Shemos 5785: A Blueprint For the Ages

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January 14 2025
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Sefer Shemos opens in our parsha, Parshas Shemos, with the servitude and enslavement forced upon the Israelite slaves by their Egyptian tormentors. The pattern is one that is familiar to us from our long and bitter history in exile. When Yosef, and his brothers, and that entire generation died (Shemos 1:6), the Children of Israel continued to be successful in their host land, populating the land, building families and homes, and spreading through the land (1:7).

Into this environment of prosper and success for the fledgling nation, the winds of change began to blow. וַיָּקָם מֶלֶךְ-חָדָשׁ, עַל-מִצְרָיִם, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יָדַע, אֶת-יוֹסֵף - and a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Yosef (1:8).  Is it possible that anyone in Egypt did not know Yosef - the viceroy who ruled for eighty years and saved the entire nation, and region, from decimation and famine?  Rashi explains that the new king made himself as one who did “not know” Yosef. He conveniently “forgot.” And how convenient it is to “forget” the good that the Jew contributes to society, economy and government stability.  

With his rise to power, he enacts new edicts to subjugate, terrify, and oppress the Children of Israel.  He begins with propaganda, convincing his fellow Egyptians that the Jews are disloyal, and will surely join with invading enemy armies to kick the Egyptians out of their own land! (1:9-10).  

Once he has planted the seeds of mistrust and hatred into the minds of his countrymen - via the newspapers, radio broadcasts, movie reels, and rousing, hysterical, passionate speeches to thousands of hysterical admirers - he moves on to the next stage of his plan: financial oppression.  The property of the Jews is confiscated. Radios, bicycles, silver and gold, paintings and businesses, are all confiscated by the Egyptian Gestapo for the purpose of tyrannizing the Jews through financial decimation (1:11). From there, the new king moves to laws of slave labor, conscripting the hapless Jews into forced labor battalions, and labor camps, where they will work for hours, days, weeks, months and years on end, to feed the Egyptian (and German) war machine (ibid.)

In his memoirs, entitled “In Seven Camps in Three Years,” (originally written in Yiddish and professionally translated into English) my maternal grandfather, Yitzchak Kaftan, Yitzchak ben Moshe a’h, from the town of Krasnik, Poland, writes: “As soon as the Germans arrived in Krashnik, the subjugation and pain of the Jewish population began. Already, a few weeks after they took over the city, no one could go to pray at a Shul. If anyone wanted to pray with a minyan, then a few elderly Jews gathered in a private residence and prayed. On a certain Shabos, when I went to lead the service at Reb Peretz Goldberg, may G-d avenge his blood, a German accosted me and began to drag me to the marketplace where a large number of Jews were already assembled. I was dressed in a silk Shabos kapote (silk frock coat), with a prayer shawl (tallis) and a Chumash under my arm.  I just realized that I should have changed my clothes, when we were driven away to the train station where we unloaded coal from box cars all day. I was then so naive and I thought: ‘What are they thinking, the Germans?  It is today the Sabbath of the New Month (Shabbos Rosh Chodesh), we must say Hallel. So where is he taking us?’  This was the first time that I experienced working for the Germans and also received a beating. But the hell had just begun.

Defying nature, when the Israelite slaves continue to build their families and carry on, despite the ruthless laws of the new king, Pharaoh moves to the final stage: infanticide. And Pharaoh said to the midwives of the Hebrews, Shifrah and Puah, when you birth the Jewish women, when you see on the birthing stone that a boy has been born, you shall kill him (1:16)… and Pharaoh commanded his entire nation saying: every male that shall be born shall be thrown into the river (1:22).  

The parallels between ancient Egypt and future exiles are startling, striking, and remind us of the prophetic nature, and Divine truth, of our holy Torah.  

אִם-בֵּן הוּא וַהֲמִתֶּן אֹתוֹ, just over one month ago, on 11 Kislev 5785, twelve year-old Yehoshua Aharon Tuvia Simcha was sitting beside his sisters on the Jerusalem-bound 291 bus from Beitar, returning home from their older sister’s last sheva brachos, when a terrorist opened fire and killed the boy.

“Just a few months ago, you asked me about the tefillin I would buy you for your bar mitzvah,” wept his father, Rav Dovid Zusha, Rosh Yeshivah of Yeshiva Klal Chassidi in Beitar Illit. “You didn’t care about the hall or the event, only the tefillin. And now, instead of tefillin, I am buying you a burial plot.  In your merit, I became a better father. I constantly felt that I needed to improve, so I could be worthy of being the father of a son like you.”

Tuvia, HY”D, learned in the Pnei Menachem cheder in Yerushalayim, and the Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Shaul Alter, described him as the “crown of the Talmud Torah.”  He was a mevakesh, never ceasing his pursuit for further clarity. “He kept asking me to learn with him,” his rebbi recalled. “When I explained a Tosafos, he insisted on understanding every detail. On his last day, I learned with him for twenty minutes. When we didn’t finish, I told him we would continue the next day. Now, he’ll continue learning in the Yeshivah shel Maalah.”

He was a role model to his classmates but also their best friend. He was constantly complimenting his friends; on his final trip home from Beitar, he borrowed a phone from someone so that he could call a friend and compliment him for something he’d done earlier that day.

Tuvia’s married brother described how whenever he came for Shabbos, Tuvia would help him with his suitcase, take care of whatever was needed, and then ask, “When will you learn with me?”

Perhaps the most heartbreaking hesped was given by his seven-year-old younger brother, Mordechai. “I loved you so much, I loved talking to you so much. And now — who will learn with me? Who will answer all my questions?”

For reasons we cannot understand, Hashem chose to transform joy into tragedy.  But He can also transform tragedy to joy.  May we soon see nechamah — for this tragedy and so many others — as the many tzaros fade away with the coming of Mashiach bimheirah b’yameinu. Amen (Yisrael Hershkowitz, Mishpacha, Issue 1042, 24 Kislev 5785, 12.25.25).

Every male born shall be thrown into the river” (1:22), is followed immediately in the Torah with: “And a man from the house of Levi went and he married a daughter of Levi; and the woman conceived and she gave birth to a son” (2:1-2).  

During this time of great travail and affliction, the redeemer - Moshe Rabbeinu - is born. Moshe who will lead the nation from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from oppression to redemption, from exile to the borders of the Promised Land.  

As they were redeemed, may we merit salvation, immediately and in our days, לנו ולכל ישראל עד עולם, אמן ואמן.

בברכת בשורות טובות ושבת שלום

Machshava:
Parsha:
Shemot 

Collections: Mrs. Horowitz Parsha Post

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