Parashat Va'eira

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:40:05 -0500 —

D'var: Parashat Va'eira 5785
Commentary by Michael Goldstein
Friday, January 24, 2025

Va'eira Exodus 6:2 — 9:35

This week’s Parashah is Vaera, (Exodus 6:2 - 9:35). It means and I appeared and is the second Parashah in the Book of Exodus. Here are the opening verses:

God spoke to Moses, and He said to him, "I am the Lord.

I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob with [the name] Almighty God, but [with] My name YHWH, I did not become known to them.

And also, I established My covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their sojournings in which they sojourned.

And also, I heard the moans of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians are holding in bondage, and I remembered My covenant.

Therefore, say to the children of Israel, 'I am the Lord, and I will take you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will save you from their labor, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.

And I will take you to Me as a people, and I will be a God to you, and you will know that I am the Lord your God, Who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.

I will bring you to the land, concerning which I raised My hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and I will give it to you as a heritage; I am the Lord.'" (Exodus 6:2-8)

In Vaera, God tells Moses and Aaron to go to Pharaoh and demand freedom for the Israelites. Pharaoh, of course, refuses. God unleashes the first seven plagues: in turn, water into blood, frogs, lice, noxious creatures, livestock pestilence, boils, and hail.

After each, Pharaoh promises to free the Israelites, but God has hardened Pharaoh’s heart as He said he would in order to have Pharaoh not free them.

There is an old Jewish imperative that each of us must feel as if he personally had left Egypt. In Hebrew, the word for "Egypt" is Mitzrayim. Mitzrayim is derived from the word meitzar, meaning "the narrow place." Therefore, it can symbolize a place of constriction, oppression, despair, and slavery.

Mitzrayim, in other words, is not merely a place. It is a state of being.

The Egypt of the Torah represents restriction: a sense of entrapment and slavery. That old imperative instructs us to escape this restriction … this limitation … every day.

We don’t have to live physically under Pharaoh’s rule to feel enslaved. We all have areas of our lives where we struggle with the limitations that impede us. Whatever forms Mitzrayim takes for each one of us, it creates a barrier to our growth and development and, yes, even to our freedom.

In FDR’s 1941 State of the Union Address, often called the Four Freedoms Speech, he said; "In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms." He went on to explain them as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

For a very long time, I have considered the Torah to be a series of wonderful and wondrous stories, perhaps one of the least believable of which is the Israelites’ escape from Egypt.

Each story in the Torah, each parashah, provides us with one or more messages that can help us choose how to live. Here, though, the message I choose for this d’var is the over-riding message of the entire Book of Exodus… we are always to strive for and treasure freedom.

The great reggae musician, Bob Marley, said, "Better to die fighting for freedom than to be a prisoner all the days of your life."

It is fitting, I think, to view the Book of Exodus as a kind of 12 step program for the Israelites with Moses as group chair who, perhaps, needs a therapist himself.

Slavery – a life without freedom – can have any number of torments… from unpaid hard labor to whippings, to being humiliated and debased, and to the worst subjugation of all … the drug and alcohol addiction that imprisons one in the despair buried deep within his own mind.

That is the worst form of slavery because it does not give its victims a living, breathing, overlord to hate and against which to rebel. You can hate the drug, but you cannot rebel against it. All you are left to hate and rebel against is your own brain.

The story in the Book of Exodus is the story of a long, difficult march to a hard-won freedom. The Israelites were not free when they crossed the Sea of Reeds. They were not free when they received the Commandments at Mount Sinai. They were not even free when they reached the Jordan River and saw Jericho’s walls come tumbling down.

They were not free until they established Eretz Yisrael and Moses passed the group leader’s gavel to Joshua. Only then were they able to overcome the slave mentality that made them feel less than free and that for 40 years had caused them to miss the restrictive certainties of their lives in Egypt.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

That is the message of the Book of Genesis. Each of us must cherish Roosevelt’s four freedoms as part of our Judaic heritage.

Last year, Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, proudly said "I love being Jewish, and I love the joy that comes with being Jewish. And I’m not going to let anyone tell me how to be Jewish."

All of us – those who are here tonight and those who aren’t – all of us must together strive to protect, at all costs, our pride in being Jews.

Michael Goldstein

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