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The Women of Shemot

1/5/2018

 
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This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Sinai of Cranston, Rhode Island.

There are a lot of movies that depict the events of this week’s Torah portion, Shemot, so it might be the most famous portion of the entire Torah. The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt tell the story of the birth of Moses, his vision of God at the Burning Bush, and his first appearance before Pharaoh commanding, “Let my people go!” Perhaps it is not surprising though that the movies do not give much attention to the fact that this week’s Torah portion is heavy with women in starring roles. In fact, Parashat Shemot may be the Torah portion in which there are more women heroes than any other part of the Torah.

To start, let’s talk about Shifra and Pu’ah. You don’t remember them from the movie? That’s because, as far as I know, there has never been a movie that depicted the two midwives who made the story of the Exodus possible. Yet, the text of the Torah makes it clear that they were indispensable heroes.

The king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, named Shifrah and Pu’ah, and said to them, “When you help Hebrew women give birth, look at the birthstool. If it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.” The midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt told them; they let the boys live. So the king summoned them and said, “Why have you let the boys live?” The midwives said to Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptians: they are vigorous. They give birth on their own before the midwife can arrive.” (Exodus 1:15-19)

The text goes on to say that Shifra and Pu’ah were rewarded by God for their act of civil disobedience. It was because of them that the Israelites continued to increase in numbers. Pharaoh’s plan to destroy them backfired because of the bravery of these women and their resistance against Pharaoh’s cruel hatred and fear of the Israelites.

But, notice also that Shifra and Pu’ah are not alone as heroes in this passage. In fact, every woman of Israel has a share in their heroism. The midwives told Pharaoh that the Israelite women were “not like the Egyptians: they are vigorous.” The verse suggests that the Egyptians themselves viewed their own women as frail and helpless. The Israelite women, by comparison, were regarded as strong and capable – a quality that allowed them to give birth to many children even while the Egyptians tried to oppress them.

The next set of women heroes in this week’s Torah portion are an unlikely trio of co-conspirators. The Torah tells us that Yocheved, the mother of Moses, looked at her beautiful baby boy and determined that she would never allow him to be doomed by Pharaoh’s decree of death. She risked her life to save her son. She kept him hidden for three months, the longest she could dare, and then “she got a wicker basket for him and caulked it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child into it and placed it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile” (Exodus 2:3-3).

Imagine how it must have felt for Yocheved to prepare to cast away her son in order to save him. Imagine the fear and the terrible feeling of loss she must have experienced as her fingertips pushed that little basket to set it afloat upon the waters of the river, hoping that somehow her baby would be found and saved.

Yocheved gave her daughter, Miriam, the task of following the basket with her eyes to see what would happen to her baby brother. Miriam, the second hero of this trio, saw the baby float down to the very spot where the daughter of Pharaoh was bathing. When she saw Pharaoh’s daughter take hold of the basket, open it, gaze upon the beautiful baby boy, and realize compassionately that the baby must be the son of a Hebrew slave, Miriam had the courage to step forward to ask the princess, “Shall I go and get you a Hebrew nurse to suckle the child for you?” (Exodus 2:7).

Miriam took a great gamble on the mercy of Pharaoh’s daughter. She trusted that the princess would not reject the child when she saw that her interest in him had been witnessed by a Hebrew. She trusted that Pharaoh’s daughter would willingly enter into an agreement with slaves to allow the child to be nursed by its natural mother – for whom else could this “Hebrew Nurse” be but the child’s own mother? Miriam knew that the instinct to save the life of a child would overpower whatever instinct Pharaoh’s daughter may have had to maintain loyalty to her father, to revile all Hebrews, or just to protect herself from danger. It worked. 

So Pharaoh’s daughter – who is unnamed in the biblical text – became the third woman in this trio of life. The rabbis of the Talmud gave her the name Bityah and claimed she did not go into the Nile just to take a bath, rather, she was cleansing herself from the idolatry of her father’s house – that is, she was entering the mikveh of conversion to Judaism (B. Megilah). According to the rabbis, Bityah defied the advice of her handmaidens who urged her not to go against the law of Pharaoh, her father.

