This week’s parasha [Torah portion], is shemot, the first portion of the Book of Exodus. The book begins by letting us know that the individual family with whom we became deeply acquainted in the Book of Bereshit, the Book of Genesis, has now blossomed into a people, an am, a nation, albeit one that finds itself in Egypt, thanks to our forefather Jacob’s migration down there to reunite with his son Joseph.
After this prologue the first verse we read says וַיָּ֥קׇם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖שׁ עַל־מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹֽא־יָדַ֖ע אֶת־יוֹסֵֽף. “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” We know what happens next: sensing a threat from this burgeoning people, the Egyptian king enslaves them, and orders the boys cast into the Nile.
And so the people, the Israelites, suffered. We’ll close tomorrow’s portion with words that say the following:
“The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out, and their cry for help from the bondage rose up to God. God heard their moaning, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, וַיֵּ֖דַע אֱלֹהִֽים and God took notice of them, God knew them.
We begin with a King who לֹֽא־יָדַ֖ע who did not know Joseph, and the implications of that for his people, and end with a God who יֵּ֖דַע who did know his people, who took notice of them, and what that eventually entailed.
And yet, as Yisrael, as God wrestlers—that’s who we are, b’nei yisrael—the ones who wrestle with God, we have to ask, why did it take our groaning, our crying out, our cry for help, our moaning—four different Hebrew verbs are used in the span of those two verses—why did it take such outpouring of the pain we were experiencing for God to hear us, to remember us, to look upon us, to know us—four verbs in turn used for God’s finally recognizing us? Is God in Jewish tradition not omniscient, all-knowing? Why would it take our outcry, our calling out loud, for God to remember us, for God to take notice of us? What kind of God is this? What could this depiction of God be teaching us?
One suggestion is that, to the extent we understand Torah as not only a map for our communal struggles, but for our inner life as well, that in order to heal, to feel whole, we have to acknowledge when we’re in pain, when we’re hurting.
I say this not to sound maudlin or morose, but in Jewish tradition, as we talked about on Yom Kippur, and as Leonard Cohen said, the crack is where the light gets in. Sometimes we have to crack open to let in that inner light. For healing to take place, there has to be an acknowledgment of the brokenness.
Jewish tradition has never been one to understand the divine-human being dynamic to be one where humanity sits around and God intervenes. Rabbi Winokur often cites the midrash, the rabbinic interpretation, that when the Israelites raced away from the Egyptians, the Egyptians bearing down on them, the sea of reeds in front of them, the sea did not split until Nachshon ben Aamminadav, a young Israelite, plunged into the waters with the faith that they would make it through.
Jewish tradition even says that the creation of the world involves God’s tzimtzum—that in order for God to create the world, God had to mitztamtzem—had to withdraw God’s presence, which was otherwise too overwhelming. God had to withdraw to make space for the creation of the world.
So, too, with respect to our inner, our spiritual pain. God, this text suggests, doesn’t just intervene without us noticing. We are invited to acknowledge our hurt, to make space for it, to cry out, before we can heal.
Min hametzar karati yah, we chant as part of the Hallel service when we celebrate our deliverance to the other side. Min ha’metzar, from the narrow straits. Ha’metzar — mitzrayim, Egypt. From the place of intense constriction, and anxiety and pain, karati yah: I called out to you, Yah, God, Holy One, Source of Being. I called out to you, v’anani ba’merchav ya. And you answered me, ba’merchav, through opening up those constrictions.
First I called, then you answered. First me, then you. As Heschel says, God is suing constantly for our devotion but we have to reach out, too. Our crying out sometimes serves to shatter the barrier that we have erected through our indifference or our busyness or our distractions.
Well, why doesn’t God transcend all of that? Why does God limit God’s self in that way? God invites us to take ownership of our own existence in partnership with the divine, Jewish tradition suggests.
וידע אלוהים The portion closes. And God knew the people of Israel in their struggles, we translated before. And yet as Rabbi Art Green points out, the phrase has no object; it just says, that is, Vayedah Elohim, God knew. It doesn’t say who God knew. So, this suggests, the verse can be read, rather than God knew Israel, that Israel knew God. It wasn’t that through their crying out God woke up from God’s dispassionate slumber; it was that through their crying out, they woke themselves up, shattering through the numbness, attuning themselves to the divine spark that lay within them.
Min hametzar karati ya. From the depths, from the narrow straits I called out to yah, to God. Rabbi Green, teaches that the word yah, yod-heh, represents “a deeper part of [ourselves], one that has never been enslaved,” never been constricted. It represents “the mysterious innermost” core… “where our [core] self is ever connected to the single cosmic Self that dwells within us.” The mysterious innermost self has a direct portal to the divine, is rooted in the Oneness of being. “It is there that we turn for liberation,” he writes.
Calling out, crying out, this suggests, can open the portal to the part of the self rooted in the divine, so that we open ourselves up for help and, eventually for healing, for wholeness. Shabbat Shalom.
As part of our interactive Torah conversation held weekly during Shabbat morning services, we, in a sense, continued the conversation.
We focused on the part of the parashah that describes the seed of hope nurtured in the midst of despair, as embodied in the person of Moses, born to an Israelite (specifically Levite) family, with Pharaoh’s genocidal edict as backdrop. We read that when Moses’ mother could hide him no longer, she “got a wicker basket for him and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile.”
Of course, those familiar with the Hebrew know that the Hebrew work for basket is far more evocative than the English. It is tevah and it is used in only one other place in the entire Hebrew Bible: tevah also means “ark” as in Noah’s ark, the vessel that, there, too, serves as the literal life raft in which humanity starts out a new. Both of these vessels serve as lifelines to a new chapter—for humanity, for a people, for the spirit.
What characterizes a tevah? Why the same word for both? Scholar Nahum Sarna observes that, “The term suggests a boxlike craft made to float on the water but without rudder or sail or any other navigational aid. It does not use the services of a crew. The use of tevah is intended to emphasize that the fate of the occupants is to be determined solely by the will of God and not to be attributed by the skill of [any human being].”
On the one hand, this passage suggests the counterpoint to the d’var torah I delivered Friday night (above): there are some elements of life out of our control; beyond our ken. Part of the beauty of finding ourselves in a tevah is the surrender involved in making peace with the seemingly rudderless nature of some moments in our lives—recognizing that it is not solely in our hands to determine our fate. And that, as Rabbi Sharon Anisfeld Cohen writes “not all hope has to be so hard-earned.” Sometimes it is just a gift, and we can embrace that gift.
On the other hand, as one Torah study participant observed, a great deal of care and love goes into creating our tevah. Look at the detail with which Moses’ “wicker basket” is described: Moses’ mother “caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile.” Similar loving detail describes Noah’s ark of “gopher wood,” for example. Love and care go into crafting the vessels in which we journey, even if we know that we can’t navigate life’s currents all on our own. (The same Torah study participant compared Jewish ritual as a whole to the tevah—vessels that help us navigate our journey).
Here, too, we find the divine-human partnership. We have a role in crafting, and shaping the vessels in which we navigate our lives, even while we recognize the success of our journeys are not entirely up to us.
