January 8, 2021
The Greatest Army in the World
Shemot, 5781
I was incredibly inspired this week by the actions of one of our congregants, Kate Schwartz, age 7. Kate decided to spend her vacation from school making beautiful key chains and selling them in order to raise money for Yad Yehuda, a local kosher food pantry -- an amazing charity that has provided emergency and ongoing assistance to our Greater Washington community. Kate’s father told me that this beautiful idea was entirely Kate’s initiative. I was very moved that this young girl showed the sensitivity and the courage to make a difference in the world.
During these difficult days of the pandemic, for most of us the question becomes how can we ordinary folk make a difference. I have heard this question many times from people over the past months. So many people I know feel blessed and want to share their own good fortune with others. They say to me in good faith please let me know if there is a way in which I can help others.
There is an answer to this question in our portion.
As the Israelites in Egypt grew in numbers, Pharaoh turned to his advisors and said, “Hineh am benei yisrael rav veatzum mimenu, hava nitchachma lo, behold the Children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than us, let us outsmart him” (1:9-10).
Why does the text say, “let us outsmart him? It should say let us outsmart them.
The Talmud explains that the “him” refers to the person who was being sent to be the savior of Israel (Sotah, 11a).
In this context, Noam Megaddim from R. Eliezer Ish Horowitz, a student of Rav Elimelech of Lizhensk writes:
“The Jewish people always have a leader to inspire them in times of distress; to strengthen their hearts with words and ideas in times of crisis; to not allow them to give up faith in challenging times, and thus he is their savior.
The enemies of the Jewish people know this and therefore they are always plotting against the leader. They are always looking for ways to nullify his influence on the Jewish people and thereby weaken the nation.
The Torah tells us that Pharaoh also said this. ‘Behold the Children of Israel,’—Behold this is the foundation of Israel. ‘They are many and numerous’—they always have a strong leader that gives them the strength and wisdom to stand up in times of distress. ‘Let us outsmart him,--‘the savior of the Jewish people’” (cited in Maayanah Shel Torah, 10.)
The Noam Megadim is teaching that there are always leaders in every generation who help the Jewish people get through difficult times. These people are so crucial because to our survival. Pharaoh and his advisors understood this and therefore sought out the leader of the Jewish people in order to attack him.
This week I studied this vort of the Noam Megadim with our son, Roey, and he asked me, “So who was the leader of the Israelites when Pharaoh said this?” I thought this was an excellent question. Who in particular was Pharaoh most worried about? After all, Moshe had not yet been born.
The Talmud itself gives the answer to this question –not explicitly, but implicitly. After the Talmud tells us that Pharaoh instituted a grueling a vicious slavery upon the Israelites, the Talmud tells us that the Jewish people were inspired—not by a single person, but by a group of people.
Says the Talmud:
Rav Avira taught that it was only due to the merit of the very holy women of that generation that the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt.
While the men were downtrodden and mentally defeated by the horrific slavery it was the women who gave them the courage and the inspiration to move forward.
The Israelite women would go down to the river and they would put their jugs into the river to draw water. Since they did this initial act of going down to the river and sticking their jugs in the water, therefore Hashem would miraculously arrange for them small fish that would enter into their pitchers. They would then draw forth from the rivers jugs that were half filled with water and half filled with fish.
The women would then come and place two pots on the fire --one pot of hot water in order to help bathe their husbands and one pot of fish to give them a delicious meal.
The women would then take what they had prepared to their husbands who were working as slaves in the field. They would groom their husbands with water and ointment, and feed them a fish dinner. They would then encourage them to have children and therefore to believe in the future of the Jewish people.
As a reward for their actions these Israelite women were granted great wealth from Hashem. After they became pregnant they would deliver their babies in a miraculous manner in the fields under an apple tree.
Hashem would then send angels from Heaven to clean and care for the newborns, just as a midwife prepares the newborn. Then the angels gathered for them two round stones from the field so that the babies could nurse from that which flowed out of the stones. Out of one stone flowed oil and out of the other stone flowed honey.
After a while, the Egyptians noticed that new Jewish babies were born and they would wickedly come to kill them. But another miracle would occur for the babies and the earth would swallow up the babies in order to hide them. The Egyptians then brought oxen and would plow up the earth! However, this had no effect upon the babies who were protected by the ground. After the Egyptians left, the babies emerged from the ground like grass grows in a field. Once the babies started to grow, they would grow and grow and eventually would return to their homes like flocks of sheep coming back to their pasture.
When Hashem split the sea, it was these children who were the first to recognize Hashem, as it is stated: “This is my God, and I will glorify God” (Exodus 15:2). They recognized Hashem from the previous time that Hashem had been revealed to them while they were infants. Thus they could now point and say: “This is my God” (Based upon Sotah, 11b, with my edits to make it more accessible for readers in this format.)
The inspiration that was the key to the survival in the days before Moshe Rabbeinu did not come from a single figure who was so great that his greatness almost makes him not relatable to us, but rather from ordinary, figures whose everyday acts of hope and courage inspired their entire generation.
The idea of being redeemed and inspired by “ordinary” people appears in Natan Sharanksy’s memoirs. He directly attributes his ability to keep up his hope and strength in his darkest moments to the courageous dedication of an “army of students and housewives.”
