Chapter 4:
Chapter 4:
Chapter 4
Free to be Me: Freedom According to Shmuel
Summary: The Seder teaches that freedom comes from acknowledging our origins, overcoming limitations, and embracing our destiny.
“Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.” --- Friedrich Nietzsche
“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.” --- Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The freedom from something is not true freedom. The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about. My vision of freedom is to be yourself.” --- Rajneesh
What a Joke
We discovered in Chapter 3 that the Exodus is not a simple morality tale about good against evil or about God exhibiting His awesome power by decimating the Egyptian empire. Rather, the Exodus story is meant to convey profound, complex, and practical lessons about freedom.
However, it is troubling that God’s own characterization of the way He carried out the Exodus appears to make light of the entire experience. Surprisingly, He directs us to tell our children about how He toyed with the people of Egypt.1 And when we examine the details, we get the impression that God did not take the events in Egypt very seriously.
For example, it is fair to say that the entire Sidra of Shemot (the first 5 chapters of the book of Exodus) seems gratuitous, as it tells the story of an attempted redemption that never got off the ground. At its close, Moses grumbles to God that his entire mission was for naught.2 Even the tricks God taught Moses to perform were unimpressive and underwhelming.3 In the end, God failed to save the nation from Egyptian bondage.4 In fact, Moses’ efforts were counterproductive, because Pharaoh reacted to his entreaties by increasing the slave labor workload,5 causing the Jews to become demoralized and disillusioned.6 In this context, God’s retort to Moses’ bitter complaint seems rather flippant. He says, okay, now you’ll really see what I can do.7 One can almost imagine Moses' frustration upon hearing this statement. "Really, God? What were You doing until now?"
We get the same impression when Moses asks what name he should call God when he speaks to the Jews.8 After initially dismissing this inquiry,9 God relents at Moses’ insistence, but His response sounds disdainful. He devises a new name just for this one occasion, never to be used again -- I will be what I will be10 (perhaps like the modern slang, whatever!)11
Moses, in turn, seems to mock Pharaoh during their negotiations. He initially asks to leave just for 3 days, in order to bring sacrifices to God.12 The commentators question whether this request was sincere. After all, what would be the point in leaving for only three days? Was Moses really planning to return?13
By the 7th plague, Pharaoh is under political pressure from his advisors, who warn that Egypt is being destroyed and that he must extricate the country from this disaster.14 He summons Moses and Aaron and acquiesces to their request. When Moses informs that they plan to take the entire nation along with their livestock on the trip,15 Pharaoh agrees only to free the adult males and abruptly ends the negotiations16 as if he realizes he is being ridiculed.
After one more plague, Pharaoh decides to free all the people, but demands that Moses leave behind their sheep and cows. Moses counters that they will not only take their own animals, but also seize the Egyptian cattle!17
Finally, after the Egyptian first-born are stricken, Pharaoh runs out in the middle of the night,18 still wearing his pajamas, desperately looking for Moses and Aaron.19 The Jewish children make fun of him and concoct misinformation about where he could find Moses and Aaron.20 And when he finally finds them, he implores them to leave as soon as possible.21 But Moses blithely responds that they will leave in the morning when they are good and ready.22
Moses keeps upping the ante, and his demands and negotiating style seem insincere.
And we may wonder, why does he even ask Pharaoh permission to free the Jews if it is clear that God could free them whenever He chose?
Furthermore, after the Jews leave, God makes them appear lost, to tempt Pharaoh to chase after them,23 and as we know, the chase ends in the drowning death of the Egyptian armed forces.24 In the end, (and throughout the story too), the joke is certainly on the Egyptians!
Similarly, the seriousness of God’s intent is in question when we consider the plagues. It seems arbitrary and gratuitous that God sends 10 plagues when obviously, as we just implied, He has the power to force Pharaoh’s hand with just one massive blow. And while most of the plagues are horrific, a few, like the plague of frogs, have become an easy source of amusement for our children when we tell over the story of the Exodus.