These three women, Yocheved, Miriam and Pharaoh’s daughter – along with the midwives, Shifra and Pu’ah – are prominent in this week’s Torah portion that begins the book of Exodus. It cannot be a coincidence. They are the ones who make the birth and life of Moses possible. They are the ones who set the tone for the entire story of the Exodus by placing the values of life above death, by placing the values of God above the values of Pharaoh, who only pretended to be a god. When Pharaoh decreed that all the Hebrew boys should be drowned in the waters of the Nile, they took Moses from the waters of childbirth and then, literally, lifted him up and out of the waters of the Nile for a figurative second birth.

The redemption of Israel from Egypt had to begin with an act of birthing by many mothers. The story of the Exodus is not just a story about slavery transformed into freedom; it is a story of affirming the power to give life as a way to transcend death. It is a story about the dignity, hope, courage, strength and life-giving qualities of women.

Today, we are living in a moment of awakening social recognition of women’s lives, women’s dignity, women’s hope, courage, strength, and life. After years in which our society turned a blind eye to sexual aggression, harassment, and debasement of women, we are finally reaching a moment when women are being believed when they say that they have been treated cruelly by men who saw their bodies as little more than objects to fulfill their desires and exercise their power.

Parashat Shemot comes to us this year in a way that should sound and feel differently to us than it has come in years past. This year, we are reminded that women cannot be ignored. Their story is where the human story begins. They are models of the courage it takes to affirm life and light even from the shadow of death and darkness. Even the highly patriarchal society from which the Hebrew Bible emerged, presented these women as heroes. Moses could not even have had a single moment of bravery standing before Pharaoh, were it not for the bravery of the women who collectively brought him into the world, protected him, saved him, nourished him and raised him at great risk. 

So, when women read this week’s Torah portion, they can truly say, “Me, too.” They can say, “My story as a woman is an essential part of Torah.” They can say, “The women, like me, of the Bible are just as much responsible for the Jewish people’s relationship with God as any man.”

Even more than that, they can say, “The values of the Torah that demand justice and righteousness also apply to me as a woman.” Equal pay for women for equal work is part of the values of Torah. Dignity and respect for women’s bodies is just as much a part of our Torah as the dignity and respect due to any human being. The obligation to hear, to believe, and to stand up for the cause of the oppressed belongs to women as much as it belongs to anyone else.

For hundreds of years, Jewish tradition identified the obligation to study Torah primarily as an obligation upon men. That certainly has changed a great deal in the last century as women scholars of Torah have gained recognition and standing in the Jewish community. But the obligation upon men should now be understood in a new way. We as men have an obligation to apply the Torah to the way that we perceive, listen to, respect, and extend justice to women. After all, the problem of sexual harassment and unequal treatment of women is primarily a male problem. It is a problem of the way that men see women and the way that men treat women. To be Torah-true Jews of the 21st century, we men must strive to notice the women of our past in our sacred texts and, even more, we must strive to notice, respect and treat with dignity the women of our present and of our future.

Shabbat shalom.

Shemot: Pharaoh's Daughter

12/20/2013

 
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After Pharaoh commanded that every Hebrew baby boy be thrown into the Nile, Moses' mother placed her infant son into a basket to float down the river instead of drown in it. You know the story. Moses was found by Pharaoh's daughter who recognized that he was a son of Hebrew slaves. She adopted him to be her own son and Moses was raised as a member of Pharaoh's court.

I wonder why. Why would a daughter of the mighty Pharaoh risk her status and her life by going against her father's decree? What did she have to gain by adopting a Hebrew slave? Did she yearn for a child of her own? Was it a rebellion against her father? Was it purely an act to save a life?

