Shemot 5767 – Gilayon #480


Shabbat Shalom The weekly parsha commentary – parshat


(link to original page)

Click here to
receive the weekly parsha by email each week.

Parshat Shemot

MOSES WAS PASTURING

THE FLOCKS OF JETHRO, HIS FATHER IN LAW, THE CHIEF OF MIDIAN, AND HE LED THE

FLOCKS AFTER THE FREE PASTURELAND, AND HE CAME TO THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD, TO HOREB.

AN ANGEL OF THE

LORD APPEARED TO HIM IN A FLAME OF FIRE FROM WITHIN THE THORN BUSH, AND BEHOLD,

THE THORN BUSH WAS BURNING WITH FIRE, BUT THE THORN BUSH WAS NOT BEING

CONSUMED.

SO MOSES SAID,

"LET ME TURN NOW AND SEE THIS GREAT SPECTACLE WHY DOES THE THORN BUSH NOT

BURN UP?"

THE LORD SAW THAT

HE HAD TURNED TO SEE, AND GOD CALLED TO HIM FROM WITHIN THE THORN BUSH, AND HE

SAID, "MOSES, MOSES!" AND HE SAID, "HERE I AM!"

AND HE SAID,

"DO NOT DRAW NEAR HERE. TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF YOUR FEET, BECAUSE THE PLACE

UPON WHICH YOU STAND IS HOLY SOIL."

(Shemot 3:1-5)

 

Taking off one's shoes expresses giving

oneself up entirely to the meaning of a place, to let your personality get its

standing and take up its position entirely and directly on it without any

intermediary. So the priests in the Temple had always to function barefooted, and nothing was allowed

to be hotzetz, to intervene between their feet

and the ground, or between their hands and the holy

vessels during the service, or between the priestly garments and their body. Nothing

in the Temple was mere gaudy show, man-designed to impress and have

effect on the eye of the beholder. Everything was to work back on the

personality of the ministrant, and if one wished to act in the service of the Temple one had to identify oneself directly with it, and become

sanctified by it, and be a part of it. "The floor sanctifies" (Zevahim 24a) – the holy soil sanctifies the priest.

(Rabbi S.R.

Hirsch, Shemot 3:5, Levi translation)

 

 

Pharaoh as the Sitra

Ahra

Ronen Ahituv

In honor of my daughter Be'er

Upon her bat mitzvah

From her we shall draw

Torah and salvation

Two birth stories are woven into the beginning of our parasha: the birth of the Israelite nation, and immediately

afterwards – the birth of Moses.

Besides the parents, each birth scene is accompanied by additional

benevolent figures: Moses is saved by Pharaoh's daughter, and the midwives try

to save the People Israel.

A further figure, threatening and dangerous, lurks behind the benevolent

characters: Pharaoh, the "new" king. It was Pharaoh who established

the framework in which the People Israel and their savior Moses were born. He

ordered the midwives – and later, his fellow Egyptians – to cast the newborns

into the Nile. In a way, Moses' mother obeyed

the royal decree; she did cast her son into the Nile (and not elsewhere) – but only

after placing him inside a basket.

Pharaoh is described as being the enemy of the People Israel, and later

in the parasha he also becomes Moses' personal enemy

and seeks his death.

The chilling colors in which Pharaoh is depicted

serve as background to the positive descriptions of the other characters of the

parasha. Pharaoh is the ultimate villain, and all evil is

drained into him (as hinted by his name, which contains the Hebrew word ro'a – evil), allowing the other participants in the

story to demonstrate their compassion and good-heartedness. Pharaoh is

important and necessary for the story's structure, counterbalancing all the

other human characters.

Later in the Torah, Pharaoh's deeds remain important and give rise to

positive consequences: when the Holy One blessed be He requests the

faithfulness and absolute submission of the Israelites, He presents Himself as

having taken you out of the Land of Egypt, from the house of bondage (Shemot 20:2). The Exodus constitutes the Israelites' bill of servitude to God: for

they are My servants whom I took out of the Land of Egypt (Vayikra

25:42). At the time

of the Exodus, enslavement to Pharaoh was switched for servitude to God. Could

God have proclaimed for they are My servants if

Pharaoh had not enslaved the Israelites earlier?

