Parahat Shmot

This week we start the book of Exodus (or Shmot, as it is called in Hebrew). Genesis was about the creation of the family of Israel. Exodus is about the creation of the Nation of Israel.

The portion starts with the enslaving of the people, through to Moses being born, the burning bush and Moses going before Pharoh for the first time (basically the first act of the movie “The Ten Commandments”).

A few interesting notes; the 210 years of slavery (which is a fundamental art of our history) take up less than 10 sentences. Contrary to popular belief, the Jews did not build the pyramids, they build the Store Cities of Pithom and Raamsees. And of interest to me, Moses had a stutter (that’s why he asked G-d to appoint Aaron to be his spokes person).

I think most of us know the story, so I wanted to talk about something more subtle. The book starts with “And these are the names of the sons of Israel who came into Egypt…”. It goes on to list all the sons, then it says “And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were 70 souls…”(1:5). This is not a completely accurate translation. The Hebrew word used for “souls” is “Nefesh’, which means soul, not souls (singular not plural). The plural is Nepeshim, which is used in many other places. So what the text is saying is that “All the people who came into Egypt were 70 soul.” 70 people came, but they were all part of one soul. That is the unique soul of the Jewish people.

I could talk all day about that idea. But instead, I just wanted to point out the lesion this teaches us about Torah study, every word is carefully chosen, so we need to pay careful attention when reading and understand the text as it is written (in the original). This has become unfashionable in modern times, Jewish learning focuses on Talmud, but there is much to be learned for a careful reading of the Torah.

Shabbat Shalom.