Shemot – Exodus 1:1 – 6:1 – Parshat Ha Shavua for Shabbat, Saturday, January 18, 2020

This week we begin the book of Exodus, the second book of the Torah, that begins the central story of our people, God’s intervention to free the Jewish people from slavery and make us a messenger of the centrality of partnership between human beings and God as a vehicle to promote human diginity for all of humanity.

In English, this book is called Exodus, from the Greek to go out or exit, which makes sense since this is the central theme of the story. When I was in Greece three years ago I saw the word Exodus (ἔξοδος) on every building emergency exit and on every freeway off ramp.

In Hebrew, the name of the book is Shemot (שמות) which means names. The Jewish naming convention for each of the books of the Torah is to call them after the first significant word in the text. In this case, “These are the names…” (אלו שמות)

Our rabbis, of blessed memory, took a lesson from these words. They teach that one of the reasons God delivered the Israelites from Egyptian slavery is they never forgot their Hebrew names. In other words, despite all the efforts of the Egyptians to dehumanize and break down the Jewish people, they never lost the fundamental sense of who they were, their culture, or their identity.

This is a profound lesson for us. We do not live in a time of oppression or slavery; rather, we live in a time of unlimited freedom to be as Jewish or as not Jewish as we wish to be.

The challenge for our generation is to remember what is most central and precious to us about our Jewish identities, and to pass these on to our children and grandchildren.