Rabbi Hyim Shafner
This week’s Torah portion is Va’era: Exodus 6:2 – 9:35
Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, which we are currently reading about in the Torah, is not only a national historical event of moving from slavery to freedom, but, as Rabbi Nachman of Breslov put it, something that we as individuals, emotionally and spiritually, must engage in in our personal lives every day. We all at times find ourselves in a personal state of exile from something we value or love, or a state of servitude, slaves to something we wish we could escape from.
For hundreds of years, the Israelites were born, generation after generation, into slavery. not just of backbreaking labor but of complete submission, smothering the human will. How could redemption emerge from such an exile in which even the idea that things might be different is unfathomable? What can possibly prime the pump of change when access to the spiritual and emotional tools of reimagining the self and personal transformation are eclipsed?
The Torah writes: “And it was after a long time the king of Egypt died, and the Jewish people groaned from the labor, and they cried out and their cry ascended to God because of the slavery. And God heard their cry … and God knew (Exodus 2:23 – 25).” God of course always knew the plight of the Jewish people in slavery, but until the people themselves were able to cry out, to realize that things are not as they should be, that it could be different, even if the vision of a different life is not yet clear, God could not take them out.
There is an exile that is so deep that one does not even know one is in exile at all. But just to groan, to cry out, is at least to know that things are amiss, thus creating a doorway. It is from this existential realization, the ability for a moment to stand outside of oneself and one’s situation, to fathom that perhaps it could be different, that the first groan emerges and from that the door is opened to change.
What holds us back from that first groan of change, the realization that things are not as they should be? Fear, of course. Human beings do not like change. But taking the risk which leads to change and growth is essential.
Perhaps this is why the Exodus is compared, in the Medrash, to birth (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, 14:30). Birth is the grand emergence, the creation of something entirely new, but in reality, it is merely a transition from one state to another and indeed a painful transition which involves much groaning. “Birth is that primordial moment which brands us and forms us forever, it is that painful transition that makes the next stage, life, one which is creative and filled with desire.” (Otto Rank, “Art and Artist,” 1923)
The pain of change thus facilitates our personal Exodus and makes possible a brighter, more creative, future. May we learn from the grand Exodus in these Torah portions to find the path to our personal Exodus.
Rabbi Hyim Shafner is the rabbi of Kesher Israel: The Georgetown Synagogue. He is also a licensed psychotherapist and the author of “The Everything Jewish Wedding Book,” as well as a wide array of articles in Jewish journals, periodicals and books.
