SHEMOT
Shemot (Exodus 1:1 to 6:1) is the first parsha of the book called in English Exodus, because it recounts our exodus from Egypt. It’s called shemot in Hebrew “names” because it starts with a recitation of the names of Jacob’s family that came down to Egypt but then greatly prospered and grew into a nation. It’s an eventful parsha with more themes than this presentation can address.
A new king arises in Egypt who greatly fears the potential military power of the Hebrews, so he determines to attempt to weaken them, eventually by basically enslaving them and proclaiming that the male children should be killed. Moses is spared by some ledgermain by Shifra and Puah, the midwives, and adopted into the Pharoah’s household by his daughter. His biological mother, Yocheved, is hired as his wet nurse. The adolescent Moses kills an Egyptian overseer who is beating on some Hebrews and flees to Midian where he does a good deed at a well and gains a wife from a priest of Midian. He then encounters the burning bush and is told to return to Egypt to free his people. He is truly reluctant to accept this task, but finally relents.
On the road back to Egypt, God gets angry and decides to kill him, but he is saved by his non Jewish wife’s actions when she circumcises their son, in one of the more cryptic passages of the 5 books of Moses. Moses and Aaron, his older brother, go and speak to Pharoah, but he laughs them out of court and makes the Hebrews’ lives even harder by withholding the straw to make bricks. YHVH tells Moses not to worry, it’s all part of the divine plan and He will show Pharoah who has more power and save the Israelites at the same time.
So many possible themes! Here’s where I will focus my comments:
Creation of the nation story
Women, blood and female action
Moses’ attempt to avoid the task given to him by YHVH and his spiritual journey
Divine absence and presence
Shemot begins with a creation story. “But the Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them (Shemot 1:7). Here’s Genesis 1:22 “Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas and let the birds increase on the earth.” when God blesses all the living creatures, the birds that fly over the earth, the great sea monsters, the creatures that creep over the earth brought forth in swarms. Then God says the same things to earthlings, humans, in 1:28 “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth.” The divine promises this to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob repeatedly in Canaan, but Jacob comes down to Egypt with only a small clan of 70 people. The fertility of the people comes to pass in the exile of Egypt.
This parallel to the Genesis leads me to suggest that what we are witnessing here is the creation of the Hebrew people. In Genesis we have two creation stories. The first myth focuses on the creation of the cosmos, the second on the creation of humans. Then we have the story of a family that never grows beyond being a large family. But here, as we will see, we have a nation with actual tribes, leaders and competition amongst them. To be human, our text is telling us, is to be located in a cosmos, in a particular place where we make our livings by the sweat of our brows, (Genesis 3:19) amongst a particular family, and amongst a nation. We are not fully human unless we are part of a much larger whole.
How true is this view of being human from the Hebrew Bible for us now? If you are like me, you spend no time thinking about the cosmos, though I do have a practice of howling at the moon. Most of us don’t make our livings by the sweat of our brows. Our families are scattered and our siblings and first cousins don’t usually number the 70 people who went down to Egypt.
The very definition of our nation seems to be fraying in the United States and amongst Jews. A lot of Trumpists think that people of color, including Jews, aren’t real Americans, while a lot of the rest of us wonder how real Americans could support a would be dictator who radically disbelieves in everything we were taught was America. On the Jewish front, some people want to read out from Jewish people the anti Zionist voices of Jewish Voices for Peace or If Not Now, while I have a hard time claiming the Jewish racist Kahanists as my brothers and sisters.
I’ve been studying Wendell Berry’s agrarianism lately. He basically argues that you can’t be fully human unless you are a member of a particular local community AND a particular piece of land. I’m really sympathetic to his argument.
How are you grounded? Cosmos, family, clan, beloved community, particular place of land?
Women are absolutely decisive in this story, in a way that is not so common in our text that even here reeks of male privilege (the males watering their sheep before the women at the well (2:19).
Shifra and Puah, the two midwives, are the first level of resistance to Pharoah’s edict. They save the male Hebrew babies by making up a story that the Israelite women actually give birth before they can get there and having the courage to tell this story to Pharoah who somehow believes it. “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; they are vigorous.” (1:19). The midwives turn on its head the trope that oppressed people are less like people and more like animals, using it to save Hebrew boy babies.
