Parshah Commentary
The Book of Shemot, whose first parshah we read this week, is an epic tale of the redemption of an enslaved and suffering people—but it is not only that. It is also the fulfillment of a divine promise. Hovering behind the story of the exodus is God’s prophecy to Abraham back in the book of Breishit: Your children will suffer for generations in a strange land, but will eventually be liberated. In other words, suffering will bring redemption; pain will be translated into meaning. But as the Israelites’ agony accumulates in our parshah, the promised redemption seems to pale in comparison. In Egypt, their conscription into crushing labor escalates into a program of infanticide—and ultimately extermination. What future redemption can possibly justify such pain? Every newborn baby, smothered on a birthing stool or thrown into the Nile, is one more person for whom the promise of salvation is meaningless.
According to a midrash, this state of affairs exacted a devastating toll on the spirit of the Israelites. When Amram, an Israelite leader, heard that the wicked Pharaoh had decreed that all the Israelite male babies were to be killed, he divorced his wife. All the other Hebrew men soon followed his example; they wanted to spare their children the pain of being born only to die, to spare their wives the pain of bringing a baby into the world only to see them floating, dead, in the Great Nile. It was the child prophet Miriam, Amram’s daughter, who implored her father to overcome his despair. Because of Pharaoh’s wickedness, she argued, there is no guarantee that his decree would be fulfilled. But Amram, she continued, was a righteous man; anything he decreed, even actions that would lead to the disappearance of his people, would certainly be fulfilled.
In their own ways, Amram and Miriam were each wrestling with the implications of Abraham’s prophecy. Amram believed there is no future that could be worth the present suffering. Miriam, while not denying the enormity of the current hardship, still held out hope for a different world. She implored the people to continue living and reproducing—even as the threat to mere existence persisted, and redemption remained beyond imagination. And indeed, when Miriam’s mother bore a son, through stubborn determination and cleverness the child, Moses, was spared the slaves’ suffering and grew up to shepherd a reborn world into existence.
Today, though, a reborn world seems impossibly far off. In our reality of monstrous inversions—in which the slave nation has become Pharaoh—Jews of conscience are understandably struggling with hopelessness and despair. In the face of the violence and suffering wrought by Jewish hands, it is hard to imagine a future for our people. But perhaps the translation of Miriam’s call we must hear today is this: Jews ought to continue living as Jews—even without the promise that redemption from our own crimes is possible. The generative act demanded of us now is not biological but rather imaginative and social, the task of remaking our Jewishness beyond the frameworks that have brought our people to charge their chariots madly into the sea. Because if the wicked decree devastation, it might be fulfilled; but if even the righteous decree that all is lost, what hope is there?
Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.
