Jewish Musings, Friday/Shabbat, January 12-13, 2024

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Frieda (hopefully)?
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[peachymom1]

Good morning! I haven’t mentioned the Torah reading for this week, so let’s do some text study before the week is over.

This week’s portion is Va-era, which is when Moses and Aaron first go to Pharaoh to try to get him to let the Israelites go. But I want to back up a bit to last week’s portion, Shemot, which is the beginning of Exodus and the beginning of the Moses story. Here’s my question: When did Moses find out he was Jewish?

When Pharaoh’s daughter finds baby Moses crying in the basket, she says, “This must be a Hebrew child” (Ex. 2:6). I always thought this was because she could see he was circumcised and therefore must be a Jewish boy, but I just learned from a Torah discussion with Rabbi Marc Gellman that Egyptian baby boys were also circumcised, so the princess probably guessed the intention of Moses’s mother and felt rachmanis for him. (Another non-Jewish woman of compassion in the story, after Shifrah and Puah.) And Moses’s birth mother surely kept Moses’s true identity a secret as well, because she couldn’t risk him being killed if the truth came out.

I think the moment of truth came when Moses came upon the Egyptian taskmaster beating the slave. Here’s the text (Ex. 2:11-12):

“When Moses had grown up, he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen. He turned this way and that and, seeing no one about, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

First of all, why did Moses go out to where the slaves were? Did he know yet they were his kin? If so, how and why did he learn this? Why did he kill the Egyptian? After all, beating a slave was nothing unusual; why did he care enough to get involved? And why did he kill the Egyptian because of it? He was a prince of Egypt, instantly recognized and feared – all he had to do was say “Stop!” and the Egyptian taskmaster would have groveled at his feet. So I think Moses must have killed him because he had learned his own identity and became enraged at how his people were being treated.

I’ve also been taught that Moses didn’t learn his true identity until the burning bush, when he had to ask what God’s name was, so the Israelites would know Moses had actually communicated with God. Or maybe Moses knew his own identity as he grew up; in “The Prince of Egypt,” Yocheved sings him a lullaby and asks Moses to remember her song so that she will always be with him.

What do you think?

Thank you all for your participation this week. Shabbat shalom!

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE! Please pray for Israel.

There is a big anti-Israel rally planned for DC tomorrow. There is also a big pro-Israel rally planned for NYC this weekend. What a world!!

Re today's topic: I've wondered this myself, but have no particular opinion. peachymom1, Thanks for an interesting week.

Have a peaceful day, Lee