Moreover, two of the Passover mitzvot also seem to defy logic. During the seder, we review one of the explanations of the mitzvah to eat matzah - it represents freedom, because the Jews left Egypt in such a hurry (b'chipazon) they had no time to bake regular bread. But the Torah tells us that God gave the initial mitzvah to eat matzah as part of His instructions before He liberated the Jews and before they had issues with their dough.25 In effect, He gave the Jewish people a spoiler alert, so to speak, informing them that they will be leaving Egypt in a rush, removing any doubt that they would leave Egypt in short time.
The same could be said about the mitzvah to celebrate Nisan (the month of the Exodus) as the first month of the year, found at the beginning of that very same section in the Torah.26 Like the mitzvah to eat matzah, the Torah attributes this mitzvah to the Exodus. But just like the matzah, God gave this mitzvah before the Exodus occurred.
Once again, it appears that God was just playing around, as if the drama of the Exodus was contrived, since the ending of the story was known to everyone in advance.27
Are we to conclude that the entire story of Exodus is merely for God’s amusement?
What You Are
On the contrary, the Exodus story is anything but a joke. As we explained, through the Exodus, God is teaching complex, life-changing lessons about freedom, and these principles of freedom emerge from His apparent lack of gravity during our liberation from Egypt.
The most challenging aspect of freedom is inherent to the circumstances under which we are born. We are dependent beings, from infancy until death. Even when we are most robust, we are still reliant on others: people, technology, and of course, God, to survive. If we can never truly become fully independent, how is freedom ever possible?
The key to solving this complex dilemma and appreciating the Passover gift of freedom is to absorb the fundamental importance and nuances of the concept called hakarat hatov/appreciation. Although this phrase is commonly translated incorrectly as gratitude, hakarat hatov is more accurately defined as acknowledgement of whatever life brings, acceptance of things that are out of your control, thereby consenting to live in accordance with God's reality. Hakarat hatov requires that we acknowledge the events that provided the basis for the individuals we will eventually become – including foundational circumstances we consider detrimental.
For example, hakarat hatov is used in the Torah in reference to the commandment to honor one's parents.28 However, some people dislike their parents, sometimes for good reason, and so they wish to psychologically dissociate themselves from their painful past. Understandably, they commonly ask how it makes sense for the Torah to require honoring one’s parents, which seems like an endorsement of one’s detestable upbringing.29
I think the answer is illustrated aptly by one of the tag lines from the Marvel TV Series, Runaways, a story about superhero kids who combat their evil super-powerful parents: You can’t know who you are until you know what you are. In other words, only once I accept that my origins, including my parents, as an immutable part of my foundation (acknowledging what I am) can I have the freedom to choose my own path going forward (becoming who I am). By honoring your parents, you are not paying homage to them. You are showing respect for yourself, because like it or not, your parents provided the DNA (physical and/or psychological) for you to build upon in creating your path in life. That foundation can never be changed, and until you accept this, you will inevitably be fighting yourself, at least subconsciously, and never be free to reach your full potential. That is why it is crucial to honor your parents and achieve hakarat hatov/appreciation for all aspects of your fundamental being.30
Good Mourning
Another way in which this formula for freedom is expressed is aveilut, or Jewish mourning practices following the death of a close relative. Our tradition requires that we stop our lives for a week, and simply sit on or close to the floor. Aside from receiving visitors who are meant to console the mourner, we keep to ourselves in quiet contemplation.31 Why do we mourn this way? The goal of aveilut is to take time to process this new information (the fact that your relative has passed) and accept it for the reality that it is, so we can then move on with our lives in a healthy, productive manner.32
That is why the root of the Hebrew word for mourning/aveilut, aval, has a double meaning: It can be used to mean definitely,33 and yet it is commonly used as a word of transition -- but/however.34 When we mourn, we have both objectives in mind: to definitively accept the loss of our relative, and then begin our transition to putting the loss behind us and moving on with our lives.
