In last week’s parsha, Moses and Aaron requested permission to take the Israelites out of Egypt to worship their God. The request contained no threats and appears reasonable, but Pharaoh outright denies it and even increases the burden of slavery on the Jews because of their request. Thus we are lead into the Ten Plagues that ultimately put enough pressure on Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go. But there are two inserts in the Torah that occur before Moses and Aaron next appear before Pharaoh to demonstrate the wonders that God can produce. The first is not an unusual or uncommon insert; it is God’s reassurances to the Jews that he will ultimately lead us to freedom. We see similar promises from God to the patriarchs. The second insert seems out of place; it is a listing of the twelve tribes, their leaders, and their descendants. What is odd here is not only that it seems out of place, but that it only mentions three sons (Reuven, Shimon, and Levi) before picking up with the story of Pharaoh, Moses, and the Plagues. But what I want to focus on this week is God’s assurances to the Jewish people.
This
section of the parsha contains the Four Expressions of Redemption (6:6-7) and a
reiteration of God’s promises to our forefathers (6:8):
I am the Lord. I will free you from the labors of the
Egyptians and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm
and through extraordinary chastisements.
And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I, the Lord, am your
God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land which I swore
to give to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya’akov, and I will give it to you for a
possession, I the Lord.
I
don’t find the actual promises that God makes to be at all unusual. Rather they seem to fit in with the promises
God makes in the book of Bereishit, albeit more catered to the specific
situation the Jewish people are in in Egypt. What is odd is the response:
But when Moses told
this [God’s promise above] to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses,
their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.
Never
in Bereishit (that I can recall) do any of our forefathers ignore God’s
promise; there is typically not a required response…God says something as a
statement of fact and then the Torah moves on.
So why is it important to specifically state here that the Israelites
would not listen? What difference would
it make if they did listen? They would still be slaves to Pharaoh and
forced to work under the same circumstances as before.
I
think it might be necessary to show that the Ten Plagues were not just
necessary to punish Pharaoh and the Egyptians, forcing the Jews to be freed,
but that it was also necessary for the Jewish people to put their faith and
trust in God. They suffered so much that
they couldn’t even hope. God needed to
restore the Jewish spirit before they were ready to be saved. As our Sages have told us, only one-fifth of
the Jewish people left Egypt. The rest
remained in Egypt, either because of a sense of security/familiarity, fear, an
unwillingness to accept uncertainty…but ultimately, no matter their “reason,” it
was really a lack of trust in God. The
one-fifth of the Israelites that did leave Egypt, to officially form the Jewish
people at Mount Sinai, were only convinced through the Ten Plagues. The rest were unable to look up from their
daily struggles/life and see God’s hand in their life. Today, there are so many people that live
this way – some in comfort and others in discontent – that fail to look up from
their daily activity and recognize God’s role.
Those of us that live this way are the eighty percent that were not saved from Egypt. May we all merit being a part of the twenty
percent, seeing God in our lives and being aware of the way He impacts us
daily.
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