"Torah Lights"
 
Video Insights on the Parsha
 
 by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin

Efrat, Israel: “The Lord spoke to Moses saying, ‘Go and tell Pharaoh King of Egypt to let the Israelites depart from his land’” (Exodus 6:11). 

The first three Biblical portions of the Book of Exodus describe the bitter servitude of the Israelites in Egypt, their abortive, repeated requests to leave the country of their travail, the ten plagues wrought by G-d in His attempt to force the hand of the cruel despot Pharaoh, and their eventual ‘exodus’ from foreign domination and oppression. From this perspective, Pharaoh is evil incarnate and the Israelites are pure and innocent victims.

However, the Bible itself records that from the very beginning of the dialogue between Pharaoh and Moses there was a degree of deception on the part of the Israelites – a deception which seems to have been orchestrated by the G-d of freedom and justice Himself!  Last week we read how G-d commands Moses “…Go with the elders of Israel to the King of Egypt and you shall say to him, ‘the Lord G-d of the Hebrews manifested Himself to us. Now therefore let us go a distance of three days into the wilderness and sacrifice to the Lord our G-d’” (Exodus 3:18). The Hebrews only request a three-day “UJA mission” – and then, when they finally are sent away by Pharaoh after the tenth plague to offer their sacrifices, they never return to Egypt. If indeed their plan from the very beginning was to leave for good (Ex 3:10), why the request for three days? 

Could it be that the reason for this duplicity was to enable the Israelites to borrow vessels of gold and silver from the Egyptians for their “desert sacrifice service”? Although the command came at the behest of G-d Himself, were they “setting up” the Egyptians to believe they would return after the three-day journey, something they never intended to do?   If so, the Hebrews were not such lily-white victims after all! 

Don Yitzhak Abarbanel, the late fifteenth century Biblical commentary, maintains that there was a misunderstanding between the Israelites and the Egyptians. Moses had initially made it clear to Pharaoh that they would be leaving Egypt for good, and that their departure point would be in the desert, a three-day journey from the country which enslaved them. However, the people who actually lent the Israelites gold and silver vessels certainly didn’t understand it that way; they were convinced that the Hebrews would return to Egypt and honor their debts. Since it seems apparent from the Biblical text that the Hebrews didn’t disabuse them of their expectation – and probably even fostered it - the moral problem still remains.  

Most of the commentaries suggest that the Hebrews came up with the three-day ruse in order to fulfill the initial Divine prophecy and promise to Abraham, “…your seed shall be strangers in a land which is not theirs and they shall enslave and afflict them; but I shall then judge the nation whom they served, and they [your seed] shall go out [of that country] with great wealth” (Gen. 15:13,14). The question remains whether the apparent mandate to fulfill a Divine prophecy should usurp the fundamental principle requiring honesty and the necessity to shun duplicity. 

I once suggested in a previous article that the gold and silver the Hebrews received when they left Egypt should not be relegated as deception or thievery, but rather a small portion of what they deserved as payment for their enforced labor, comparable to the reparations holocaust survivors received from Germany after the second world war. Just as all the gold and silver in the world couldn’t make amends for the millions of enslaved Jews gassed and burned in the crematoria of Auschwitz and Treblinka, so too the gold and silver of the Egyptians couldn’t possibly compensate for all the male babies drowned in the Nile River. 

The RaN in Sermon Eleven  (Drashot) of his essays on government and political rule provides a more profound meaning behind the request for a three day leave and the borrowing of the gold and silver, more significant  --from a historical and moral perspective-- than the actual acquisition of gold and silver payments (‘reparations’). In effect, the Hebrews and the Egyptians were involved in a clash between two civilizations: the G-d who created the human being in His image was pitted against the idol Ra, the sun-god who represented domination and enslavement; Moses, the man of justice and freedom for all, was locked in a struggle against Pharaoh, the totalitarian despot who controlled and enslaved an entire society.  If the concept of freedom was to take root in the world, not only was it necessary for the G-d of the Hebrews to win a decisive victory but it was absolutely crucial that the nations of the world had to witness that victory as well.

Had the Israelites merely left Egypt after the plagues, the Egyptians would have said “goodbye and good riddance” and the world would have assumed that Egypt had been struck by a string of natural disasters like the Tsunami; any identification between the plagues and the departure of the Israelites would have been considered coincidental at best and irrelevant at worst.

But given that the Israelites now were in possession of all that borrowed gold and silver, once the Egyptians realized that the Israelites had no intention of returning, their pursuit of the borrowers became their first order of business –anything to retrieve their wealth.

The three-day journey placed the Israelites on the shores of the Reed Sea, a waterway which paralleled the Nile River within Egypt. When the Egyptians tore after the Hebrews into the sea and drowned, the world couldn’t help but recognize the parallel between the drowned Egyptians and the murder of the Hebrew babies who had been drowned in the Nile, measure for measure. This is precisely what Yitro understands when he praises Moses and his G-d: “Now I know that the Lord is greater than any other power since that which they [the Egyptians] did with malice of forethought [in the Nile River], came upon them [in the Reed Sea] – Exodus 18:11).

And this what the Jews sang in their song at the sea: “The nations heard and trembled, a shuddering grasped the inhabitants of Philistia; …all the inhabitants of Canaan melted. Fear and terror fell upon them, and with the greatness of Your Divine arm they became silent as stone….” (Exodus 15: 14-16).  The three-day journey and the gold and silver reparations was what ultimately made the world understand that the victory in Egypt was a victory of the G-d of justice and freedom, who abhors – and will eventually destroy – the tyrants of totalitarian enslavement.

Shabbat Shalom