Va'era

Exodus 6:2 - 9:35

The Cup of Hope

The Mishna in Pesaḥim speaks of four cups of wine.1 These are the basic requirements of the Seder, and the community must ensure that even the poorest person has sufficient wine to drink these cups. According to the Jerusalem Talmud,2 they represent the four stages of redemption at the beginning of our parasha. God assures Moses that despite the fact that his intervention with Pharaoh has initially made things worse, liberation will indeed come:

”Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as My own people, and I will be your God.’” (Exodus 6:6–7)

The first cup corresponds to “I will bring you out,” the second to “I will free you,” the third to “I will redeem you,” and the fourth to “I will take you.” Geographically, God will take the Israelites out of Egypt, physically He will save them from oppression, legally He will liberate them from Pharaoh’s rule, and spiritually He “will take them under His own protection and tutelage. Each of the four cups is a stage on the way to freedom, a way of pausing and giving thanks.”

“Two questions arise on the views of Maimonides and Ravad. The first is: why does the Mishna speak about four cups if there are in fact five? To this the answer is straightforward: The four cups are obligatory, unlike the fifth. That is why the community must provide the poor with the means of fulfilling their obligation, but they do not have to make provision for the fifth cup, which according to Maimonides is optional, and according to Ravad is desirable but not absolutely necessary.”

“The drama of the fifth cup now becomes apparent. Pesah represents the start of the great journey of Jewish history, from slavery to freedom, Egypt to the promised land. The fifth cup stands for the destination, the “land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8)”

“Hence the extra cup at the Seder table. Out of respect for Maimonides and Ravad, we pour it. Out of respect for Rashi, we do not drink it. According to the sages, unresolved halakhic disputes will one day be resolved by Elijah (the word Teyku, “Let it stand [undecided],” refers to Elijah: “The Tishbite [Elijah] will come and answer questions and problems”). Hence the fifth cup became known as the cup of Elijah.”

“the word Teyku, “Let it stand [undecided],” refers to Elijah: “The Tishbite [Elijah] will come and answer questions and problems”). Hence the fifth cup became known as the cup of Elijah.”

“Maimonides interprets God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as meaning that “repentance was withheld from him, and the liberty to turn from his wickedness was not accorded to him.”3

Albo and Sforno offer the opposite interpretation. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart precisely to restore his free will. After the succession of plagues that had devastated the land, Pharaoh was under overwhelming pressure to let the Israelites go. Had he done so, it would not have been out of free choice, but rather under force majeure. God therefore toughened, strengthened, Pharaoh’s heart so that even after the first five plagues he was genuinely free to say yes or no.4”

“Pharaoh is in fact (and this is rare in Tanakh) a tragic figure like Lady Macbeth, or like Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, trapped in an obsession which may have had rational beginnings, right or wrong, but which has taken hold of him, bringing not only him but those around him to their ruin. This is signalled, simply but deftly, early in the following parasha, Bo, when Pharaoh’s own advisors say to him: “Let the people go so that they may worship the Lord their God. Do you not yet realize that Egypt is ruined?” (10:7). But Pharaoh has left rationality behind. He can no longer hear them.”

“The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon – that we have it either all the time or none of the time – blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and its loss is gradual. Unless the will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and dies. ”

“Only narrative can portray the subtlety of Pharaoh’s slow descent into a self-destructive madness. That, I believe, is what makes Torah truer to the human condition than its philosophical or scientific counterparts.”

“This is the first appearance in the Torah of an idea, surprisingly persistent in religious thinking even today, called “the god of the gaps.” This holds that a miracle is something for which we cannot yet find a scientific explanation. Science is natural; religion is supernatural. An “act of God” is something we cannot account for rationally. What magicians (or technocrats) cannot reproduce must be the result of divine intervention. This leads inevitably to the conclusion that religion and science are opposed. The more we can explain scientifically or control technologically, the less need we have for faith. As the scope of science expands, the place of God progressively diminishes to vanishing point.”

“What the Torah is intimating is that this is a pagan mode of thought, not a Jewish one. The Egyptians admitted that Moses and Aaron were genuine prophets when they performed wonders beyond the scope of their own magic. But this is not why we believe in Moses and Aaron. On this, Maimonides is unequivocal:

Israel did not believe in Moses our teacher because of the signs he performed. When faith is predicated on signs, a lurking doubt always remains that these signs may have been performed with the aid of occult arts and witchcraft. All the signs Moses performed in the wilderness, he did because they were necessary, not to authenticate his status as a prophet…. When we needed food, he brought down manna. When the people were thirsty, he cleaved the rock. When Korach’s supporters denied his authority, the earth swallowed them up. So too with all the other signs. What then were our grounds for believing in him? The revelation at Sinai, in which we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears….”

