This was my D’var Torah on Shabbat for Parashat Shmot, January 10, 2026.
It has been a week, from Iran to Venezuela to my hometown the Twin Cities. And it has also been the week of Parashat Shmot, the opening of the book of Exodus, the most important book in human history. If you have been trying to find a foothold around the happenings of this week — and not just this week, but this past year and these two-plus years and, and… — the thing I want to teach today is that the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus narrative, is in fact our core. Exodus is the core of being Jewish.
There are a lot of things in Judaism that are important, but what holds them all together is the Exodus. That is my credo, my Ani Ma’amin. I am pluralist, in that I think it’s possible to be Jewish in all kinds of different ways and there are things important to my own Jewish life that I can see other Jews doing without. But the one thing I cannot see Judaism without is a grounding in the Exodus.
Yetziat Mitzrayim is not just one of the Torah’s stories, or even one of the Torah’s most important stories — it is the story. When we talk about the Exodus, it’s the whole sweep from oppression in Mitzrayim by Pharaoh, to liberation, to covenant, to the training in the desert and the struggles in the desert, to the cusp of the promised land. That is not only the story of one festival, Passover — it is being Jewish. As Rabbi Sharon Brous has put it: We are Exodus people.
Judaism is the Exodus touching every part of our lives — the parts we think of as individual, our thoughts and hearts and even our bodies; the parts we think of as ethical and spiritual and ritual; the parts we think of as social and political. That is how Judaism is designed.
When we awaken in the morning and first stretch out our bodies, we say the blessing Baruch Atah… Matir asurim ברוך אתה מתיר אסורים — thank you for releasing the bound, for freeing the captive.
When we end our conscious day with the Shma, our final words are about Divine who brought us out of Mitzrayim, and who will redeem us by giving us life again in the morning.
Whenever we sing Mi Chamocha in a morning or evening service, we are singing the song our ancestors sang in the first moments of freedom.
When we hold our cup of grape juice or wine on Shabbat evening, we say this is zechar li’tziat Mitzrayim זכר ליציאת מצרים — I love Rabbi Andre Unger’s translation: Shabbat is a memento of our going out from Egypt.
When we rest on Shabbat from our weekday labors, we are reminding ourselves that we are not slaves.
It’s not only about blessings and rituals. Whenever we pay someone on time for their work, or pay a wage that is fair and not exploitative, the Torah says: what you’re doing is the opposite of Pharaoh. And if you don’t, that worker will cry out to God who will answer them just as we were answered in Egypt.
Whenever we give tzedakah, when we face a person and take in their needs and respond — the Torah says our hearts are gracious unlike Pharaoh’s hardened heart, and our hands are like the strong hand and outstretched arm that redeemed us.
Whenever we sit with someone who is sick, held down by illness of body or spirit, we are like God who came to us when we were worn down and weakened by our oppression.
Whenever we find the owner of a lost object and give it back — the Torah makes a much bigger deal about this than you would expect, and it’s because that was us, lost in Mitzrayim until we were discovered again and brought back to where we belonged.
And of course Yetziat Mitzrayim is about the bigger scale.
Whenever we find resilience and strength, as a single Jew or as all of Am Yisrael, to overcome the hates and conspiracy theories and violence directed at us, we are drawing on the inspiration of our ancestors who endured Egypt and walked through the sea and across the desert.
Whenever we walk into a synagogue and see this architecture and these symbols of the bimah and the ark and the Torah, we are reminded of how we went in a single year from being the builders of Pharoah’s garrison cities to being the builders of a sacred center where the Divine would come to infuse our world and to speak teachings.
Whenever we are in the forefront for freedom, for equality, we are back standing at the river facing Pharaoh.
Whenever we resist leaders who steal, who mock, who oppress, who revel in cruelty, we are Miryam, we are Moshe. Whether the leaders are outside or are our own. Whenever we reject making idols out of powerful humans or any false power, we are rejecting Pharaoh yet again.
Whenever we discover ourselves complicit in the enslavement of people and we turn from that in teshuvah, we are heeding the very first law in the first law code that was given to us in our state of freedom.
Whenever we notice someone across a boundary our society carelessly draws, someone or some group deemed by others to be lesser — and when we love that person, when we find solidarity with that group — then we are obeying the Torah’s charge to remember what is was like when we ourselves were the stranger, the other in Egypt.
And yes, when we open the Torah from this morning and for the rest of the year until just after Yom Kippur, we are in the Exodus story. And yes too, when during Pesach we eat matzah, the bread of suffering and of the first moments of freedom, and we sit at the Pesach table and retell the story again.
