[00:00:00] Hello, my friends, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Practical Parsha Podcast. This is Rabbi Shlomo Cohon, and I hope you are well.
[00:00:08] This week we start the second of the five books of the Torah, the book of Shemos, the book of Exodus.
[00:00:17] And this week it's Parshas Shemos, the first of the parshios that described to us about the Jewish people's descent into slavery and the beginning of their redemption, even though we don't see it yet. Right. The parsha discusses about Moshe getting ready to be the leader of the Jewish nation and how he comes back to Egypt to eventually lead the Jewish people out of Mitsrayim, out of the land of Egypt.
[00:00:49] Before we begin, as always, if you have any questions, comments, just would like to say hello.
[00:00:56] Don't hesitate, send me that email, Rabbi Shlomokon Kohmil.com I'd love to hear from you.
[00:01:05] This week's Parshas, Parshas Shimos.
[00:01:08] Just to give a quick overview of the Parsha. The Parsha begins with the Torah telling us how the generation of Yosef and the brothers, they pass on. And slowly the Egyptians, you know, as the Jewish people increase and become more numerous, the Egyptians start hating the Jewish people.
[00:01:38] And they say they're going to become too many and they're going to take over the land or they're going to leave and take all that tax money with them.
[00:01:52] And they say we have to devise a plot to keep them here. This is the first, I guess, mass instance of anti Semitism in Jewish history.
[00:02:04] And the advisors of Paro, they come up with this plot of enslaving the Jewish people.
[00:02:13] And the way they get them to do it is they at first, you know, try to gather all the Jewish people together, Paro included, to have this patriotic project to help Mitzrayim.
[00:02:27] And slowly but surely as the days go on, this building project, which is, you know, which the Jewish people want to do to help this Newfoundland that they're part of becomes into slave labor.
[00:02:42] The Jewish people become enslaved by the Egyptians slowly.
[00:02:48] Additionally, the parasha also tells us how the Egyptians, they foresaw how the eventual redemption of the Jewish people would be a boy that would be born.
[00:03:03] And they decree that all the boys that are born should be thrown into the Nile River.
[00:03:12] The Parsha tells us how Moshe is miraculously saved.
[00:03:16] And actually this decree is stopped because they're these stargazers. They see that, you know, he's gone, this threat is gone. But little did they realize that Moshe was saved by the Nile. His parents put him in the basket.
[00:03:29] He was found by the daughter of Paro Basya, who brings him to the palace. She raises him actually. In fact, the Parsha tells us how Moshe has to actually flee Egypt. He is raised in the house of Paro and the Midrashim, they tell us all about this experience, how he saw the Jewish people enslaved and he went to be with them. M And at a certain point, the Parasha tells us how Moshe sees an Egyptian person about to strike a Jewish person, and he kills him. Because of that, he has to flee the land of Mitsrayim, the land of Egypt, to go to the land of Midian, where he actually, he saves the Tzipporah, who is the daughter of Yisroel, and he actually marries her.
[00:04:19] He's living in the land of Midian as a shepherd.
[00:04:22] Finally, as the Parsha progresses, Moshe Rabbeinu has his first prophecy, where he's out, um, tending to the flock.
[00:04:32] And he comes across this burning bush where there's a fire in this bush, but the bush is not being consumed. And Hashem comes to him and tells him that he is to be the leader of the Jewish people, to take them out of Mitzrayim.
[00:04:48] And Hashem will use Moshe Rabbeinu to, as his messenger, to bring the entire Jewish people out of Mitzrayim with miracles to eventually bring them to accept the Torah. Moshe is hesitant at first, but he eventually realizes that this is his mission and he departs back to Mitsrayim. He meets his brother Aaron, and they approach Paro and it actually has the opposite effect. He tells Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go. And Paro just laughs him off and makes the work even harder. The Jewish people complain to Moshe, how could you make it harder for us? Why did you do this? The Parasha finishes with Moshe going to Hashem and saying to Hashem like, um, I'm trying to do your part, Hashem. And you know, it's getting harder for them. Help me help them. And Hashem reassures him that, no, I will take them out of Mitzrayim. And Hashem is not going to just take the Jewish people out of Mitzrayim. He's going to take the Jewish nation out of Mitzrayim with a strong hand with miracles, to eventually receive the Torah.
[00:06:02] The first idea I want to share with you today takes us to the beginning of the Parsha, where the Torah describes to us how the generation that had come down to Mitzrayim, meaning the Family of Yaakov, the family of Jacob, how they passed on the Vayamos, Yosef, Vichol, Hador, Hahu and Yosef Joseph passed on, and his brothers and the entire generation.