I often find that individuals going through the mourning ritual for the first time are perplexed when they read the translation to the Mourner's Kaddish: Yitgadal v'yitkadash shimei rabbah - may God's great name be exalted and praised. What does praising God have to do with death? The answer is that it is unrelated to the death itself, but it has everything to do with you, meaning your acceptance of the person's death, for you to be able to carry on. In order to accept this reality, we praise God daily, making a powerful statement that we accept God’s decree. Of course, we should always honor the memory of our loved ones and their positive impact on us, but only when we accept our loss can we continue to live in a world without our parent, sibling, child, or spouse.
It is interesting to note that according to Jewish law, the people who require the lengthiest mourning period are not our children or spouses; we mourn longest for our parents.35 As we said, your parents had the greatest influence on your foundational being, so by honoring them, you cherish the person you are now as well as the person you hope to become.
Inanimate
Because hakarat hatov is an essential factor in our development as free individuals, it is understandably a major theme running through the Exodus narrative. Surprisingly, however, it is also applied to inanimate phenomena. For example, Aaron conjured the first 3 plagues of “blood," “frogs,” and "lice,” because Moses was prohibited from doing so. Why? Our tradition tells us that Moses was not permitted to "smite" these objects because he owed a debt of gratitude to them.36 The plagues of both blood and frogs involved “smiting" the Nile River (its water turned to blood and also was the source of the frog plague), and the plague of lice involved "smiting" the sand (the lice plague emerged from the sand). Moses was not permitted to strike the Nile because the Nile River harbored him as an infant,37 and he could not bring about a plague from Egyptian sand because it facilitated his escape from the Egyptian authorities when he became a fugitive.38 But one may ask, what is the point of going so far as to express hakarat hatov/appreciation to inanimate objects, like a river and sand, which cannot understand you?
The inescapable answer is that acts and statements of hakarat hatov are meant to be for your benefit, not the recipient's benefit.39 Having hakarat hatov for inanimate objects fulfills an important purpose that has nothing to do with the object of your appreciation. It requires humility to acknowledge and definitively accept those things that were pivotal providers of your life's foundation, whether they be people or objects, so that you can then shift your focus to creating your own unique persona.
That is why having hakarat hatov for your parents has little to do with your feelings toward them, because the process is not about them, it is about your self-awareness regarding your origins.
Thanks, Snake
Hakarat hatov is thus about more than acceptance and respect. Hakarat hatov entails acknowledging or appreciating the positive side to all circumstances which befall you, even the negative ones. This idea is exemplified by the story of Tzipporah and her sisters.40 When shepherds try to block them from drawing water from a well, it is Moses, who has fled Egypt,41 who comes to their rescue in Midyan. After they return home sooner than expected, they report to their father that an Egyptian man saved them.42 While the more obvious interpretation is that they mistook Moses for an Egyptian, one midrashic explanation is that they were referring to the Egyptian whom Moses had killed, because if not for that crisis in his life, Moses would never have fled to Midyan in the first place.43
To frame this positive perspective on misfortune, the same Midrash gives an analogy about a man who is bitten by a snake. In those days, people believed that if you raced the snake to the river and arrived there first, you would survive. The man runs to the river, and as he sticks his foot in the water, he sees a boy drowning and saves him. The boy's mother expresses gratitude to the man, who replies, don't thank me, thank the snake! Because if not for my snake bite, I would never have found your son.
Why do we pay homage to the snakes of the world? Because the issue here is not their good intent. Hakarat hatov helps us appreciate that our problems, even those that are beyond our control to change, are meant to be a springboard to achieving selfhood and independence. Without absorbing this message and putting it into practice, we cannot be free. If we cannot accept our circumstances as they are right now, if our mindset tells us that we must be saved from our hardships, we will become enslaved to our dissatisfaction and frustration. But if we see our hardships as opportunities to accomplish greater things and discover our unique selves, we will become liberated from those problems and free to change our circumstances for the better.
