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Drash
for Shabbat Shemot This week we begin reading Exodus, the second book of the Torah. Its Hebrew name, and therefore the name of the first weekly portion, is Sh’mot, meaning "names." The Hebrew name of each book is taken from one word in the book’s first sentence. Here, in a prologue, are listed the "names" of Jacob’s sons who with their families went with him in joining Joseph in Egypt at the end of the book of Genesis. "Exodus," which comes from an important Greek translation, is clearly a more descriptive title. Something like "Liberation, Revelation, and Covenant" would be more descriptive of the whole book, but it’s too late for that. After the prologue the narrative begins some 400 years later, in about the 13th century BCE. We know the story well from our Passover seder. The Israelites have been cruelly enslaved but have been fertile and multiplied. They may well have forgotten God, and God has, perhaps for that reason, allowed them to suffer. A Pharaoh "did not know Joseph" who had saved Egypt from starvation in bygone days. He feared the potential power of the numerous Hebrews and oppressed them with forced labor. He now tells the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill all newborn Hebrew boys and throw their bodies into the Nile. In perhaps the first recorded instance of nonviolent civil disobedience, the midwives, "fearing God" let the boys live and gave the Pharaoh a cock-and-bull story that the mothers gave birth before the midwives could come to them. The words "fearing God" are the first mention of God in the book. Thirty-two centuries later another woman, Rosa Parks, a descendant of slaves, followed the example of the midwives by disobeying the law in Montgomery, Alabama by refusing to move to the back of a public bus. Her act started the bus boycott that launched Martin Luther King to prominence as the leader of the civil rights movement. Now, in an irony of our Jewish history, the Arizona Jewish Post of October 26, 2007 reported that in Israel a religious woman and a male Israeli soldier sitting next to her in an Israeli bus were assaulted by five fervently Orthodox youths after she refused their demand that she move to the back of the bus. "When police arrived at the scene, several dozen fervently Orthodox men attacked them and punctured their tires before escaping." Back to the text. As we know, Moses, a beautiful child, was saved by five women: the midwives, his mother, his sister and Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopted him. He eventually runs away from Egypt to the land of Midian. There, on Mount Sinai, God reveals his (her) existence to Moses as the God of the patriarchs who has (at long last) heard the groans of pain of the slaves. God explains that Moses, following God’s commands, will be the leader of the Israelites to freedom and to the good land of their ancestors. God tells Moses to ask Pharaoh to let the people go so they can serve God, and God outlines exactly what will happen: Pharaoh will refuse many times as God repeatedly hardens Pharaoh’s heart after each plague, and eventually God will slay the Egyptian first-born sons, since Israel, whom Pharaoh will not free, is God’s first-born son. Moses invents many clever reasons why he shouldn’t take on this immense burden; however, as we know, he becomes the greatest prophet and leader of our people in all of our history, almost always obeying God’s commands. Shabbat Shalom.
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