Parasha of the Week

We are approaching the end of servitude for the Jewish nation.  The plagues that God inflicted on Egypt are at their climax.  Darkness and the death of the Firstborn were the final plagues that struck the Egyptians in this parasha. Imagine the terror everyone felt as one affliction after another the people were denied access to the life giving aspects of nature.  One by one the gods of Egypt were demythologized.  From the god the Nile to the sun god Ra each one was successfully degraded to show that there is only one God in the world who alone has the power to control destiny.  For thousands of years humankind has worshipped nature.  They have exported the idea that nature needs to be appeased and cultivated so that the gods of the sky, rain and crops would be good to them.  Imagine their disillusionment when they found that everything they were taught to believe was a lie. We live in a time when a plague confounds and con...

God is teacher, educator and instructor of behavior.  The Bible is no a mere set of stories but an instruction book on justice, fairness, and kindness.  We, the reader, are asked to pay close attention to people’s behavior throughout the books and observe how God responds to them.   This is how we learn: by imitating God.  God feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and in this week’s Torah portion tells us how He frees the enslaved. Note that God could perform the act to redeeming the Jewish slaves without the input of Moses of the mouthpiece of Aaron.  But God is determined that He show us what is good and right by teaching us what to do, how to confront power with truth, how to gather the masses under a united banner of cohesion for dignity and life’s sake.  God does not free the slaves.  Instead He teaches us that in each successive generation we must work to protect the dignity and quality of life of every human bei...