In Advance
This principle applies not only to each of us as individuals, but also to the development of our nation as a whole. We know this because the Torah calls the first night of Passover leil shimurim, the night that is watched.44 Our sages explain this phrase to mean that the Exodus was prepared in advance, at Creation.45 In other words, the Exodus was embedded in the Creation of the world. There was no question the Exodus would take place; it was inevitable. However, the Jewish people could be freed only if we understood the message of leil shimurim; in other words, that our liberation from Egypt was our destiny.
Therefore, it was unnecessary to feel desperate and beseech God to save His nation. We did not need God to swoop down like Superman coming to Lois Lane’s rescue. We did not need to ask for God’s intervention or wait in suspense to see whether God would deliver us. Egyptian slavery and redemption were not random complications imposed on our people. Our salvation was a foregone conclusion from the beginning of the story because it was preordained from the beginning of time.46
With this concept in mind, we can better understand why God was conveying the message that we never really needed to be saved, why God seemed to treat the Jews’ predicament as a joke, and why the mitzvah of matzah and the celebration of Nisan were given before the events they were intended to commemorate. All of these components reflect the story of a liberation that was inevitable, a redemption that was meant to be from the beginning of time. For the Children of Israel, true freedom emerged from an awareness that their problems were in a sense, a joke, because it was never a question of whether the redemption would occur, only when and how it would occur.47
This lesson of leil shimurim applies not only to the Exodus, but also to all the events and circumstances in our lives that are similarly beyond our control. Leil shimurim means that within each problem we encounter, the solution is preordained and ingrained within that challenge. As the Talmud teaches, God always brings a cure for the illness before the disease.48 In other words, the solutions are embedded in our problems, and our task is to discover these pre-ordained solutions, a process which allows us to develop our individuality.
We can see, then, that in order to attain freedom, we must accept our travails and view them as opportunities. We must focus on finding the most constructive solutions, instead of obsessing about the injustice of our suffering. Understanding this truth is the secret to liberating ourselves from all manner of things that enslave us psychologically. When we teach our children this lesson, we are giving them nothing less than the key to genuine freedom, which is based on a positive outlook about the problems they will inevitably face as they grow and move through life.
Pharaoh in Egypt
Shmuel summarizes the genut, his conceptualization of the negative counterpart to the freedom we won, with 4 words: Avadim hayinu l'Pharaoh b'mitzrayim - we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.49 This implies that the uniqueness of this experience was due to these 2 factors, Pharaoh and Egypt. What do these 2 factors symbolize?
Mitzrayim/Egypt in Hebrew doubles as the word metzarim, or straits.50 In Egypt, we were caught between a proverbial rock and a hard place, a perfect environment for slavery to thrive. It was a place where things remained stagnant - they did not change.
Pharaoh in Egypt based his entire kingdom on the premise of slavery, and fittingly, he came to symbolize someone who enslaves himself to a life that can never qualitatively improve, someone forever ensnared in the trap of his own making. He was the perfect symbol of his country – a stagnant king of a stagnant nation.
Why were Pharaoh and Egypt incapable of change?
Surprisingly, most of the Exodus story was focused not on the Jews, who were in the background to a great extent, but on Pharaoh. The story is told from his perspective and primarily tells of the interchange between him and Moses and Aaron. It would seem that the message of the Exodus can be best understood by learning from Pharaoh’s experience.
A blatant irony of this story of freedom is that it highlights the process in which God negated Pharaoh’s free-will. If God presented freedom as a universal right, how could He arbitrarily take that freedom from Pharaoh? Whenever the Torah relates an episode of such blatant irony, it usually incorporates a profound message. To uncover this lesson, let us examine Pharaoh’s character more closely.
In contrast to our previous discussion about Moses, Pharaoh’s most salient characteristic was that he refused to engage in hakarat hatov. As we explained, hakarat hatov demands that one must accept one’s origins, including any negative reality, in order to change and develop into a free, independent person. As we will see, Pharaoh groomed the opposite trait within himself; he became a kafui tova,51 an ingrate,52 someone who rejects and condemns his foundational past.
