Rabbi's Derasha

Famously, the parasha lays out four languages of Geula (redemption).  This is not four different ways to understand the same thing.  Rather each verb refers to four distinct stages of the Geula.  First was the end of the servitude.  The hard, grinding work ended.  Then they were no longer second-class citizens.  Then came the actual exodus.  Finally, the verb Lakachti refers to the giving of the Torah at Har Sinai.  One can trace each of the changes unfold in the verses.

Why does it go like this?  Let’s look at another process.  Moshe Rabenu first proposes to Paro that there should be a three-day trip to the desert.  He asking for a Shabbaton.  There’s a lot to say about how this should be viewed.  Was he lying or was it a sincere offer?  But let’s just call it a sincere lie.  That is, there was no way Paro would immediately go for full emancipation.  But he could first get used to the idea of a Shabbaton.  Part of the psychology is going to be that people have to grow into things slowly.  No one achieves anything overnight, at least not anything big.  So they begin Paro with the idea of a Shabbaton, on the way to something more emphatic.

We’ll see the same process next week.  Before the Jews get to Har Sinai, they will have to go through a trial over water.  The Torah will announce that at Mara that they were given three Mitzvot.  They were given a Chok, the red heifer.  They were also taught about the civil code, and they were taught about Shabbat.  It’s an appetizer.  A logical Mitzva, a Mitzva with no apparent logic, and then Shabbat, which has many Halachot.  With this in place, they will be better primed for Har Sinai.    

And so it goes with every redemption.  It comes in stages.  Certainly for Paro but also for our benefit.  We have to catch up with what is unfolding.      

Several years ago, we had a scholar in residence, R’ Moshe Taragin from Alon Shvut.  He also spoke via Zoom for us during Covid about Yom Haatzma’ut.  He spoke about a gradual, what might even be a protracted, process of Geula.  This was the idea presented by his Rosh Yeshiva, R’ Yehuda Amital, ztz’l, a Holocaust survivor whose meditations on these subjects were always thoughtful and restrained.  For example, R’ Amital did not think of Zionism as a messianic movement.  Nor did he think of the Six Day War in those terms.  And he was willing to give up the West Bank if it meant truly saving lives.  

R’ Taragin thought that the way things were developing was a demonstration that things were working gradually.  Even the phrase we say in the prayer for welfare of Israel, “Reisheet Tzmichat Geulateinu” (the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption), is gradual.  It is just a beginning of a beginning.  I would call it the beginning of the end of the exile.  Not the end, for sure.  But once one has a possible entrance to Eretz Yisrael, once a Jew can reach the Kotel without restrictions, we are in a different space.  Remember that less than 100 years ago, one could not obtain permission to blow the Shofar on Rosh Hashana next to the Kotel.  

The process is just that, a process, because maturation has to occur.  That’s for us.  We are supposed to be maturing into something better in order to meet the moment.  All of us have something to do.  We’re all on a journey.  As we angle toward redemption, we have to make ourselves fitting for it.