Pharoah’s daughter then saves a particular Hebrew baby by adopting him. Bluntly, there’s no earthly way that the Pharoah’s daughter could bring a Hebrew boy to be raised at court, given the decree of the Pharoah that the Hebrew boys should be drowned. The decree to drown the sons is 1:22, the rescue by Pharoah’s daughter is 2:5-6 and the return of the weaned Baby Moses to the court is 2:10. Another perspective on this story is to think about what it means that Moses is singled out for being saved compared to other male Hebrew babies.
The Zipporah fragment (4:24-6) is one of the most confusing set of verses in the Hebrew Bible. “At a night encampment on the way, YHVH encountered him and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me.” And when he [YHVH] left him [Moses] alone, she added “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”
Here are some questions that occur to me in these brief three verses. Why is YHVH seeking to kill Moses? The text gives us no explanation at all, and this is after YHVH and Moses have this long back and forth because Moses does not want to return to Egypt and YHVH basically says shut up and go. I discuss this further below. Then, it is really interesting that Moses has not circumcised his sons before this. Circumcision is the mark of being part of the Hebrew tribe, as we learned in Genesis and the story of the rape of Dinah. Are Moses’ sons not part of the Hebrews before this? Then why does Zipporah do the circumcising rather than Moses? Rabbi Jill Hammer suggests that Zipporah is doing the work of a priestess, which makes sense as the daughter of a priest of Midian. But still, I’d think circumcising males would be a male prerogative. Then what does a “bridegroom of blood” mean? Is Zipporah saying her kids are now bridegrooms of blood to her? And if she is the one who should have been responsible in the first place, why does YHVH want to kill Moses and not her?
What’s at least somewhat clear is that the blood acts to protect the family, in the same way that the blood of lambs will protect the Hebrews from the killing of the first born. I think the logic is that a donation of a minimal amount of blood to the divine offers protection against the taking of all of the blood through death. I also think it is significant for our theme that a woman is the wielder of blood magic. Blood magic, it seems to me, rightly belongs to women, given the menstrual process.
What can we learn from Shifra and Puah’s resistance to Pharoah, particularly their excuse that Hebrew women are more like female animals than human women in the speed and ease with which they give birth? What lessons might we learn from Pharoah’s daughter saving a Hebrew male baby? What does his being singled out tell us about Moses? What do you make of the Zipporah story and the idea of blood as the protector of life and the idea of a woman as the wielder of this magic?
Moses is desperate to avoid the calling given to him by YHVH. Let’s look at this in the context of his spiritual journey, using Plotkin’s framework as laid out in Journey to Soul Initiation.
Young adolescents, metaphorically and/or literally, leave home seeking to find themselves. They are either called in pursuit of something (think the quest for the Holy Grail or Abraham to the Holy land that the divine will show him) or are abducted, meaning some kind of forced departure—think Persephone being abducted by Hades, Jacob forced to flee after stealing the birthright or Joseph sold into slavery and taken down to Egypt. Moses is metaphorically abducted and he is running away from Egypt, not towards Midian in particular. He does not make Midian his home, naming his first son Gershom, “for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” (2:22). Even though he is married and has a son, he is still in the adolescent wandering phase.
Then he encounters the divine at the burning bush when he is pasturing the sheep near the sacred mountain Horeb. He does not receive a name the way Jacob does after wrestling with the angel or Joseph receives from the Pharoah. This is not a revelation of his mythopoetic identity, Rather, this is still part of his journey of discovery of who he is. And he’s assigned a task, an impossible task like the tasks Hercules was assigned—only this is to be YHVH’s spokesperson in the freeing of his people. This spiritual task situates him squarely as an adolescent still seeking to find himself.
