Tikvah Frymer Kensky (from Reading the Women of the Bible p.26- 28)
Pharaoh has a problem. Just as he took no heed of daughters, daughters take no heed of him. Immediately, two daughters defy Pharaoh's command and act to preserve the life of a boy child....
The Bible records the name of Moses' mother, Yochebed, and his sister Miriam, and midrash adds the name "Bithya" for the daughter of Pharaoh. But none of them is named in this story, for like the anonymous daughters of the book of Judges, they are archetypal. They are daughters, women, the very ones overlooked by both Pharaoh and the tradition that remem- bered the names of only the men who came to Egypt. Three subversive daughters have foiled the plans of men and shaped the destiny of the world.
Maurice D. Harris (from Moses; A Stranger Among Us p.23-25)
The seeding of a new era of history can happen in the brief moment it takes for a single person to have a change of heart. In that moment, when compassion stirs one person to the point of some small act of resistance to a system of evil, we witness an aspect of reality that no CEO, president, dictator, or Supreme Leader can eliminate from the human experience, compassion's version of the butterfly effect...
The success of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott teaches us that we should organize and ready ourselves for those moments when the inevitable cracks in unjust power structures begin to rupture, so that we can take advantage. The cracks are there. Preparation increases the odds that when light comes pouring through a small crack, people will be ready to widen the crack and let a wave of light rumble through...
The story of Batya teaches something perhaps even more hopeful...the impression we get from the text is that Batya had most likely lived well within the privileged bubble of the royal court, and that her decision to rescue the Hebrew baby was a purely spontaneous act of compassion. the implication is that even without an organizing effort by a committed resistance movement, the System can't prevent all the possible things that can happen to undermine its grip on power. There really is a crack (or more likely, cracks) in everything and some of the cracks are close to the center of power. Try to control every human heart, to seal off the possibility of love weeding its way somehow to the surface - it's beyond any System's capacities of control.
CHAYA KAPLAN-LESTER
Midrash Hagadol illustrates this idea beautifully in its weaving of a story of Pharoah sending guards to capture the delinquent midwives. It says that God saves the women by turning them into the beams of a home. The guards search the house to no avail, for Shifra and Puah have become embedded in the house itself. The are the beams, the fortifying forces that uphold the entire structure.
All the women who didn't make it - all the women who defied Pharoah and paid with their lives so that we could enjoy the freedoms we have all the women still there and to whom we owe a debt we are bound to explore how to pay
They are the beams of this house...they are what supports it even as they fall and are destroyed
We are their sisters, their daughters, their offspring that they preserved and saved so that we
could create the reality that would become redemption
Will we honor their sacrifices? Tonight? Tomorrow?