[00:06:34] Now, the orochaim comments on this verse, right? The, the psukim are telling us, the pasuk is telling us that first Yosef died, then the brothers, meaning the rest of the 11 sons of Yaakov.
[00:06:51] And then that entire generation, the 70 souls that had come down to Mitzrayim as a family, they also passed on.
[00:07:00] And the orochiyim comments on this, the fact that it's separating, it's telling us separately that the entire generation passed, right? It doesn't have to say it, each one separately, that first Yosef, then the brothers, then the entire generation, it's teaching us here that the Jewish people's descent into slavery, or better yet, the Egyptians, enslavement of the Jewish people. And actually, it's going to be both in a minute. As you're going, as we're going to see happen in three stages.
[00:07:33] When Yosef was alive, Joseph was alive. He was the viceroy of Egypt. The Jewish people had power, right? They had this certain protection. They had somebody in the palace, right? There was somebody there who was advocating for them. They had a certain sense of standing.
[00:07:49] But when Yosef passed on, they lost that power, that position. He wasn't there anymore.
[00:07:56] So they went down one level.
[00:07:58] But when the brothers were alive, the Egyptians still had, you know, respect for the Jewish people, right?
[00:08:08] The sons of Jacob were living in Mitzrayim, so they weren't able to enslave the Jewish nation.
[00:08:15] So as long as the brothers, uh, of Yosef were still alive. But once they passed on, there were still people from that generation, from that first generation that came down with Yaakov Inu, that those 70 souls that came down and the Egyptians were still not able to enslave them because they looked upon them, they looked up to them. These people, they were great people. They were very smart. They looked to them for advice, and they still were not able to enslave them, to do anything towards them.
[00:08:47] Only after Yosef died, the brothers died and the entire generation passed on.
[00:08:55] Only then did the.
[00:08:59] Did the Jews become disgusting in the eyes of the Egyptians that they started this plan to enslave them.
[00:09:09] So we have to understand for a minute what's going on over here. What changed?
[00:09:14] Because one generation passed and another began.
[00:09:20] How does it happen that Yosef, the brothers and the entire generation pass on equal to the next generation being enslaved and Rabbi Chaim Shmuelevitz explains in a beautiful piece in Sichas Musser, he explains this, um, in two ways.
[00:09:41] The reason why the Egyptians were not able to enslave the Jewish people when Yosef was around or the brothers, or that entire generation is that they looked up to them.
[00:09:57] They looked up to them, and therefore, since they looked up to them, they weren't able to enslave them.
[00:10:06] That generation that had come down was a. Was a great generation. They, you know, they saved the Egypt from famine. They were important people, right? So in the eyes of the oppressors of the, uh, Egyptians, they were too important to look at them as slaves or to make them slaves.
[00:10:29] So therefore, as long as any of them were alive, it didn't happen.
[00:10:34] Only after they passed on were they able to, I guess, have that view in their eyes, that in their psyche, they weren't important anymore. They didn't look up to them, so they were able to enslave them.
[00:10:50] Now, Rabchaim Shulem also brings down another dimension to this, that it's not just how the Egyptians viewed the Jews.
[00:11:01] And thus they were able to make them into slaves to like, to degrade, uh, them enough that they could enslave them.
[00:11:08] But it was also the Jews themselves, how they. That they looked at themselves, right? As long as Yosef was alive and as long as the brothers were alive and as long as that generation was alive, the Jews looked at themselves as important.
[00:11:30] They looked at. They. They looked at themselves as important people. They were exalted. They were, you know, they were not slaves.
[00:11:39] And he says once that generation passed on, they didn't view themselves in the same way as they used to.
[00:11:49] And since they themselves didn't view themselves in that same way, you know, as they did when their grandfather, um Yosef, and the shvatim and that generation was alive, they were able to be enslaved. So it's not just how the Egyptians looked at them, but it's how they looked at themselves.
[00:12:12] And that's what was, you know, that's how the Egyptians were able to get a foothold to bring them into slavery.
[00:12:19] So it comes out that as long as they consider themselves exalted and high, or they were also considered exalted and important by the Egyptians, slavery was not able to happen. Only when they considered themselves lowly and the Egyptians looked at them as such, was it able to begin.
[00:12:39] And I think this is a very powerful idea on many levels for ourselves.
[00:12:46] You know, the first thing that it's well known that the evil inclination, the yetzer hara, when he's trying to get us to sin, he doesn't try to convince us when we're feeling good about ourselves, when we do something good, uh, when we're on a high, he knows he's not going to succeed to convince us to sin.
