VAERA 1989

In the Torah portion Vaera we learn how Pharaoh refuses to let the Jewish people go.  He believed in slavery.  He believed, like the ancient philosophers, Aristotle and Plato, did, that civilization was impossible without slavery.  He thought that Moshe was asking for an impossible thing.  He had to be convinced that slavery was evil.  He had to realize how helpless a slave was.  That was one of the purposes of the plagues: to show him how helpless he was and what it meant to be a slave, where you had no control over your life at all.  We can understand why Pharaoh had to undergo the plagues in order to understand the evil of slavery, but why did the Jewish people have to endure slavery in the first place?  Why did G-d have to tell Abraham that "your children are going to serve 400 year in Egypt"?  The rabbis interpret that this means 400 years from the birth of Isaac, and that they would leave Egypt with great possession.  Why did the Jewish people have to endure slavery at all?  What was the purpose of their enduring the Egyptian slavery?

What's more, we learn that G-d told Moshe to tell the Jewish people that, "I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egypt, 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."  In other words, G-d said He was going redeem the Jewish people four different ways from slavery.  Why did G-d have to tell the Jewish people that He was going to redeem them in four different ways?  Why didn't He just say that He was going to redeem them, take them out of Egypt?  Why did He have to say He was going to redeem them four different ways?
The rabbis tell us the reason the Jewish people had to endure slavery in Egypt was to teach them the important lesson of Rachmones, that unless the Jewish people are compassionate and sympathetic, unless they empathize with the suffering people, that, therefore, they will not be able to carry the Jewish message, that the Jewish people had to understand what it means to be poor and downtrodden.  Then they could become a light unto the nations.  Then they would be worthy to receive the Torah.  Even to this day Jews, as a group, are more sympathetic and compassionate to the poor and the helpless.  Even our voting records speak that way.  Jews vote, according to political scientists, as if they were lower class people when actually Jews are in the upper classes economically, yet in the United States when they vote they vote as if they were lower class.  The reason for that being that Jews do not always and almost never vote the economic interest.  They vote with their heart.  They feel the plight of the unfortunate.
This is what the Egyptian experience was to teach us.  It was to teach the Jew that slavery was evil, and that we have to be concerned with social justice, that we have to be concerned that the poor are taken care of, too.  We cannot believe and never believe that slavery is a necessary condition for civilization.  In fact, we even have a variant of that same theme today where people say that we have to keep the minimum wage very low otherwise we will not have people willing to serve in the army or willing to work in industry, and, although there are government leaders who are willing to double the wages of high government officials, they are not willing to do anything about the minimum wage.  They keep it the same as it has been for 10 years even though we know that inflation has eroded terribly its purchasing power.  The Egyptian experience was to teach the Jewish people that they had to care for each other and sympathize with each other, and that they had to take care of the world's problems, that we must not be indifferent when we social injustice and poverty.

We must try to eradicate it and overcome it.

Before the Jewish people went to Egypt they knew these lessons in their head but not in their heart.  Therefore, the brothers could sell Joseph into slavery.  The brothers could develop a caste system where the sons of Leah felt they were better than the sons of the handmaidens.  Slavery was to refine the Jewish people, to have them come out a people who are always on the side of compassion and on the side of those who need help.  That was the purpose of the Egyptian experience.  That is why it says, "And I have brought you out from under the burdens of Egypt."  The Jewish people when they were in Egypt began to feel they deserved to be slaves.  "Seivlos" can also come from the word "Savlonut" which means that they "tolerated"  Egypt, that they "tolerated" slavery, that they felt that maybe they should be slaves.  They felt that maybe that was their only position.  It is the same thing that many masters try to do even to this day.  They try to inculcate into their lower classes the fact that there should always be a lower class.  They cannot rise.  They cannot do anything.  That is wrong.