A comparison

between the passage describing the Israelite enslavement and the story of the Tower of Babel reveals their reversed

parallelism:

 

Shemot 1

 

9. He said to his people,

"Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we are.

10. Go, let us deal shrewdly

with them, lest they increase, and a war befall us,

and they join our enemies and depart from the land."

11. So they appointed over

them tax collectors to afflict them with their burdens, and they built store

cities for Pharaoh, namely Pithom and Raamses.

 

 

 

 

12. But as much as they

would afflict them, so did they multiply and so did they gain strength, and

they were disgusted because of the children of Israel.

Bereishit 11

 

4. And they said,

"Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the

heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered upon the face

of the entire earth."

5. And the Lord descended to

see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built.

6. And the Lord said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one

language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be

withheld from them, all that they have planned to do?

7. Come, let us descend and

confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his

companion."

8. And the Lord scattered

them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and

they ceased building the city.

 

Salient similarities and contrasts are evident in both the vertical and

horizontal dimensions of the table.

In the vertical, we find the opposition between lest they increase and

so did they multiply and between lest we be scattered and the

Lord scattered them, and between had built/ what they have

commenced to do and they ceased building. The Sages addressed these two sets of contrasts

in each passage.

In the horizontal dimension, we find similarity between Behold [hinei], the people of the

children of Israel and Lo [hen]! [they are] one

people. The word go [Hebrew: hava] is

also used by both God and Pharaoh.

The similarities

between the two passages are not merely linguistic. They

both involve an individual ruler who speaks in the plural and who faces the children

of Israel/children of Adam and wants to use clever tactics against

them. In the Babel passage, God stops the city's construction by scattering

its inhabitants; in our parasha Pharaoh tries to

contain the break-away growth of the Israelite population by forcing them to

build a city.

Differences between

the two passages include, among others: that the Israelites in Egypt were mute [until their sighing-crying in the end of

chapter 2] while the humans of Babel take the initiative and stand up to God. Another obvious

difference is Pharaoh's failure compared to God's success. Nonetheless, the

linguistic and thematic similarities between Pharaoh's intentions and God's

deed cry out for our attention.

There are additional

aspects in which Pharaoh's deeds echo those of God: God grants life and death,

and Pharaoh wants to grant life and death: If he is a boy, kill him; but if

she is a girl, let her live. God makes Israel His servant, and so does Pharaoh. There is significance to

the fact that Pharaoh's magicians toiled to reproduce the plagues that Moses

produced in God's name, and that the Holy One blessed be He, speaking through

Moses, addresses Pharaoh on equal terms: And you shall say to Pharaoh, 'So said the Lord,

"My firstborn son is Israel. 'So I say to you, send out My son so that he

will worship Me, but if you refuse to send him out, behold, I am going to slay

your firstborn son" (Shemot 4:22-3). Just as the People Israel – God's son – is equal

to Pharaoh's son, God and Pharaoh are – so to speak – equals.

Pharaoh's hubris,

his imagining himself to be a god, receives partial confirmation from the fact

that God sees him as a worthy adversary (as He had also seen the inhabitants of

Babel), and defeats him, as it is written, and

in order that you tell into the ears of your son and your son's son how I made

a mockery of the Egyptians (10:2). The

reversed similarity between Pharaoh and God informs Pharaoh's role as God's

agent, and as His mirror image. As we have seen, Pharaoh does play a divine role,

and not only in his defeat – his deeds also create the

background for the revelation of God's presence in His world.

Dr. Ronen

Ahituv lives in Mitzpei Netufa and teaches at the Midrasha

in Oranim, at Kinneret College and at Western Galilee College.

 

Human Compassion Knows No Bounds

– Righteous Gentiles Have a Share in the World to Come.

