Monday, January 7, 2013
Parshat Va’Era
Sh’mot 6:2 – 9:35
Sh’mot 6:2 – 9:35
1 Shevat 5773 / Jan 11 - 12,
2013
Living
Liberation from the Inside Out
by Zvi Bellin, MHHQ
by Zvi Bellin, MHHQ
As I read through this week’s Torah
portion, I was reminded of a Harry Potter style wizards’ dual. Moshe and Aaron
show up at Pharoah’s palace and throw down one magic trick after another –
sticks to snakes, water to blood, and frogs from everywhere! After each of
these signs Pharoah’s magicians counter by performing the same trick. Until the lice and so on through the rest of
the 10 plagues, where they see that this magic is beyond human ability.
Amazingly, this epic sorcerers’
battle was sparked by a power that not even God could overturn:
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ט וַיְדַבֵּר
מֹשֶׁה כֵּן, אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; וְלֹא שָׁמְעוּ, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, מִקֹּצֶר
רוּחַ, וּמֵעֲבֹדָה קָשָׁה.
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9 And Moshe spoke so to the
children of Israel; but they could not hear Moshe for impatience of
spirit, and for cruel bondage.
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This verse directly precedes Moshe
and Aaron coming to Pharoah’s house. Moshe
is first told by God to go to the children of Israel and let them know that God
is with them and will deliver them from slavery. As we see in the verse above, they
are unable to take in this message. The children of Israel have been beat down
so much by years of oppression that the seeds of liberation cannot be planted
within them. They are like soil that is too tightly packed in, nothing can
penetrate it! It seems that because of this God directs Moshe and Aaron to
Pharoah’s palace to destroy the externally imposed bonds of slavery instead. If
liberation cannot be actualized from within the people, it must be forced from
the outside.
A few things stand out for me as
potential learning points. True freedom cannot be imposed on someone else. Even
though the Israelites were taken out of Egypt, it took them generations to
embrace freedom on the inside. I think Jews are still in this process today
(even without our collective Holocaust trauma), so many of Jewish rituals
remind us of being taken out of Egypt – begging us to contemplate our status as
a free people.
Taking this message more internally,
the Israelites could not hear Moshe because of impatience of spirit, or
literally, shortness of breath. How often do we refuse to fully accept reality
because our anger or fear gets in our way? We can see this physically in our
breath which is shortened when we are upset or afraid. Even when good news
comes along, we can be so wrapped up in a past story of hurt that we fail to
acknowledge the blessing that is coming our way. We cannot breathe in the
change!
When Moshe approached the children
of Israel, they were unable to breathe in their freedom. Their identity of oppression
was too strong to allow any other possibility to seem viable. I want to believe
that in some way the plagues on the Egyptians, and the plagues of our own lives,
do not have to always happen if we can only see through the cruel bondage with
a patient spirit to the tides of change in our lives. Sometimes,
reality is just too harsh and time is needed for our insides to catch up to an
outside situation. But other times, and perhaps more often than we think, we
can use the wisdom of the breath to teach us that we might be holding ourselves
back from moving forward.
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