Pharaoh's daughter is regarded very positively by the rabbis. She is considered a woman who chose the path of righteousness against the sinful path of her father. In some regards, she is the epitome of the righteous gentile who saves the life of a Jew at great personal risk.

It is also possible that the character of Pharaoh's daughter in the Torah was inspired by another Pharaoh's daughter who is described much later in the Hebrew Bible. According to the Book of Kings, King Solomon married a daughter of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. She became Solomon's wife (one of seven hundred) when Pharaoh gave her to him, apparently in an act of appeasement after an ill-fated Egyptian military expedition against the Canaanite city of Gezer  (I Kings 9). The editors of the book of Exodus may have had Solomon's wife in mind when they described the kind-hearted daughter of Pharaoh who recognized the child of a Hebrew slave, rescued him, and took him for her own.

We, too, can recognize Pharaoh's daughter in our own world. We, too, have seen non-Jews who choose to raise Jewish children to be their own and who nurture within them a love of Judaism and the Jewish people.

In the congregations I have served, I have seen many non-Jewish spouses who make the loving choice to honor the religious tradition of their husbands and wives by raising children in our faith. I have seen these non-Jewish men and women joyfully drive their children to Hebrew school, volunteer in the synagogue, and love their adopted communities. 

For a very long time, Jews tended to look askance at the non-Jewish spouses of intermarriage, as if they were the cause of a stain against our people. That has to end. Rather, we should look at these men and women the way we look at Pharaoh's daughter. They are shining examples of dedication and, sometimes, also of sacrifice.

The next time you hear a fellow Jew speak harshly of a "shiksa" or speak pejoratively of a non-Jewish man who has married a Jew, remember Pharaoh's daughter. Remember our debt to the people who choose to help raise the next generation of the Jewish people, even if it is not the people of their own faith.


Other Posts on This Theme:
Missing Pieces
How Does a Joyful Jew Respond to "Merry Christmas"?

Shemot: Names

1/4/2013

 
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The Western Wall
Names

Moses asks God for a Name
And gets a puzzle for his trouble.
"Be" in first person singular, imperfect.
And, I discover, that is also my name.

Here I am sitting in a strange place, alone,
And very imperfect myself.
It is a name for God that fits
In quiet moments of uncertain thoughts.

Who shall I be? What name applies
In this perfectly imperfect world
Of solitary questioning within?
I will be a shepherd alone with the fire.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Shemot: Sacred Names
Shemot: Midwives, Morality and Meaning

Shemot: Sacred Names

1/13/2012

 
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From left to right: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, and (my dear friend and teacher) Rabbi Everett Gendler.

This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Florida.
I was born with a name. My parents named me Jeffrey Wayne Goldwasser. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. Today, I have a different name. I am Rabbi Jeffrey Wolfson Goldwasser. The title “Rabbi” I acquired eleven years ago when I was ordained, and the middle name “Wolfson” I adopted sixteen years ago when I married my wife. I have also had other names over the course of my life.

When I was still very young, I was aware that I also had a Hebrew name, Yosef Aryeh, which was given to me on the day of my bris. I knew that I was named after my grandfather’s father. I saw his portrait hanging in my grandparent’s apartment whenever I visited them. Each time I saw it, I thought, “I’m named after that old man with the gray beard. We’re both Yosef Aryeh.”

When I was a kid, for reasons that are still unknown to me, my father called me “Bean.” Was he thinking about the time that I was the size of a kidney bean in my mother’s womb? Was it a reference to my energy level as a six-year-old boy who was “full of beans”? I don’t know. But I was Bean. That’s what my father called me.

When my little sister was old enough to give me a nickname, she called me “Jay,” which makes sense as an abbreviation for “Jeffrey.” Eventually, when I was in high school, the two nicknames were combined and I was known at home as “Jay Bean.”

Each of those names stir a lot of memories in me. Those names have the power to take me back to specific, cherished moments.