Pharaoh's

daughter went down to bathe, to the Nile, and her maidens were walking along

the Nile, and she saw the basket in the midst of the marsh, and she sent her

maidservant, and she took it. She opened [it], and she saw him the child, and

behold, he was a weeping lad, and she had compassion on him, and she said,

"This is [one] of the children of the Hebrews." His sister said to

Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and call for you a wet nurse from the

Hebrew women, so that she shall nurse the child for you?"

(Shemot 2:5-7)

 

Nine entered the Garden of Eden while still

alive, they are: Hanokh ben

Yered, Elijah, the Messiah, Abraham's servant Eliezer, King Hiram of Tzor, the Cushite king's servant, Ya'avetz

son of Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi,

Pharaoh's daughter Bitiyah, Serah daughter of Asher, and according to some, even Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi.

(Masekhet Derekh Eretz Zuta 1: 8)

 

And his Judahite

wife bore Yered father of Gedor,

Heber father of Soko, and Yekutiel

father of Zanoah. These were the sons of Bitiyah daughter of Pharaoh, whom Mered

married.

(I Chronicles 4: 18)

 

These were the sons of Bitiyah daughter of Pharaoh, whom Mered

married Why did they call his wife a Judahite? Because she rejected idolatry, as is

written: The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the Nile. Rabbi Yohanan

said: She went down to wash herself clean of the idols of her father's house. Bore

[Yered father of Soco..]? She only raised him! This teaches us that Scripture

views one who raises a boy or girl orphan in his house as if he bore them. Yered is Moses, and why was he called 'Yered'?

Because manna came down [yarad]

for Israel in his days. [He was called] Geder [fence]

because he fenced in Israel's

promiscuity.

[He was called] Heber because he attached [hiber] Israel to their

Father in heaven. [He was called] Soko because he was like a sukkah to Israel. [He was called] Yekutiel because

Israel looked [kivu] to God in his days. [He was called] Zanoah because

he caused Israel's sins to be

neglected [hizniah]. [The verse mentions three

times] father of. father of, father of,

– a father in Torah, a father in wisdom, a father in prophecy.

These were the sons of Bitiyah daughter of Pharaoh, whom Mered

married- Was

his name Mered? Wasn't his name Kalev?!

The Holy One Blessed Be He said: Let Kalev, who

rebelled [marad] against the Spies' plan come

and marry the daughter of Pharaoh, who rebelled [mardah]

against the idols of her father's house.

(Meggilah 13a)

 

Now

Pharaoh's daughter went down to bath at the Nile… she saw the little ark… she opened

it and saw him, the child, here, a boy weeping! She pitied him and she said:

One of the Hebrews' children is this!… The child

grew, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She called

his name: Moshe/He-Who-Pulls-Out; she said: for out of the water I pulled him.

She did not call him Mashuione

drawn up from the water. Perhaps this gives us an indication of the

whole tendency of the education which the Princess gave her foster- son, and of

the deep impression that was made from the very beginning upon his character.

By giving him this name she said to him: All his life, he is never to forget

that he was thrown into the water and that I drew him out of it. Therefore all

his life is he to have a soft heart for other people's troubles and always be

on the alert to be a Moshe, a deliverer in times of distress. His Hebrew name

always kept the consciousness of his origin awake within him. The Princess

surely inquired of the mother the Hebrew term for expressing this thought,

otherwise she would have given him his an Egyptian name. In all this we can see

the noble humane character of Moses' savior.

(Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch, Shemot 2:10)

 

Ethical Behavior is the

Criterion for Fear of God

…whoever withstands this test,

willing to sacrifice his life – prepared to be killed rather than to transgress

– definitely has in his heart the Lord, the Lord of truth… "Fear of

God" in the Bible is a demand made of every person created in the image,

and if there is no fear of God in his heart, the heart of the gentile, Scripture

judges him accordingly, and he is considered to have betrayed all his duties.

Abraham said: For I said that there is no fear of God in this place, and

they will kill me for my wife.