Pharaoh’s essence is encapsulated in his name, which represented his chosen path: the root middle letters of his name spells ra/evil, and his name reads peh ra’ah or evil mouth.53 This is because ra/evil in Hebrew essentially means cut off from reality.54 The most fundamental way someone can cut themselves out of reality is by denying their origins, which, by definition, form the foundation for their reality.55
Pharoah’s rejection of his foundational past was dramatically demonstrated when he enslaved the people of Joseph, the former Egyptian viceroy who was responsible for turning Egypt into a world power. By not acknowledging Joseph,56 and enslaving Joseph’s people, he rejected the one person who was most pivotal in providing the throne of power and privilege he maintained and enjoyed.
Even more fundamentally, Pharaoh rejected and condemned his roots by denying the basic human rights of other people, by enslaving and murdering them. Pharaoh considered himself to be a deity in his own right,57 and chose to disavow God’s moral reality; he wished to live in his own contrived existence, based on his own personal agenda, with no concern about whether he was in tune with the basic moral principles that God places inside every one of us.58
The path of God’s reality that Pharaoh rejected is exemplified by the narrative we read at the outset of the Exodus story, about the midwives who rebelled against Pharaoh’s order to murder all the male Jewish newborns.59 The verse says that [they] feared God,60 but according to one traditional explanation, the midwives were Egyptian.61 In that case, how could these midwives fear a God they didn't know existed, who was outside their belief system in any event? The answer is that they were not fearful of the God who was going to liberate the Jews from Egypt and would author the Torah’s moral code. But they could fear Elohim,62 the more universal name of the Creator,63 because they were able to grasp reality, and thus instinctively adhered to God’s universal moral principles, which includes an injunction against murdering innocent babies.64
By contrast, Pharaoh chose to ignore the moral code of human decency, which the midwives instinctively understood. A person who could indiscriminately kill babies will inevitably fail to recognize a moral truth staring him in the face. He will become self-destructive and oblivious to this truth because he lives in a false, unsubstantiated universe and is destined to be a slave to his own desires.
God revoked Pharaoh’s freedom in order to teach the invaluable lesson of freedom: if we fail to embrace God’s basic moral code that He made a foundation of our existence, we will eventually become unable to achieve the change in ourselves that freedom allows.
As the Rambam explains,65 Pharaoh himself was solely responsible for predicament, because of the path he chose. In discussing Pharaoh’s plight, the Rambam uses the term פרעון meaning payback, which has the same Hebrew root פ-ר-ע as the name Pharaoh, פרעה , suggesting that his experience demonstrates that rejecting our foundational past and God’s moral code will eventually bring about serious consequences.
Therefore, after 6 plagues, God saw that Pharaoh was not open to a genuine change of heart – he was firmly set on his evil path. Nonetheless, he was susceptible to buckling under the intense pressure the plagues placed on him and his country. So instead of forcing Pharaoh to behave differently, God hardened his heart to enable him to continue on his chosen path, doing what he really sought to do, which was to keep the Jews enslaved.66 Pharaoh chose a path of evil, and God kept him on that path,67 as our Sages teach, [God] lets a person remain on the path he chooses to walk on.68
God used Pharaoh as the conduit to teach the world that if you choose to ignore those who provided the foundation for your achievements, and you choose to reject the basic moral code that God embedded within all of us, eventually you will become entrenched in that way of being and left to suffer the consequences of those choices. Through the negative example of Pharaoh, we learn that hakarat hatov is a prerequisite for change, and we understand why Pharaoh and his kingdom of Egypt were irrevocably mired in their own selfish existence, unable to conceive of any achievement that was outside their narrow perspective.
A Change for the Better
In the Haggadah, after we read Shmuel’s version of the “before” and “after” of freedom, that we were slaves in Egypt and God took us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, the Haggadah presents us with a troublesome declaration. If God did not take us out of Egypt, we and our children and grandchildren would still be slaves in Egypt. On the face of it, this is a difficult conclusion to accept. Are we to believe that millennia later, after the passage of time, the enlightenment of mankind, and the evolution of history, we would have remained in Egyptian bondage? This assertion seems implausible and overly dramatic!