When I was a rabbinic student, I once led High Holiday services at Duke University in North Carolina. The non-Jewish cellist, whom the school chaplain had hired to play Kol Nidre, spoke to me in the deferential tones he probably used when talking to his minister. He kept calling me “Reverend.” I got a chuckle out of that. I never thought of myself as “Reverend,” but for one weekend, it became part of my name.

Today, I am “Jeff” to some. I am “Rabbi” to others. I am “Abba” to two people. And, I am “Mr. Goldwasser” to the hotel clerk who asks for my credit card, or the TSA agent who checks my driver’s licence at the airport.

Each of us is made up of many different identities and, sometimes, those identities each carry different names. Our names tell others, and they tell ourselves, who we are.

This week’s Torah portion is called, “Sh’mot.” Literally, Sh’mot means “Names.” The portion opens the book of Exodus and it begins by telling us the names of the children of Jacob who came down to live in Egypt: Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher. Their descendants grew up in Egypt and stayed there. Over time, they earned a new name for themselves in the mouth of Pharaoh. Pharaoh called Jacob’s children, “Am B’nei Yisrael,” “The Israelite People.” By uttering that name, Pharaoh changed us from being a family into being a nation (Ex 1:9).

According to a teaching of the rabbis, the Israelites soon forgot the name of the God who had made a covenant with their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But God did not forget them. Why not? According to the rabbis, it was on account of three things: they did not forget their native language, they did not stop circumcising their sons, and they did not change their names.” (Midrash Shocher Tov 114). Names are sacred in Jewish tradition. Names connect us to each other—like the way that different people know us by different names. And names also connect us to God.

When we wish to remember someone who has died, we mention his or her name and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. Tonight, we are remembering Debbie Friedman on the occasion of her first yahrzeit by singing her songs and by repeating her name to keep her and her memory alive within us. Names have that power.

This week was also the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest Jewish thinker of the Twentieth Century. There is a collection of poems that Heschel wrote when he was a young man living as a Polish foreigner in Berlin. The title of the collection is, The Ineffable Name of God: Man. In this title, Heschel suggests that God’s deepest identity, his unspeakable name, is to be found in humanity, in each of us. 

This weekend we also sanctify the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., whose birthday is celebrated this Monday. By naming this day, “Martin Luther King Day,” our society has decided to make his memory a lasting part of our identity as a nation. By invoking his name on our calendars, on a special day off, and in our hearts, we recommit ourselves to the ideals that he stood for: freedom, equality, fellowship, peace, the beloved community and the pursuit of our highest dreams. 

Heschel and King knew each other. They marched through the streets of Selma, Alabama, together. By naming these two great men together, we affirm the universalism of our values. The things held dear by a chasidic rabbi from Poland are also dear to an African-American Baptist minister and minister’s son from Atlanta, Georgia.

If our names connect us to God, it is also true in Jewish tradition that God’s name connects God to us. In this week’s Torah portion, Moses spoke to God through the Burning Bush and said, “When I go back to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is this god’s name?’ what shall I say to them?” God answered Moses by saying, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, I-am-that-I-am. You can tell the Israelites that 'Ehyeh' sent you” (Ex 3:13-14). 

One of God’s deepest and truest names is simply Ehyeh, “I am.” God’s name tells us that God not only exists, but that God is existence. The God whose name is “I am” is a God who presence can be experienced throughout all of being, throughout all of everything that is.

By what names are you known? What do each of your names say about who you are? What do your names say about your values and the ideals that are most important to you? What are your most important relationships and what do your names say about those relationships? What are the names in your heart right now? Which names, when you hear them, warm your soul? Which names connect you to the highest within you? Which names connect you to God?

Each of us is born with a name which identifies us throughout life. But the names we acquire in life, and the names we invoke to say who we are and what we believe in, tell a great deal more about us. On this Shabbat, Shabbat Sh'mot, the Sabbath of Names, we sanctify our lives with the remembrance of names.

Shabbat shalom.