Then it says, "And I will save you from their work, from their service, from their worship, that I will save you from the idea that slavery is necessary."  This is the very basis of Egyptian civilization, and, as I said before, the ideas of Aristotle and Plato, that the Jew had to come out feeling that we can create a world, that nobody has to feel inferior, in which all can reach their potential.  This is part of the Jewish message, too.  Why, then, do we have to have the word "Goalti" and the word "Lokachti"?  The answer to that is there were two other Galut, exiles, that the Jewish people have endured.  We endured an exile after the destruction of the Temple, the Babylonian exile.  What was the purpose of that Babylonian exile?  We learned compassion in Egypt.

What were we to learn in the Babylonian exile?  We learned that you cannot combine paganism with Judaism.  What brought the downfall of the Temple was that Jews tried to combine paganism with Judaism.  It would not work.  It ended up with child sacrifice, with sexual immorality practiced in the Temple with sacred prostitutes and sacred homosexuality.  It ended where you had not only lewd rites, and not only did you have the child sacrifice, but you also had the oppression of people, their enslavement.  You cannot combine Judaism with any other kind of ism.  That is why it uses the word "Goalti" because the word "Goalti" means not only "to redeem" but "to pollute," that you cannot pollute the Jewish message by trying to combine it with any other kind of isms.  What about the "Lokachti"?  "Lokachti" is the same word in Hebrew that we use for "marriage," that the Jewish people brought upon themselves the destruction of the second Temple, not because they wanted to combine Judaism with paganism, but because they did not realize that they were a family.  In a marriage you are always going to have ups and downs, disputes, but you cannot carry principle to the nth degree.  You will destroy your marriage.  You have to learn how to compromise and live together.  The Jewish people at the time of the second Temple, the rabbis say, observed the Torah, but they did not go beyond the letter of the Torah.  What's more, they had senseless hatred.  The zealots in Jerusalem, even when it was besieged, burned the stores of the people so the people would fight harder.  They were quarreling and fighting among themselves.  There was violence between one Jew and another.  We were all fighting for principles.  That, of course, is a terrible thing.  You cannot let these disputes get out of hand.  Just as we believe that a marriage is the most sacred of all institutions and Jewish life has always put the family as a top value, and until recently Jewish marriages have always been very, very stable, and the reason is because each side knew how to compromise.  They knew the limits.  They knew how far they could push.  That is what the Jewish people had to learn in these 2,000 years of exile:  how to live together with differing views and opinions but still to live together as brothers because we all support the basic Jewish ideal of making sure that this world is perfected and making sure that all of us can live healthy, happy lives filled with dignity.

This is a lesson I hope we have learned.  The last 40 years of Israel's existence I think has proved that Jews have learned that even though we have differing views, we can learn to live together and can compromise enough not on basic things, but enough so that we can get along with each other.  We recognize each other is differences and are willing to live with them.  That, of course, was the purpose of this exile, sot hat we will never again break out with one Jew killing another and with it being impossible for the Jewish people to live together in harmony.  That is why, the rabbis tell us, we had to endure exiles: to learn compassion in Egypt; to learn we cannot combine paganism with Judaism in the second exile; and, third, to learn how to live together and to realize that all Jews are together in a marriage relationship in which we must learn to compromise our differences without sacrificing principles.

I am reminded of the story about a truck driver who came to a truck stop.  There he ordered a hamburger and a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.  As he was about ready to eat three hoodlums came by with their motorcycles and their leather jackets, and they burst into the truck stop, and one of them came and took the hamburger and started to eat it.  The other one took the cup of coffee and started to drink it.  The third one started to eat the piece of pie.  The truck driver did not say anything.  He just went to the cashier, paid for the food, and walked out.  After the three hoodlums finished eating, they walked over to the cashier and said, "That truck driver isn't much of a man."  The cashier replied, "You know what?  He's also not much of a driver.  As he was pulling out he smashed three motorcycles."  

There are many ways to settle disputes, but we should have learned from the last exile that we do not settle them in a violent manner, but that every Jew should recognize that he is in a relationship similar to a marriage relationship where the marriage must endure and each side must learn how to compromise without violating basic principles.  May we never have another exile, and may the Jewish people have learned all they are supposed to from exiles so that we will never have one again.