“The primary way in which we encounter God is not through miracles but through His word – the revelation – Torah – which is the Jewish people’s constitution as a nation under the sovereignty of God. To be sure, God is in the events which, seeming to defy nature, we call miracles. But He is also in nature itself. Science does not displace God: it reveals, in ever more intricate and wondrous ways, the design within nature itself. Far from diminishing our religious sense, science (rightly understood) should enlarge it, teaching us to see “How great are Your works, O God; You have made them all with wisdom” (Psalm 104:24). Above all, God is to be found in the voice heard at Sinai, teaching us how to construct a society that will be the opposite of Egypt: in which the few do not enslave the many, nor are strangers mistreated.”

“What the Egyptian magicians (and their latter-day successors) did not understand is that power over nature is not an end in itself, but solely the means to ethical ends. The lice were God’s joke at the expense of the magicians who believed that because they controlled the forces of nature, they were masters of human destiny. They were wrong.”

“Humility is the only antidote to hubris. However great we are, we are small in the scheme of things. That is what God showed the Egyptians in the plague of lice.”

“The Torah is preparing the ground for one of its most monumental propositions: It is in the darkest night that Israel has its greatest visions. Hope is born at the very edge of the abyss of despair. There is nothing natural about this, nothing inevitable. No logic can give rise to hope; no law of history charts a path from slavery to redemption, exile to return. The entire sequence of events has been a prelude to the single most formative moment in the history of Israel: the intervention of God in history – the supreme Power intervening on behalf of the supremely powerless, not (as in every other culture) to endorse the status quo, but to overturn it”

“The speech that follows, in Exodus 6:2–8, is breathtaking in its grandeur and literary structure. As Nechama Leibowitz and others point out, it takes the form of a chiasmus:4”

The structure is worked out in extraordinary detail. The first and second halves of the speech each contain exactly fifty words in the Hebrew text. B and B1 are about the patriarchs; C and C1 about the land; D and D1 about Egypt and slavery. The first half is about the past, the second about the future. The first half refers to the Israelites in the third person (“them”), the second in the second person (“you”). The entire speech turns on the threefold repetition of “I am God” – at the beginning, end and middle of the speech. (The phrase actually appears four times, the extra mention occurring in D1. It is not impossible that this is linked to the fact that the name – which is, as we will see, the central theme of the speech – has four letters, the so-called tetragrammaton.)”

“I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as the Lord Almighty, but by My name God I was not known to them.” A fundamental distinction is being made between the experience the patriarchs had of God, and the experience the Israelites are about to have. Something new, unprecedented, is about to happen. What is it?”

“Throughout these essays I have tried to convey the world-changing character of this idea. What is revolutionary in Judaism is not simply the concept of monotheism – that the universe is not a blind clash of conflicting powers but the result of a single creative will. It is that God is involved in His creation. God is not simply the force that brought the universe into being, nor is He reached only in the private recesses of the soul. At a certain point He intervened in history, to rescue His people from slavery and set them on the path to freedom. This was the revolution, at once political and intellectual.”

“In ancient Israel, by contrast, “for the first time, the prophets placed a value on history… For the first time, we find affirmed and increasingly accepted the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God… Historical facts thus become situations of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God.”13 Judaism is the escape into history, the unique attempt to endow events with meaning, and to see in the chronicles of mankind something more than a mere succession of happenings – to see them as nothing less than a drama of redemption in which the fate of a nation reflects its loyalty or otherwise to a covenant with God.”

Excerpt From

Covenent & Conversation

Jonathan Sacks

The Journey and the (Elusive) Destination

The foundational story of the Jewish people is about our ancestors being freed from slavery in Egypt and brought by God to the Land of Israel. And yet, reading the Haggadah at Pesach, we come upon an anomaly: We learn a great deal about the Exodus but hear almost nothing about arriving in the land. Amazingly, in reading the Torah, we encounter much the same thing: We are told quite a lot about the Exodus and the long journey through the wilderness. We hear many details about what is supposed to happen when the Israelites arrive in the land and conquer it, but the Torah startlingly ends before they actually get there. What is going on here”

“Where has the land of Israel gone? Why is the seder night so focused on the journey and seemingly so uninterested in the destination?”