Other posts on this topic:
The Last Miracle
Ha'azinu: Forgetting

Shemot: Midwives, Morality and Meaning

1/7/2012

 
At the beginning of the book of Exodus in this week's Torah portion (Shemot), we read that there were two midwives, Shifra and Puah, who refused to carry out Pharaoh's order to kill the newborn boys of Israel. Because of their act of civil disobedience, baby Moses was saved from being thrown into the Nile to drown. He was, instead, placed in a basket to ride on the surface of the Nile to live in the house of Pharaoh. Nice irony.

It is hard to imagine that the midwives would have done anything other than save the baby boys. Murder a newborn baby? Who would do such a thing, even under the orders of a powerful king? Such an act would haunt the soul of any normal person for the rest of her life. It is painful to consider how a person would overcome the quaking fear within that warns us against committing such a horror.

Indeed, the Torah tells us, in its own way, that Shifra and Puah did save the Israelite baby boys because of exactly this capacity to be horrified at the thought of committing murder. The Torah says that the midwives "feared God" (Exodus 1:21). 

The "Fear of God" is not, as some imagine, the cowering fear of a divine being who will come to smite the wicked with lightening bolts. Rather, when Jewish tradition talks about "fearing God," it is talking about the innate human response to the thought of committing an immoral act. This is the kind of fear (yirah in Hebrew) that we feel in our gut that sets a boundary against doing what we know is wrong.

The Torah says that because of their fear of God, Shifra and Puah were rewarded by God who "established households for them" (ibid). According to some commentators, this reward should not be understood only on a literal level. Those "households" may also have been the figurative four walls, floor and ceiling that define our moral universe and make us feel secure in who we are.

In his collection, Degel Machaneh Ephraim, the late-eighteenth-century chasidic master, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov made this connection. He wrote that the fear of God can be called a "house" because it is the capacity within us that establishes our limits and boundaries. It creates a vessel into which we pour our lives. 

This capacity to tremble at immorality is something that almost everyone discovers in childhood. We recognize the suffering to others that results from our bad choices, and we are repulsed instinctively by the idea of being the cause of such suffering. This is a quality that we share with other animals. Monkeys and apes also show a innate discomfort in causing harm to their fellows, even when it is to their own immediate benefit.

As we grow older, the ability to respond to the discomfort of causing harm to others is something that we can develop into a mature moral sensibility, or it is something that we can learn to ignore. It is up to us to choose. 

People who choose, as Shifra and Puah did, to harness their actions according to that gut feeling, tend to feel more secure about themselves. They have a set of personal boundaries that help them to understand who they are and their own, personal expectations for themselves. Those boundaries help them to discover a sense of purpose and find happiness in life.

On the other hand, people who develop the habit of ignoring the feelings that tell them when they are stepping over the line, tend to feel ungrounded in life. WIthout a set of boundaries, life can seem purposeless and unrewarding. People who habitually act on their instincts to satisfy their desires without regard to the affect their actions have on others, over time, begin to feel that their unbounded desires can never be fully satisfied. They often grow unhappy with a world that never seems to give them what they want because they fail to recognize any limits on themselves or on their desires.

There is also an unhappiness that can result when people place too stringent limitations on the boundaries of their behavior. A person who convinces himself that everything he does is wrong is also likely to be unhappy, of course. We often think about people who are "wound too tight" when we imagine how people can make themselves unhappy, but we do not always recognize that having loose or missing boundaries can also lead to unhappiness.

God rewarded the Shifra and Puah's fear by establishing "households" for them. That may really mean that they found their own reward by living lives of moral order. By knowing themselves and setting boundaries for their actions, they found a sense of meaning and purpose in life. We can help ourselves to become more fulfilled by listening, as they did, to our own feelings. When we are aware of the trembling within that warns against harming others, we come closer to finding our own happiness.


Other posts on this topic:
Fearing God
Shelach Lecha: Getting Up Close and Personal

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