’s generally how people deal with their enemies. They dehumanize them, deny them names, faces and any trace of the beauty which is endemic to Humanity and treat them as subhuman vermin.
Of course treating people this way doesn’t only deface the humanity of the victims. When we fail to recognize the Tzelem Elohim, The Divine Image inherent in all people, our own Divine nature becomes eclipsed and fades from memory. We become the evil we project onto others. So it was with Pharaoh in Egypt. He looked at us as subhuman, and in doing so sunk to the level himself The man who thought of himself as a god on Earth had become the ungodly bane of Humanity and remains enshrined in the Torah as the preeminent “bad guy” of the most widely read book in history. And unlike in Cecil B Demille’s film, in the Torah, pharaoh has no name.
In the face of Pharah’ tyranny and oppression, we suffered quietly until two righteous women stepped up to begin the process of redemption. These two women are the first Jews since Yoseph died to be mentioned by name: Shifra and Puah, the Hebrew midwives (identified by Rashi as Yocheved and Miriam) that refused Pharaoh’s initial order to kill newborn Israelite male babies. (1:17) "The Midwives feared God and so they refused to do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, and they spared the children''. Seeing that his ruse to discreetly stamp out the infestation was foiled, Pharaoh abandoned any sense of decency and (1:22) “charged all his people, saying, “every boy that is born you shall throw into the Nile”. And they did just that. They would gladly see their own children die in order to hurt us. (Sound familiar?)
In the midst of this terrible decree, Yocheved would not be deterred from her fear of God and her love of life. She enticed her husband to renew family life and gave birth to a son. The infant boy was cast into the hand of God by his mother and sister, found in the reeds by a princess and eventually grew into the first Jewish boy in his generation to be called by name. Moshe.
In the darkest of times the spark that ignited the redemption was not a finger pointing at pharaoh's wanton injustice. It was not our longing for freedom nor even our faithfulness to our traditions. It was our love of life and the appreciation of the unique value of each individual. That value couldn't be seen looking at the swarm of Israelite slaves. But in the intimacy of a loving family, the specialness of every child can be seen and nurtured.
If indeed The Jewish People are to bring redemption to the world, we must be the midwives of all Humanity, teaching the world to fear God by cherishing the unique faces of each member of the extended family of Adam.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Shlomo
Classes This Week
NOTE: The Thursday evening class is paused until further notice.
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