The Exodus is in our every day, our every week, our holy times and our signal moments and our historic ones. Our daily routine, our spiritual practices, our ethics, our social vision. But even that is saying too little. This is what I believe: The Exodus has to be the lens through which we see the world, and the language for making sense of it and making plans for it together.
When we don’t see the world through Exodus eyes, we may see vivid colors but everything is blurry. Exodus is how we focus, how we notice, how we zero in.
When we don’t speak through the Exodus story, our words may be passionate but they are disjointed, and try as we might to be understood, we sound like gibberish. The Exodus gives us words and labels, so we can connect one thing to another and talk about them together.
And when I say the Exodus helps us see with focus and speak more clearly, that’s includes the times when we are stuck or beleaguered, or when we doubt.
Whenever we notice our minds and hearts narrowing, when we feel ourselves physically clenched because of fear or disbelief about what is happening around us, and then we locate even the smallest defiance of despair, the smallest source of hope — the Kabbalah says this is the seed of redemption that our ancestors found in Egypt in their darkest hour, when they felt cosmically abandoned, in a world of incoherence, and yet still they found enough to call out toward heaven.
Whenever we act on our gut to right a wrong and we don’t get it quite right, or whenever we feel like all we can do is step back or retreat or take a long break, we are back where Moshe was the day he tried to reconcile the two slaves but instead ended up fleeing to Midian.
Whenever we are trying to figure out where we belong in the world, among our people and other peoples; whenever we are asking who is my brother or my sister or my fellow or my neighbor, and what is demanded of me when I know or as I don’t know — then we are standing next to Pharaoh’s daughter on the Nile shore, contemplating a baby she knows it is dangerous to rescue; we are standing next to Moshe as he tries to work out being all at once an Egyptian prince and a potential Jewish leader.
Whenever we think are going nowhere, or even backward, we are nonetheless marching through the desert toward the promised land.
The Exodus story is the map for everything in our Jewish lives and our lives of purpose in this world. At the Seder we say that anyone who brings more telling to the story of the Exodus v’chol hamarbeh l’sapeir bitziat Mitzrayim, harei zeh meshubach וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים, הרי זה משובך — the telling makes things better! Makes oneself better; makes all of us better.
The Sfat Emet says that each of us experience the Exodus every day, because in our lives there are Pharaohs and even within our own psyches.
Michael Walzer, a Jewish American political philosopher, discovered an amazing thing — that the discussions of the Talmudic rabbis and the medieval Jewish commentators on the Exodus were about the same questions posed by political theorists and activists and revolutionaries all over the Western world for the past few hundred years, who themselves often used the Exodus narrative to organize their thoughts.
The Exodus helps us with our biggest questions, even helps us formulate our questions. Even helps us figure out how to argue with each other. Studying the Exodus Torah and joining those discussions helps us see our own world better and our own role in it.
When we are faced with a week like this week or a world like this world, the Exodus Torah will show us things we’ve never seen before, or help us see better what is in front of us — show us ourselves better. We don’t wait for the Seder to do that. This is my charge: When you don’t know what else to do, go to the Exodus text, and when you think you do know go to it also.
We have to study it with our brains and with all of our attention and all of our souls. We have to read it with our bodies and our hearts. And most of all, we have to study it together.
The Exodus story is a framework for our questions, and also a compass in the desert for our commitments.
It helps us glimpse the promised land, or at least get its picture in our mind.
It helps us recognize and connect with others who have seen themselves in a story that was once just about the Jews — people who have heard our Exodus story and been inspired toward their own freedom.
Exodus is everywhere. Everything Torah, everything Jewish. There is no Jewish core without the Exodus.
Everything in our world is Exodus. Everything is either Egypt, or the crossing of the sea, or the desert march, or the cusp of the destination. And that’s why there is no response as a Jew to this week that was, or this year or these two years, or more …. that doesn’t start with grounding ourselves again in this story which is more than a story.
We are meant to be Exodus people. Charged to keep reading and teaching this story, and to define our lives as responding to it. To take it in and broadcast it out. That is what it means to be a Jew — to live our daily moments and our historic ones in the light of the most important story ever.
Shabbat Shalom.
*****
This D’var Torah and many others along similar lines about Exodus owe a lot to Michael Walzer, and in particular his books Exodus and Revolution and Interpretation and Social Criticism; Rabbi Sharon Brous and her many articulations about the Exodus; and Harvard Professor Paul Hansen, whose Core curriculum Foreign Cultures course on the religions of the ancient Near East I was initially so determined not to take having just returned from a year actually living in a “foreign” place.
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