Slight detour for two points about Moses’ experience at the bush. The first is that this is one of the three places where a hero says “hineni,” here I am”, as I’ve discussed previously with Jacob. Hineni is an incredibly powerful statement. Second, God tells him to take off his shoes from his feet because the ground he is standing on is holy ground. My teacher R. Zelig Golden teaches us that “take off your shoes” could also be translated as put aside your habits. Now maybe the holy ground is always sacred ground because it is a place of power, or maybe we have the power to transform an ordinary place into a sacred place by taking off the habits that interfere with us experiencing the sacred. Wandering as an adolescent forces us to shake off our habits.
Moses, to put it mildly, is highly resistant to doing this task that the divine has assigned him (3:11-4:17). He offers excuse after excuse about why he can’t do it. YHVH patiently answers the objections. Who am I to do it, Moses asks, I don’t even know your name. YHVH answers “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” I am who I am (which is, fascinatingly, more like a mythopoetic identity than any kind of proper name). What if they say, Moses continues, that YHVH did not really appear to you, you’re making it all up? YHVH tells Moses to respond by putting on a magic demonstration. Throw your staff which I will magically turn into a snake or put your hand on your chest, have it turn scaly white, put it on your chest again and have it come back clean, take some water from the Nile and have it turn into blood). But YHVH, pleads Moses, I am not a man of words. YHVH says I am the one who gives people speech. Finally, and most plainly, “Please YHVH, make someone else your agent.” (4:13) But YHVH says enough already, your brother Aaron will speak for you, but get going.
Running from what we’ve been called to do—that’s really typical. It’s even typical in our Bible. Jeremiah also protested “Ah, YHVH God, I don’t how to speak, for I am still a boy. And YHVH said to me, Do not say “I am still a boy” But go wherever I send you.” (Jeremiah 1:6-7). Above all, recall the story of Jonah who did everything he could to (literally) flee his calling. Beware of those who embrace their calling too readily.
How have you tried in your life to avoid doing what you’ve been called to do? Can I recount the ways in my life? The things I am best at in life, are not the things I do. I was a great philosophy student. That’s not what I’ve done. I have this deep connection with cows. I live in suburbia.
How have you tried in your life to avoid doing what you’ve been called to do? Are there habits you need to take off in order to make the place where you stand into holy ground? Are you still wandering, or have you settled down? In what sense have you settled down?
The part of the parsha where the divine says that he is just now remembering his people puzzles me. This occurs after Moses has fled to Midian, married Zipporah and his son Gershom has been born. “A long time after that, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out; and their cry for help from the bondage rose up to God. God heard their moaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites and God took notice of them.” (2:23-25).
Hello, the divine didn’t notice the people to whom he had made all these extravagant promises back in Genesis all that time they were in Egypt? Times were good for them, so he forgot about them? Does the divine only pay attention to cries of pain, and not notice when things are going good? Or maybe we only look for the divine when we are struggling and forget to say thank you when we are not? Or both?
We might also approach this mystifying text by saying that the divine not see the Israelites in Egypt because Egypt wasn’t his territory. Indigenous belief is that deities are place specific. Are divine beings properly tethered to a place, and not, as we have come to think, nowhere and everywhere, which is really nowhere at all?
Does the divine only pay attention to cries of pain, and not notice when things are going good? Or maybe we only look for the divine when we are struggling and forget to say thank you when we are not? Or both? Do you believe that the divine or sacred energy is place specific?
QUESTIONS
How are you grounded? Cosmos, family, clan, beloved community, particular place of land?
What can we learn from Shifra and Puah’s resistance to Pharoah, particularly their excuse that Hebrew women are more like female animals than human women in the speed and ease with which they give birth? What lessons might we learn from Pharoah’s daughter saving a Hebrew male baby? What does his being singled out tell us about Moses? What do you make of the Zipporah story and the idea of blood as the protector of life and the idea of a woman as the wielder of this magic?
How have you tried in your life to avoid doing what you’ve been called to do? Are there habits you need to take off in order to make the place where you stand into holy ground? Are you still wandering, or have you settled down? In what sense have you settled down?
Does the divine only pay attention to cries of pain, and not notice when things are going good? Or maybe we only look for the divine when we are struggling and forget to say thank you when we are not? Or both? Do you believe that the divine or sacred energy is place specific?
Zipporah