Our skeptical reaction is natural in the context of current societal norms, which take for granted that slavery is unacceptable. But this enlightened norm against slavery is only a reflection of the extraordinary, long-lasting impact of our liberation from Egypt. Without the Exodus, the world may have remained entrenched in its old ways. The dramatic change in our society before and after the Exodus taught us the meaning of freedom. Put another way, without Pharaoh and the story of the Exodus, we could never fully appreciate the difference between slavery and freedom. We would never contemplate the possibility of escape from our inborn circumstances to a better life, nor would we understand that we are free to look beyond our individual lives to ask ma nishtana and challenge ourselves to claim our unique status as free individuals who care enough to make a meaningful difference in the world.
We would still be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt, who used his free will to create his own evil character, who was set in his ways and could not change for the better.69 Pharaoh in Egypt, who had his heart hardened by God and engaged in self-destructive behavior from which he could not escape.70 Pharaoh in Egypt, who acknowledged he was morally corrupt, yet could not bring himself to become a moral person.71 When God took us out of Egypt, He taught us that we need not be slaves to circumstance. He gave us the gift of change, the ability to create a life of our own and become free.
The Exodus introduces us to the God of Abraham as the source of all things, whose moral code is inherent to the psyche of the human species. Acceptance of this universal basic moral code is the only path to genuine freedom. Just as we cannot ignore our parents and other foundational influences and must acknowledge their contribution to our existence to become independent, we must acknowledge God as Creator, the One who provides us with the visceral blueprint to develop as unique individuals. Hakarat hatov is therefore a vital element in our ability to be free.
In contrast to Pharaoh, Abraham exemplified the fundamental principle of hakarat hatov by being the first to recognize God as the infinite source of all things, and so he is the forefather of Passover.72 He completely transformed his direction in life, and God fittingly changed his73 and Sarah’s74 name to represent this transformation. He taught the world that no one is limited by the circumstances of birth or upbringing or society, and we can be free to make choices that matter and make a substantial difference in the world.
Shmuel’s concept of freedom is fundamental, but only one side of the coin. There is another notion of freedom based on the framework of Shmuel’s colleague, Rav, whose conceptualization is not simply an alternative to Shmuel’s but a vision that goes hand in hand with Shmuel’s. When we explore Rav’s vision in the next chapter, we will complete our understanding of the unique freedom we can achieve at our seder.
Notes
Shemot 10:2.
↩Shemot 5:22-23.
↩See Shemot Rabbah 9:6, 3:12.
↩Shemot 5:23.
↩Shemot 5:6-9.
↩Shemot 6:9.
↩Shemot 6:1.
↩Shemot 3:13.
↩See Ramban 3:13, Kuzari 4:3.
↩Shenot 3:14.
↩See Eldad, Rav Gilad, “Why Do You Ask My Name?” Etzion.org. Also see MT and Kesef Mishneh Yesodei Hatorah 6:3.
↩Shemot 5:3.
↩See Akedat Yitzchak Shaar 35, Abarbanel Shemot 3:16.
↩Shemot 10:7.
↩Shemot 10:10.
↩Shemot 10:11.
↩Shemot 10:24-26.
↩Shemot 12:30.
↩Rashi Shemot 12:31, Yalkut Shimoni, Shemot 12:208.
↩Tanchuma 7.
↩Shemot 12:31-32.
↩Yalkut Shimoni, Shemot 12:208.
↩Shemot 14:3-5.
↩Shemot 14:27-28.
↩Shemot 12:15.
↩Shemot 12:1-2.
↩See Rabbi Matis Weinberg, “The Game of Historic Jeopardy” Frameworks Exodus, FJP (1999), 85-86.
↩See Sefer Hachinuch Mitzvah 33.
