Healthy Separation In this weeks parsha, God speaks to Moses and tells him to say to the Jewish people: I am God, and I will take you out from under the burdens of Egypt; and I will save you from their service; and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and great judgments. And I will take you to Me for a people, and I will be a God to you... (Exodus 6:6-7) This passage uses four separate expressions of redemption. Surely any one of these expressions alone would have sufficed to convey Gods promise to redeem the Jewish people! Why are all four necessary? The commentator Netivot Shalom explains that these four promises are not merely expressions of redemption; rather, they represent four separate redemptions (see also Talmud Yerushalmi, Pesachim 10:1). These four redemptions can be understood as four stages of redemption that were needed to completely liberate the Jews from Egyptian exile. The Jewish people in Egypt had fallen to the lowest possible spiritual level. The Midrash (Socher Tov on Psalms 114) compares the enslaved Jewish nation to a fetus within the womb of an impure animal, based on the verse, ...to take for Himself a nation from amidst a nation (Deut. 4:34). The Jewish people were living inside the Egyptians. Their identity was completely meshed with the corruption and immorality of Egyptian society. According to the Netivot Shalom, since the situation was so severe, the first stage of redemption was for the Jews to be taken out from the darkness and impurity of their surrounding culture. Nevertheless, they were still slaves to their inner drive toward negativity (yetzer hara). The second stage, then, was to be saved from this servitude. The slave mentality cannot be so easily eradicated, however; even after being saved, the Jewish people were still subjugated to the side of negativity. It was this subjugation from which God redeemed the Jews. The final stage of redemption was for God to take the Jews as His nation.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:30:00 +0000
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