Perhaps. But there is likely also something deeper at play. Maybe the Haggadah seeks to teach us that the journey is often more important than the destination.1”

“Think for a moment about Judaism’s three pilgrimage festivals. Pesach, of course, commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. Shavuot, as our sages understand it, commemorates the revelation at Mount Sinai. And Sukkot? Sukkot does not recall any earth-shattering or life-orienting events. It merely remembers (and reenacts) the long journey of the Israelites through the wilderness. Remarkably, it is Sukkot that is referred to as zeman simhateinu, the time of our joy. The happiest days of the year in Judaism are the days devoted to remembering and reexperiencing the journey.”

“As always Jewish spirituality asks us to embrace complexity rather than eschew it: The journey can indeed be more significant, and more joyous, than arriving at the destination. But the never-endingness of the journey can also exhaust and enervate us. The perpetual elusiveness of our destination can enliven our hearts, but sometimes it can also break them.”

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse,” says the Deuteronomy; “choose life, that you and your children may live” (Deut. 30:19).

The conviction that human beings have the freedom—and the responsibility—to choose how we will act lies at the very heart of Jewish theology and spirituality. As Maimonides (Rambam, 1135–1204) writes, free will is “a great principle and a foundation of the Torah. . . . The choice is yours, and anything a person wishes to do, for good or for evil, he can do” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 5:3). Moreover, Maimonides insists, without a robust conception of human freedom, the whole idea of moral responsibility collapses into incoherence: “If God decreed that a person should be righteous or wicked . . . what place would there be for the Torah? By what right or justice would God punish the wicked or reward the righteous? ‘Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?’” (5:4). No freedom, says Maimonides, no moral responsibility; no moral responsibility, no Judaism.”

“Important as Ibn Ezra’s question is, it is not where the Torah’s attention is focused. Rather, what animates the text is God’s desire to make God’s sovereignty unambiguously clear. Pharaoh brazenly dismisses God—derisively he asks, “Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go” (Exod. 5:2)—and now he will learn that God is lord and master of creation.18 Never again, God hopes, will God’s power and presence be doubted. As Bible scholar John Durham puts it, God “is orchestrating, in a combination of opposing and unlikely forces, a deliverance that will above all be a proof of [God’s] active presence. A reluctant Moses, an unbelieving Pharaoh[;] a crushed and dispirited Israel, a proud and ruling Egyptian people[;] a non-nation against the greatest of nations, are brought together, and the opposing sides are set still more firmly in their respective ways, so that proof of [God’s presence] which is to turn everything upside down, may be established irrevocably”

“Maimonides maintains that free will is fundamental to Jewish theology, he nevertheless adds that “it is possible for a person to commit a sin so egregious, or to commit so many sins, that the judgment rendered before the True Judge is that his retribution for these sins, which he committed freely and of his own accord, is that he is prevented from repenting and is no longer able to abandon his evil ways—so that he dies and perishes on account of those sins he committed”

“This, Maimonides insists, is how we should understand the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart: “Since he initially sinned of his own free will and wronged the Israelites who lived in his land . . . justice required that he be prevented from repenting, so that he be punished. This is why the Blessed Holy One hardened his heart” (Laws of Repentance, 6:3).”

“What does Maimonides mean when he says that sin can lead to loss of freedom? Some interpreters take his words literally—that is, they assume that at a certain point, when a person has persisted in choosing evil, God actively intervenes to undermine his capacity to repent.20 But this is not a defensible interpretation of Maimonides, who “embraced a naturalistic metaphysics21 that severely restricted—or even virtually eliminated—instances of direct divine intervention in the universe. . . . Indeed, Maimonides reduced prophetic locutions of the form ‘God does x’ to statements of the form, ‘within the natural order ordained by God, x occurs.’”22 Moreover Maimonides insists in the Guide of the Perplexed that God never interferes with human freedom (3:32), and that divine providence never takes the form of direct divine intervention to punish the wicked (3:18).”

