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We Are Hayot
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
Moses should have no peers. They should all be dead. Every Hebrew baby boy, cast into the Nile to die, by order of Pharaoh. This should have been the greatest tragedy ever to befall us. A whole generation of our boys, dead. Yet there is hardly a mention of it in the Tanakh. And the Tanakh knows how to mourn, how to lament. We record our tragedies, we bewail our losses. David raises his voice and cries, “My son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom” The Book of Lamentations holds our pain and our fury, our grief and our disbelief. We cry out, “my eyes are finished by tears.”
Where is our lament for our boys in Egypt? Why do we not bewail them? The text skips directly from Pharaoh’s order that the boys be thrown into the Nile to the story of how Yocheved and Miriam saved Moses. We are not told of the reaction of the Israelites to this order, we are not told of any mass killing.
The Torah does relate in more detail to Pharoah’s first attempt to wipe us out. He orders Shifra and Puah, two midwives, to kill all male babies, but to let the females live. Presumably, they would have been able to do this without the knowledge of the mothers, making it appear as if the males were stillborn. It is an absolutely despicable thing to ask. And Shifra and Puah do not do it. Careful for their own lives, they explain to Pharaoh that they were unable to do it because by the time they arrived to deliver the babies, the babies had already been born.
Shifra and Puah attribute these speedy deliveries to the fact that the Hebrew women are hayot. It is unclear exactly what they mean. Rashi, following b. Sotah 11b, explains that this word means animals. The midwives compare us to animals, birthing on our own without any medical assistance. However, we take that word, meant as an insult, and wear it proudly. After all, the blessings that Jacob had given us in the previous chapter compare most of the tribes to animals - Judah is a lion, among other animals. If we are animals, it is not because we are less than human, it is because we have the best qualities of animals as well. Our ability to birth without help is impressive, a show of our strength and our fortitude.
The word hayot comes from the root hyh, life. We could read the word as “life-givers.” Shifra and Puah explain that they were unable to kill the boys because the mothers had chosen life so vigorously, so completely, that their boys could not be killed.
This reading allows us to make more sense of the lack of mourning for our boys, meant to be killed in the Nile. After all, we are hayot. Even when Pharaoh has chosen death for us, we choose life. The story of Yocheved and Miriam becomes one example of the way we protected our boys from death, but perhaps every mother, every sister did the same for their boys. We are hayot, life-givers. Even when we have to cast our boys into the Nile, we weave baskets to protect them, we stand by the shore, we do everything we can to keep them safe.
We also do not forgive. The first plague shows our sorrow and our rage. The waters of the Nile turn to blood. We expose to Pharaoh the truth of what he tried to do to us. Likewise, we, the hayot, the animals, plague Pharaoh with animals. And most tragically, we, the hayot, the life-givers, bring death also to the boys of Egypt. We choose life for our boys.
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