This means that fear of God does

exist among the gentiles. Whoever is suspect of not having fear of God in his

heart is also suspect of all evil behavior. Of Amalek

it is written: How he encountered you on the way and attacked your tail –

all the beaten down ones at your rear, while you were weary and faint, and thus

he did not stand in awe of God. It should be noted that in

all of the four places where the gentile (including Joseph, who plays the part

of the gentile) is either praised or condemned – either because of his fear of

God or because of the lack of it – in all those places "fear of God"

is expressed by behavior towards a member of another people, towards members

of the minority. The attitude to the stranger, to the one who is powerless,

who lacks protection, is the criterion of whether or not one has fear of God in

his heart. Therefore, and also because of the phrase the midwives, fearing

God, it would seem that the preferable explanation would be: They were

Egyptians.

(Prof.

N. Leibowitz: New Studies in the Book of Shemot, pp. 32-33)

 

Shabbat Shalom is

available on our website: www.netivot-shalom.org.il

If you wish to

subscribe to the email English editions of Shabbat Shalom, to print copies of

it for distribution in your synagogue, to inquire regarding the dedication of

an edition in someone's honor or memory, to find out about how to make

tax-exempt donations, or to suggest additional helpful ideas, please contact Miriam

Fine at +972-52-3920206 or at ozshalom@netvision.net.il

 

If you enjoy Shabbat Shalom, please consider contributing towards

its publication and distribution.

  • Hebrew edition distributed in Israel

    $700

  • English edition distributed via email $

    100

Issues may be dedicated in honor of an event, person, simcha, etc. Requests must be made 3-4 weeks in advance to

appear in the Hebrew, 10 days in advance to appear in the English email.

In Israel, checks made out to Oz VeShalom

may be sent to Oz VeShalom-P.O.B. 4433, Jerusalem 91043. Unfortunately there is no Israeli

tax-exemption for local donations.

US and British tax-exempt contributions to Oz VeShalom may be made through:

New Israel

Fund, POB 91588, Washington, DC

20090-1588, USA

New Israel

Fund of Great Britain,

26 Enford Street, London

W1H 2DD, Great Britain

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE NEW ISRAEL

FUND IS NO LONGER ACCEPTING DONATIONS UNDER $100.

PEF will also channel donations and provide a tax-exemption. Donations

should be sent to P.E.F. Israel Endowment Funds, Inc., 317

Madison Ave., Suite 607, New York,

New York 10017

USA

All contributions should be marked as donor-advised to Oz ve'Shalom, the Shabbat Shalom project.

 

About us

Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom is a movement

dedicated to the advancement of a civil society in Israel.

It is committed to promoting the ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and justice,

concepts which have always been central to Jewish tradition and law.

Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom shares a deep

attachment to the land of Israel

and it no less views peace as a central religious value. It believes that Jews

have both the religious and the national obligation to support the pursuit of

peace. It maintains that Jewish law clearly requires us to create a fair and

just society, and that co-existence between Jews and Arabs is not an option but

an imperative.

Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom's

programs include both educational and protest activities. Seminars, lectures,

workshops, conferences and weekend programs are held for students, educators

and families, as well as joint seminars for Jews, Israeli Arabs and

Palestinians. Protest activities focus on issues of human rights, co-existence

between Jews and Arabs, and responses to issues of particular religious

relevance.

5,000 copies of a 4 page peace oriented commentary on the weekly Torah

reading are written and published by Oz VeShalom/Netivot

Shalom and they are distributed to over 350 synagogues in Israel

and are sent overseas via email. Our web site is www.netivot-shalom.org.il

Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom's

educational forums draw people of different backgrounds, secular and religious,

who are keen to deepen their Jewish knowledge and to hear an alternative

religious standpoint on the subjects of peace and social issues.

Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom fills an

ideological vacuum in Israel's

society. Committed both to Jewish tradition and observance, and to the

furthering of peace and coexistence, the movement is in a unique position to

engage in dialogue with the secular left and the religious right, with Israeli

Arabs and with Palestinians.