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...

 This is a powerful parasha filled with the roots of the Israelite enslavement, the genocide of the male children, Moses defending his people and the ultimate call to Moses to take his rightful place as leader of the people. Inasmuch as there are many villains in the story, there are many more heroes, some known and others nameless.  Here are two such heroines, Shifra and Puah.  Commanded to murder all the Jewish male children they not only rush to the site if the delivery but save the children claiming they could not make it in time to commit the atrocity.  Legend has it that Shifra was the Egyptian name for Yocheved (Moses' mother) and Puah as none other than Miriam, Moses' sister.  Whether true or not, they are to be celebrated for their bravery in defying the order of the mighty Pharaoh. We are taught by our wise rabbis to respect government and governmental authorities.  Rabbi Hanina, one the greatest sages of the second century, tells us to respect th...

Some time later Joseph was told, "Your father is ill.     Genesis 48:1   Throughout the Torah people are born and die but this is the first time any mention is made of illness in the Torah.  The Midrash explains, “from the time of Adam until now no one became ill before they passed away.  When their time came to die, they simply died without warning." Jacob prayed to God that he would have some indication that his death as approaching so that he would have a chance to say the things that he needed to day to his children before he passed from view.  God accepted his prayer and from Jacob’s time on, illness was the gift of a warning that life was about to come to an end and we could “put our things in order”.” (Me’am Loez) We not usually consider illness a gift yet we have a long tradition of leaving a well-considered list of ideals that we want to give to the next generations.  They are not wills of the sort that divides real estate ...

“God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.  So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.”   Genesis 45:7-8 In these two sentences Joseph sums up his feelings towards his brothers.  Not only does he not hold a grudge against them for stripping him of his coat, his family and freedom he declares that everything was a part of God's plan.   We rarely have a choice in what happens to us but we always have a choice in the way that we respond.  Some of us prefer to harbor feelings of anger and resentment and coddle them until they become malignant. Others choose the path of forgiveness because that is a gift to them, as well as to us. In the latter instance, a religious person understands that our choices can also be God directed.     We all write the narrative of our own li...

The purpose of life is alluded to in this parasha.  It can be found in Judah’s question to his brothers after they threw Joseph into the pit: Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood?    Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay a hand on him; for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And they agreed.    So when the Midianite traders passed by, his brothers pulled Joseph out of the pit and sold him for twenty shekels of silver   to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt.    Genesis 37:26-28 While some may be tempted to credit Judah with saving Joseph’s life we cannot ignore the fact that he was the one who sold Joseph as a slave for the purpose of lining his pocket with silver.  Who would do such a thing?  While we learn later that Judah felt great remorse and repented, at this moment he was thinking only of himself and how he could better his position...

After father Jacob wrestles an angel/man he receives a blessing that came with a cost, a leg that was permanently damaged. “ Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,   because you have struggled with God and with men, and you have prevailed. ” Genesis 32:29 Aryeh Kaplan points out that the root of Israel indicates that we “must always struggle to be great before God.”  Life is a gift but that does not mean it does not require assembly.  We have an instruction guide; we call it Torah.  It tells us how to put our life together.    Yet we are comprised of so many contradictory thoughts and wishes that it is often difficult to determine which path to travel.  Tradition tells us that we have two impulses (yetser), one which is altruistic and other is vindictive and selfish.  Throughout our lives we listen to both of those voices and hopefully choose the path that God wishes us to take, the on...