Shemot 5773 - English

By Rabbi Joshua Kullock
Comunidad Hebrea de Guadalajara

We find ourselves once again in Egypt.  We are Pharaoh’s slaves again.  And once again, the path that will lead us to the exodus, to the wandering through the wilderness and to the receiving of the Torah has begun.

However, in order to reach Egypt, the biblical story had to present Joseph and his brothers.  In other words: slavery would not have been possible if, some time before, Jacob’s family had not moved to the fruitful lands of Goshen.  On his decision to move down to the Nile, the third of our patriarchs promotes the foundation of a storyline which, generations later, will bring suffering and pain to the recently born people of Israel.

In last week’s parashah we read that Jacob lived seventeen years in Egypt.  When you think it through, you acknowledge that the first five were the years of famine predicted by Joseph out of Pharaoh’s dream.  Nevertheless, after that period of drought, we understand that the agricultural cycle returned to normal, and life conditions improved once more.  In that sense, it is worthwhile to wonder why the Hebrew family stayed in Egypt instead of returning to Canaan: perhaps life in Goshen was much more comfortable; perhaps living under the viceroy’s protection was not something to disdain; or perhaps, just the idea of returning to Canaan to start again was too overwhelming for this group of exiled shepherds.  Be that as it may, they chose to stay in Egypt.  And that choice turned out to be profitable, until the time came when “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph” (Ex. 1:8).

The entire structure presented throughout the last parashiyot of Genesis and the first parashiyot of Exodus, in particular, teaches us three fundamental ideas that should be applied to our own realities:

(a) There are times in our lives when we are called to change.  When hunger hovered upon the land of Canaan, Jacob’s family had to make a choice.  The search for food in Egypt, and the subsequent settlement in those lands, meant the need to procure a better future.  Leaving a known space, no matter how precarious, is never an easy choice.  Nonetheless, the biblical text reminds us of the importance of having the courage required to make substantial changes in our lives, always striving to build a hopeful future.

(b) Sometimes, we can fail.   As we said earlier, settling in Egypt became the paradigm for “today’s bread, tomorrow’s hunger”.  The comfort of a choice that was valid, and even necessary, at some point, became the stage where suffering and humiliation evolved later on.  Consequently, just as our tradition teaches us the value of change and the importance of daring to follow new paths, it also warns us that our choices do not always yield the expected results, and that life is sufficiently complex to make some of our moves turn out differently from what we planned and expected.

(c) And even if it fails, we have to try it out.  The third and last of this week’s messages deals with what to do when we recognize that our choices have led us to sadly unexpected places.  Instead of giving up or disowning the past, instead of sitting down to cry our bitter present or to abuse our bad luck, the tradition of Israel invites us to rearm ourselves and choose again.  If we realize that yesterday’s decisions are no longer good for us, what we have to do is renew our courage to shuffle and deal again.  In fact, history does not recall the Jewish people as that group who decided to live in Goshen and paid the price for their comfort with slavery, but rather as the family who became a nation and found not just the way to depart from Egypt but also the way to build its own national distinctive feature.

These days, when we are just starting a new cycle, when we raise our glasses and reaffirm our commitment to live full lives, we are invited to reflect on the changes we wish to make, on the choices we made in the past, and on the path we would like to travel hereon forward.  For even if we have made mistakes, and even if we will make mistakes again, nothing should be reason enough to make us abandon our struggle, through our actions and choices, for a better future.

Shabbat Shalom u’Meborah!