Parashat Shemot 5783: The Heritage of Yocheved
Confronted with the draconian decree, “Every boy that
is born you shall throw into the Nile,” Yocheved – like tormented parents in
every generation – separates from her son, hoping that her sacrifice will
ensure him a better future. By luck, chance or divine providence, at that
moment, Pharaoh’s daughter goes down to the Nile and sees the baby in the
basket. Although she understands that he is one of the Hebrew children, and
therefore sentenced to death, she has compassion on him. Before she says aloud
that she intends to adopt the boy, his sister emerges from among the reeds and
asks “Shall I go and get you a Hebrew nurse to suckle the child for you?”
(Exodus 2:7). Without a second thought, Pharaoh’s daughter agrees and the rest
of the story is well known.
As I told it just now, this is a story of oppression
and hope featuring luck or chance (that might be providence), compassion,
resourcefulness and a little bit more luck or chance (that might be again
providence). The end is so promising that its almost possible to momentarily forget
that it is all happening because of a horrible decree.
For a deeper look, I want to quote Rabbi Tali Adler who
brings the fullness of life to the text and thereby reveals hidden layers:
The things you don’t realize until you’ve left the hospital without your baby and stayed up nights pumping milk because it is the one way, while she is in the hospital, that you can be a mother to your child:
- The bodies of childless mothers haunt the background of the beginning of Exodus. Women left after their babies have been taken, breasts still producing milk for the children that they will never feed.
- When Moshe’s sister asks if she should bring an Israelite woman to breastfeed the baby, there is a dark reality behind that question: in societies where enslaved women can have their babies wrenched away at any point, those same women are often forced to act as wet nurses for the children of their oppressors.
- If the Torah only wanted to tell the story of Moshe’s miraculous rescue it could have stopped as soon as Pharaoh’s daughter drew him out of the water. Instead, the Torah makes the choice to tell us about Moshe’s reunion with his mother, and in doing so, makes this her story as well.
- This is the story of the first miracle of the redemption: a child in danger of death saved. Milk given from mother to child, rather than from slave to slave holder. (Facebook post)
The cruelty inherent in this layer is even more intense. Mothers whose sons have been killed violently, are forced not only to care for the children of their masters but to nurse them. Not to sit them in a high chair and feed them with a bottle or spoon but to hold them in their arms, and create close physical contact. Horrifying.
In this reality, I think Yocheved plans more carefully than immediately apparent. She does not float the basket in a random place or time. Rather, on the basis of advance information, she picks exactly the spot where Pharaoh’s daughter can be expected to appear. She can’t foretell how Pharaoh’s daughter will react but she counts on a initial motherly instinct, and prepares Miriam to immediately make a carefully rehearsed offer, before compassion is replaced with ethnic or political considerations, or simply respect for her father.
In the face of a cruel regime, resourcefulness and
luck are not enough. In order to sow seeds of redemption, sophistication and
planning are necessary. Divine Providence does not function in a vacuum but
rather through earthly cooperation. We see this again in the next chapter when
the seed of redemption begins to sprout. God announces “I have come down to rescue them
from the Egyptians” (3:8) and immediately continues by sending Moses to
Pharaoh.
Enslaved in the ultimate exile, Yocheved confronts a reality dictated by others and takes action af al pi chen u’lamrot hakol despite everything and anything. This is the spirit that she bequeathed to the people of Israel in all of our wanderings:
- Despite it all, we built “tower and blockade” settlements.
- Despite it all, we drained the swamps, paved roads, and made the desert bloom.
- Despite it all, illegal immigrants arrived by land and sea.
In the spirit of Yocheved, who planned, dared and
executed her plan with precision, many seeds of national revival were sown, and
we merited Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel
That means – in my opinion – that we should now read at
the story from an additional perspective. The perspective of the sovereign.
Pharaoh was a legitimate ruler of Egypt but he went
overboard and brought destruction to his land.
This perspective can be difficult for us. For 2000,
years we didn’t have the opportunity to think of ourselves as a sovereign power.
For 2000 years, we did not have the need or opportunity to test the boundaries
between essential self-defense and superfluous power-mongering, between an
orderly society and individual rights, and between economic growth and environmental
quality. Now, however, those distinctions and many others are critical for our
continued life here.
If not now when?
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