“Whether or not it fully captures the Torah’s intentions, Maimonides’s interpretation does powerfully evoke a fundamental truth of the human condition. In psychologist Erich Fromm’s words, “Every evil act tends to harden a man’s heart, that is, to deaden it. Every good deed tends to soften it, that is, to make it more alive. The more man’s heart hardens, the less freedom does he have to change, the more is determined already by previous action. But there comes a point of no return when man’s heart has become so hardened and so deadened that he has lost the possibility of freedom.”30 Consistently repeated, sinful behavior can take deep and unrelenting hold of us. Piling bad decision upon bad decision deeply compromises our ability to choose a different course.”

“We often think of freedom as a fact, but it is also—and perhaps primarily—an aspiration. Real freedom requires, R. Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–93) writes, “a continuous awareness of maximal responsibility by man without even a moment’s inattentiveness.”31 Mindfulness and constant, exquisite attention are necessary for freedom to flourish. Freedom needs to be nurtured and attended to, not taken for granted”

“Freedom is, in other words, a spiritual project. In order to thrive, it must be brought into awareness (Soloveitchik) and actively cultivated (Wolbe). Then, and only then, can we soften our hearts.”

Excerpt From

The Heart of Torah, Volume 1

Shai Held

“Years later, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism took a similar step when they published the following prayer in their Hebrew Machzor, the High Holiday prayerbook:

Shechinah, the source of our life—hear our prayer and have compassion for us.

Shechinah, the source of our life—remember that we are Your sons and daughters.

Shechinah, the source of our life—teach us to recognize our limitations.

Shechinah, the source of our life—guide us in the ways of pleasantness.

Shechinah, the source of our life—teach us compassion and tzedakah.

Shechinah, the source of our life—be with us for the sake of those who struggle for peace and justice.

Shechinah, the source of our life—turn our mourning to joy and our sadness to happiness.

Shechinah, the source of our life—bless our land and the work of our hands.

Shechinah, the source of our life—gather Your children from the four corners of the earth.

Shechinah, the source of our life—complete the building of Jerusalem Your holy city.”

Excerpt From

The Women's Torah Commentary

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein

Nothing

Rabbi Judah ben Bateira, an early tanna, reads the verse as if it is referring to idol worship. In Hebrew, idol worship is called avodah zarah, and the word avodah itself can mean either “hard work” or “worship.” By interpreting the word avodah to mean “worship” rather than “hard work,” Rabbi Judah thus finds an answer to the problem of why the Israelites did not react with joy and enthusiasm to Moses when he brought them good tidings of freedom and salvation. While the Torah’s answer seems to be that they were simply worn down by their enslavement, he asserts that the people did not listen to Moses because it was hard for them to abandon idol worship. They were disturbed by God’s new requirement that they relinquish their idols and worship God alone.”

Excerpt From

A Year with the Sages

Reuven Hammer

“you shall know that I am the LORD your God Who takes you out from under the burdens of Egypt. This idea is emphasized again and again, in the Torah as well as in later books of the Bible. It is the cornerstone of Israelite faith—that God has proven His divinity and His special attachment to Israel by the dramatic act of liberating the people from Egyptian slavery.”

“I…shall harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply My signs and My portents. Whatever the theological difficulties, the general aim of God’s allowing, or here causing, Pharaoh to persist in his harshness is made clear: without Pharaoh’s resistance, God would not have the opportunity to deploy His great wonders and so demonstrate His insuperable power in history and the emptiness of the power attributed to the gods of Egypt. It should be noted that three different verbs are used in the story for the action on or in Pharaoh’s heart: hiqshah, “to harden” (the verb here), izeq, “to toughen,” or in other contexts, “to strengthen” (the verb used in earlier passages), and kaved, literally, “to be heavy,” which in English unfortunately suggests sorrow when linked with the heart, and so has been rendered “harden” in this translation (as in verse 14). The force of all three idioms is to be stubborn, unfeeling, arrogantly inflexible, and there doesn’t seem to be much differentiation of meaning among the terms, though elsewhere izeq linked with heart has a positive meaning—“to show firm resolve.”

“But I shall set apart on that day the land of Goshen. Goshen is the region of northeastern Egypt that, according to the account in Genesis (46:34), was set aside for Hebrew settlement. This is the first clear indication in Exodus that the Hebrews lived in a segregated area in Egypt. That geographical segregation will play a crucial role in the climactic ninth and tenth plagues.”

“The Exodus story is conceived as an establishing of the credentials of the God of Israel for all humankind. Hence his awesome power has to be demonstrated in one plague after another, and Pharaoh’s repeated resistance is a required condition of the demonstration.”

Excerpt From

The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary

Robert Alter