↩It should be noted that there are circumstances in which one is not obligated to honor their parents, particularly if they are truly evil individuals. For further discussion, see Rama YD 240:18, Maharik 166:3, and Yam Shel Shlomo Kiddushin 31a.
↩This could be the reason why the mitzvah to honor one’s parents is not listed on the second tablet of the Ten Commandments that consists of the mitzvot bein adam lichaveiro, civil commands, but rather on the first tablet, consisting of rules between Godזסססס and people. Because honoring one’s parents has less to do with honoring them as people as it does with honoring oneself and our God given, immutable upbringing.
↩See Shulchan Aruch YD 380-391.fqu
↩See for example, Gordon, Audrey “A Psychological Interpretation of the Laws of Mourning” in Jewish Reflections on Death, edited by Jack Riemer, New York, Schocken (September 13, 1987)
↩Rashi, Targum Braisheet 17:19.
↩For example, see Metzudat David Divrei Hayamim 2:19:3.
↩See Moed Katan 22b for other differences between mourning for a parent and other relatives.
↩See Shemot Rabbah 9:10, 10:4, 10:6; Tanchuma, Vaeira 14.
↩Moses' sister Miriam sent him down the Nile in a wicker basket to escape Pharaoh's edict to murder all male newborns. Ironically, he was eventually saved by Bitya, Pharaoh's daughter, and raised by her in Pharaoh's palace. See Shemot 2:3-10.
↩Moses was wanted for the murder of an Egyptian taskmaster he killed to prevent a savage beating of a Jewish slave. He used the sand to bury the taskmaster's body, buying him time to flee the country. See Exodus
↩See Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz, Sichot Mussar Shemot.
↩Shemot 2:15-22.
↩As we just explained, Moses was a fugitive running from the Egyptian authorities for his killing of a viscous Egyptian taskmaster who was lashing a Jewish slave. See Shemot 2:11-12.
↩Shemot 2:19.
↩Shemot Rabbah 1:32.
↩Shemot 12:42.
↩Rosh Hashana 11b, Yalkut Shimoni 247:831.:
↩See Rabbi Matis Weinberg, “The Game of Historic Jeopardy” in Frameworks Exodus, FJP (1999), 90-92.
↩See below chapter 7 – “Our Living Saga”.
↩Megillah 13b.
↩Pesachim 116a.
↩Per Eicha 1:3. Also see Bava Metziah 107a, Bava Batra 55a & 61b, Chulin 50b, Midrash Tehillim 109:5, etc.
↩Shemot Rabbah 1.
↩This could be why the arami oved avi section holds such a prominent place in the Haggadah, because we are told to read it in thanks to God for all the goodness he has granted you and your household (Devarim 26:11), so as to announce that you are not an ingrate (Rashi Devarim 26:3).
↩In contrast to the more generic ‘Peh Sach’ of Passover, mentioned earlier.
↩Rabbi SR Hirsch Ki Tisa 32:17.
↩See above in this chapter, “What You Are”.
↩Shemot 1:8.
↩Shemot Rabbah 9:8, Tanchuma 2:2.
↩See Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown, 2013).
↩Shemot 1:15-21.
↩Shemot 1:17.
↩Abarbanel, Shadal Shemot 1:15, Yalkut Shimoni Yehoshua 247:9, Midrash Tadshe, Ozar hamidrashim [Eisenstein], p. 4.
↩Shemot ibid.
↩See Drashot HaRan Drush 1, Shulchan Aruch OC 5.
↩As heard from one of my teachers. See MT Melachim 9:1.
↩Teshuva 6:3.
↩Seforno Shemot 7:3.
↩See MT Teshuva 6:3.
↩Makot 12a.
↩See MT Teshuva 6:3, Shemot Rabbah 13:3, Ramban, Seforno Shemot 7:3, Sefer HaIkarim 4:25.
↩See Shemot Rabbah 12:2.
↩See Shemot 9:27 and Tanchuma Vaera 20.
↩See Braisheet Rabbah 5
↩Braisheet 17:5.
↩Braisheet 17:15.
↩