As he sat in prison and awaited trial in the Soviet Union on trumped up charges he bravely acted as his own defense attorney and demanded the right to review evidence that the KGB was planning to introduce against him. Part of their evidence consisted of demonstrations that were taking place around the world on his behalf. When they showed him videotape of one of the demonstrations, Sharansky’s heart leapt as he noticed that his wife Avital was amongst the demonstrators.
He writes:
“My heart started racing. There was Avital, leading the demonstration. She spoke perfect Hebrew and good English. She was determined, resolute, as she marched straight from the heart of London into my prison hell. The film’s twenty minutes or so passed too quickly.
I demanded to see it again….
I insisted, ‘I have the right to understand every word you are using against me.’ I kept inventing more reasons: I missed this. I didn’t understand that. What was that English word?
After we had watched it three times, the head of my interrogation team, Colonel Viktor Ivanovich Volodin, exploded. ‘That’s enough! What do you think, that your fate is in the hands of those people, and not ours? They’re nothing more than students and housewives!’
Thank you, Colonel Volodin. I think you should go down in history with these words. You gave the best possible definition of our army” (Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, Never Alone, 111).
Like the many demonstrators on behalf of the Prisoners of Zion, the Israelite women in Egypt gave courage and hope and are a crucial part of the redemption story. The women referred to in the Talmudic text are not explicitly mentioned in the Torah, however, the Torah does refer to other everyday people whose courage and hope in the future directly gave inspiration to many.
The Torah states:
“The king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, saying, ‘When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birth stool: 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 had told them; they let the boys live (1:15-17).
Pharaoh’s decree to kill the Israelite baby boys is thwarted by the bravery of these midwives. If we apply our theory that the true “savior” of the Jewish people in this difficult time was not due to any specific person, but to the inspiring acts of ordinary people, then the decree of Pharaoh is doubly ironic.
First it is ironic because Pharaoh focused his decree on the Israelite boys when according to the Talmud true inspiration was coming from Israelite women. And second, because Pharaoh focused his decree on the Israelites when it seems that in the case of the midwives true inspiration was coming not from the Israelites but from Egyptians.
This week an amazing and brilliant book was released –Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, by Leon Kass. Kass describes the heroism of these “ordinary” women.
“Mighty Pharaoh, for the first time but not the last time, has one of his direct orders defied, by a pair of humble women.
The defiance of the midwives is all the more noteworthy if we take them to be Egyptians, as many commentators do.” Kass notes that the actions of these woman demonstrate a “singular example of the relation between Pharaoh and his own people and indication of the limits of his power” (32).
If these midwives are Egyptians then this truly is a “singular example” of the relationship between Pharaoh and his own subjects. The text suggests that Pharaoh badly miscalculated in thinking that there would be complete compliance amongst his own people. There wasn’t. These remarkable women are “restrained by reverence and awe for an authority higher than Pharaoh’s, higher even than all man-made law” (32.)
From the Israelite women who drew water at the river, to the Egyptian midwives who recognized that Pharaoh was not their God, to the demonstrators on behalf of Sharansky, we see that the key to living in a redeemed world is everyday people acting with simple courage and dignity even in the most difficult of times. Such individual acts of courage are what is necessary to inspire the rest of our world and lead us all to redemption.
In our current situation our fight is not against an evil Pharaoh or cruel KGB. Our struggle is against a disease that not only kills, but also isolates and deflates us on a daily basis.
To beat our current foe we all need to follow the lead of the Israelite woman and the Egyptian midwives, and yes, of Kate Schwartz.
Today we all need to be the “savior” that Pharaoh was so worried about. We need to be the ones to inspire others.
How are we able to inspire others?
One of the messages of the Exodus story is that redemption can come from all of us and we need not wait for a more qualified person to lead the redemption.
There are two different customs about which Haftorah to read this Shabbat. Ashkenazim read from Isaiah 27,28, and 29. Sephardim read from chapter 1 of Jeremiah.
Both Haftorot make clear that redemption will come from the leadership of the grassroots.
Isaiah says: “To whom should a prophet give instruction and to whom should he explain his message? To babies who are weaned from milk and drawn from the bosom” (Isaiah, 28:9).
And to Jeremiah God says: “Do not say, ‘I am but a youth,’ for wherever I send you, you must go” (Jeremiah 1:7).
We too cannot say that we are youths and unable to bring redemption.
Each of us can do little acts which can bring about a redemption.
Each of us can do this in a different way. For some it is to give a speech or a moving post, for others it is a phone call to a neighbor, and for others it is to bake challah for someone who you know can use some delicious food.
For still others it can even be a smiley face at the end of an email.
Rav Yisrael Salanter taught that during the Ten Days of Repentance one was especially required to greet others with a smile so as to encourage them during the stressful period of the Days of Awe (Pliskin, Love Your Neighbor, page 127).
During this difficult period where we are always masked we cannot even usually see a smile! Oh how we yearn to see the smile of others! So until we can smile regularly, even sending a virtual smile is a mitzvah that can lead us all to redemption.
Shmuel Herzfeld
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You can now watch a Youtube recording of Rabbi Herzfeld’s D'var Torah: https://youtu.be/t_E1ANBvA1E
