Community Blog

Earlier in the week, I was ruminating on the Torah portion for this Shabbat, Parashat Shemot, and thinking about a d’var Torah on new beginnings. This parasha marks the beginning of the Book of Exodus, a new chapter for the Israellite people, a renewal of the ancient covenant, and begins with a new pharaoh in Egypt. There’s a lot of newness. But during my Coffee with the Rabbi time at Jirani yesterday, I sat and talked with Reverend Charlotte, a local Unitarian Universalist minister, who was working on a sermon about “Women of the Resistance.” Charlotte is primarily German-American, whose German great-grandparents were Jewish apostates to Lutheranism. The family was well-involved in democratic endeavors in Weimar Germany, and against the rise of the Nazis, with most eventually immigrating in the 1930’s to escape the dangers (at worst) and national shame (at best) that would come with staying in Germany. We spoke in particular about a cousin of Charlotte’s and the other women of the Kreisau Circle, who were less involved in the direct action of the resistance, but who facilitated the resistance movements through their own homemaking. By maintaining the Safe House, tending the adjacent farm that fed people kicked out of their professions, and caring for and educating the future generations of people who would know that fascism is unacceptable, they allowed the men to plan the sabotage of the Third Reich. 

Of course, the UU Church does not follow our Parashat HaShavua, but what a perfect connection back to our own sacred text this week. Parashat Shemot is chock-full of women supporting resistance to Pharaoh, and particularly in their care for the future generation (or younger male of the same generation) in order that redemption may come through someone they know will have more power to make it actually happen. The midwives, Shifra and Puah, can’t just say no to Pharaoh - that would be incredibly dangerous. But they can tell Pharaoh that his request to have them discreetly kill the Hebrew baby boys as they’re being born is not logistically feasible, and simply not do it. Yocheved keeps Moses hidden for three months until she can’t anymore, and she sends him into the river in a water-resistant basket rather than drowning him as Pharaoh expects her to do. Pharaoh’s daughter says, “This must be a Hebrew child” when she finds the basket, but still chooses to keep Moses alive rather than adhere to her father’s commands. Miriam followed the basket along to ensure the baby would not be harmed before he was found, and when he is found, she offers to Pharaoh’s daughter to “find” a wet nurse for him (taking him back to their biological mother until he is weaned). Tzipporah saves Moses from a Divine Smiting by circumcising their son in a very weird sequence about halfway through the parasha. There is no Moses without his bio and adoptive moms, his sister, his wife, and the midwives. That means, there would be no redemption, no Exodus, no Pesach holiday, without these women. They may not be the face of the story, the central leading character like Moses is, but they are integral to the narrative and to the strength of our people. 

There’s even a midrash that Amram, Moses’s father, suggested that all the fertile Israelite couples divorce when Pharaoh decreed death to the Hebrew baby boys. No married couples means no babies, which means no murdered babies. But Miriam, according to this Midrash, was already a prophetess at the tender age of five, and knew her younger brother needed to be born in order to bring about the redemption of the Israelites. She convinced her father to remarry her mother, and to tell all the Hebrews he was wrong about divorcing, and that it is better to continue to try to bring new life into a world that may harm them, than to give up altogether on the hope for a better future. 

And that is an incredibly powerful message to live by now. Climate change is reaching disastrous and irreversible levels. Fascism is on the rise again around the world. Hard won human rights are at risk of being taken back away in our country and other Global North nations. Reproductive freedoms, and thus healthcare, have already begun to crumble in disturbing ways and are sure to get more difficult to access before things get better. But we have to believe they will get better. We have to live for the future. Yes, this means acting in ways that resist the status quo when the status quo endangers lives, it means standing up for other marginalized people, and asking that they stand up for us as well. And it means continuing to care for our families, raising new generations, teaching young people what it means to fiercely love justice and equity, to bravely embrace humanity in all its messy beauty, to fight for our Earth and care for our environment. May we live to see our love for the future embodied, and may the future embody our love for the world. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.