This was my D’var Torah for Parashat Shmot in 5779 just before New Year’s, at the turn of 2018 into 2019.
I have come to love the hinge between the book of Bereshit (Genesis) and the book of Shmot (Exodus). The sense of something coiled up and about to uncoil.
My rav at the Seminary, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, savored for us the last three words of Genesis: Vayisem, ba’aron, b’mitzrayim. Joseph was placed, in a box, in Egypt. The first three words of Genesis, of the Torah, are familiar – B’reishit, bara, Elohim – in the beginning, God created, and what God created was heaven and earth. All of that, and everything that has happened in Genesis, is now packed away in the depths of the earth, Gordon taught, in a box in the ground in the lowest place on earth. The two sets of three words are like bookends, even in their letters and sounds. The bara, the bet-resh-alef of “created”, becomes ba-aron, the bet-alef-resh in “in a box”, in a coffin. Instead of Elohim, the God of creation in all its expanses of heaven and earth, we have Mitzrayim, Egypt, the narrow land, with its narrow ideas of divinity embodied by the Pharaoh. Gordon didn’t say this, but while the Torah starts with the bet of B’reishit, the letter with the wide open side, the house with its open door, Genesis ends with a mem sofit, a final mem, a box with no opening at all. The mem itself is the coffin in which Joseph is placed in the ground in Egypt.
In the Torah scroll there is a space, equivalent to several lines of script. A silence, a break. The week between reading in shul the end of Genesis, and starting to hear the book of Exodus – traditionally on Shabbat afternoon last week, for us today right now on Shabbes morning.
What uncoils, what springs out of the box, is not only what was packed in there. It is not exactly the same. It is more.
What springs out of the box is the Torah of redemption, the reality of liberation – the divine force of love in the world.
The Torah tells us in this week’s parasha that divinity is known in the book of Exodus by a new name – a name new to people – YHVH. The midrashim say that this name represents a dimension of divinity that had not been known to the Avot and Imahot of Genesis – this is the dimension of compassion and love, chesed and rachamim. This is divine solidarity with the Israelites in their suffering – Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I will be who I will be, means I will be with you, Ehyeh imach, in your suffering, in your tzara, your tzores, your Mitzrayim.
Heschel calls this “divine pathos”, the feeling that God has for people especially when they are in pain – Heschel says that God doesn’t just hear our groans but is pained as we are pained. The God of the book of Exodus is the God of Chesed, the God of love, known for the first time.
You might not think of Exodus as the God of love – not in a story with slavery and plagues, with fear and danger. Exodus is not a courtship or a wooing. It is mature love.
As I was writing I happened to see in my e-mail inbox a message from “The Revolutionary Love Project”, which I figured must be a sign. I took a few minutes to peruse and found this definition of love:
“Love is a form of sweet labor – fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving.”
Divinity in the book of Exodus is love working – fierce and bloody. Fierce and bloody and life-giving as the midwives, moved by their reverence for divinity, deliver babies and stand up to Pharaoh to trick him and save lives under his nose.
Fierce and fearless as Yocheved and Miryam protect one baby, and stand face to face with the daughter of Pharaoh and together their create a reality of love and life where Pharaoh, the narrow-god of the narrow-land, had said there could not be.
Fierce and bloody as Moshe, seeing people enslaved and beaten, kills the taskmaster, and pries fighting people apart, and fears for his life.
Imperfect, as Moshe argues, the midrash says for seven days, that it is impossible to go and stand up for his people, to speak at all about what is going on in the world.
The divine force of love is perfect in itself, but looks imperfect because we are imperfect – the image of God but not the perfect image all the time. When we try to act out of love, as the midwives or Moshe did, love looks imperfect. Because mature love is labor, because being fierce is frightening. So we delay.
And the reputation of divine chesed takes quite a hit because of us. The Torah let us think that God ignored the Israelites for hundreds of years. A midrash imagines God waiting for the time of redemption to arrive, four hundred years of oppression that had been foretold in Genesis which to God might be a blink of an eye. Soon, God says, to the angels, and one of them brings him a baby baked into a brick made by the slaves – how can you wait, the angel says to God, even another day? Is this divine love?
The world today seems in places without divine love, and the Exodus itself seems like it begins with such an absence of it. But this is impossible. Divine chesed was closed inside a box, buried in Mitzrayim, in a pit in the lowest part of the earth. This is the paradox, like the Aladdin’s lamp, such power in a small space but it has to be opened, by someone willing to be its master and partner.
I don’t know exactly why sometimes we have the courage to love with God-like love and sometimes we don’t, or why some people can reveal it and others do not.
But I believe that the book of Exodus is teaching us about divine love, about ahavah rabbah and avahat olam, great love and enduring love. Ki gavar aleinu chasdo, about divine love that is overpowering.
Exodus is about divine love when it needs to be overpowering – when it is facing obstacles that are themselves mighty, that fight back. The midrash even says that up through the moment Moshe faced the burning bush, for seven days of refusing to be a vessel of divine love, the Israelites were not that lovable.
Divine love begins where human love seems to be at its limit. It starts after feelings of affection have taken us as far as we can go. Chesed means giving because we want to, and then because we ought to.
We have, by our biology and our wiring, the capacity to love a certain number of people, connected to us by blood or friendship or culture – but the imperative of divine love tells us to love beyond that. That’s why the example of divine love in Exodus is a love that fights for 600,000 men and their wives and their children, all at once.
Divine love fights for, and it fights against.
And still there is sweetness, even in these opening stories of Exodus. Not on the surface, but the midrash tells us of the remarkable women, wives of slaves, who met their husbands at the end of each day. They would hold up a dusty mirror, one you couldn’t really see in, and say, “How beautiful we are together”, until they believed it, in a beauty beyond what the eye can see, until they fell in love again.
“Love is a form of sweet labor – fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving.”
Divine love is not separate from how we act when we love as a mitzvah. It is exactly the same, and that’s what we will be reading in the Torah and talking about for weeks and weeks to come.
And if the story in the Torah does not seem to feature the sweetness of the labor every week, the telling is surrounded by sweetness here – in Shabbat itself, in one another. So let us know the divine in new ways as we begin to read the book of Exodus, to open a box and help love uncoil into the world of our new year.
Shabbat Shalom!
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