[00:13:11] What does he try to do?
[00:13:13] He slowly tries to get us to not feel good about ourselves.
[00:13:19] And once we don't feel good about ourselves, that's when he strikes. That's when he smells blood in the water.
[00:13:26] And this is a common tactic of the Itzhara, right? He'll get us to, you know, wake up late or to not study or to not daven or to not do something good. And then when we don't do those things, we don't feel good. So then we won't do something else and we'll feel even worse. And it's we get into this hamster wheel of doom, which that's what he wants because he knows when we feel good about ourselves, when we look at ourselves as important, as good people, as doing the right thing, as then we're not going to come to sin. It's only when we look at ourselves as bad and it doesn't matter and I'm no good, that's when we fall and fall and fall and fall.
[00:14:04] That's the first idea I believe we see from this week's Parasha. Just we need to remember that, how important we are. And the Talmud tells us that when a person looks at himself, he has to remember b' shvili nev' rahelam that Hashem created the world for me, that each and every person has to remember that Hashem created the world for you, just for you.
[00:14:34] Meaning you're important, you matter, you're exalted.
[00:14:40] And if we have that realization that we're important people, our actions matter.
[00:14:46] We're not a nobody, you know.
[00:14:49] So then the actions that we do or don't do are going to be affected how we look at ourselves.
[00:14:55] We're not going to just act in any way. We're important.
[00:14:59] So therefore we're not going to belittil ourselves by talking a certain way, by doing certain actions.
[00:15:05] That's one powerful idea I believe we see. Another idea, which we see from this vart, from this Torah thought on the parsha from the Egyptians, is that when we view ourselves as exalted now, doesn't mean we have to be stuck up, doesn't mean that. But if we view ourselves on a higher level, it'll push us to act on that level, right? We don't go down to the gutter.
[00:15:38] When, uh, we're dealing with other people, we don't go down to their level. We want to bring them to our level. That's the idea. And when we act in an elevated manner, people recognize it, people respect it. That's my personal experiences, you know, and thank God, you know, walking around different parts of this country, I haven't been everywhere, but I feel. And I'm not perfect, I have a lot to work on. But when I walk around as a visibly Orthodox Jew and I feel that people respect me and non. Jewish, Jewish, they have a certain sense of respect for the fact that I'm living according to my values. And, uh, I'm trying to. Right. I'm trying to live according to my values. And there's this certain sense of respect that a person doesn't have to be Jewish to see that. And I feel that people give that to people. When you live according to your values and not try to just be.
[00:16:40] Just fit in and just try to go with the flow, when you stand up for what's right and you try to do what's right, ultimately people respect you more for that. It might be hard at times, but people will look up to you for that.
[00:16:56] And that's just my thoughts. And I think that we see that from this week's Parsha. The second idea I want to share with you today takes us to Moshe's birth and actually and is being saved by Basia, the daughter of Paro. The posse tells us that Basia saw this baby floating in the Nile and she rescued him.
[00:17:21] The verse reads as Vaterid bas para lurchoitz hayar venareisa hoyleches al yadayar vatera sateva besoich hasofet.
[00:17:35] Paro's daughter went down to bathe by the river, and her maidens walked along the river. She saw the basket among the reeds, and she sent her maidservant and she took it.
[00:17:47] So Rashi actually explains on this pasuk, and it's based on the Gemara, the Talmud, that when the pasuk says, um, that she sent her maidservants and the maidservants brought this basket.
[00:18:06] Another meaning of the word amas is that she stretched out her arms.
[00:18:11] And the Gemara tells us that when Basya stretched, uh, out her arm, according to this understanding, her arms miraculously stretched to reach the basket. And she was able to pull Moshe Rabbeinu in to safety and eventually just raise him up to be Moshe.
[00:18:31] But, uh, a very powerful idea is brought down. And the question that really begs to be asked is that according to the gemara that says that Basia, the daughter of Paro, stretched out her arms to rescue Paro and they miraculously stretched to reach the basket, why did she stretch out her arms? If it was further than the length of her arms, why did she even try?
[00:18:56] Right. If you want to get something on the other side of the room, you don't just try to stretch your arms out. You just, you're gonna have to do something else to get that, uh, to get what you want to get. It would be great if you want to drink and just stretch your arms out.
[00:19:11] But doesn't work like that.
[00:19:14] But why did she just try that? Why did she stretch her arms out to try to reach the basket?
[00:19:20] Wouldn't she realize it's futile to understand? This is a powerful lesson that we see, is that when it comes to saving somebody or to do a righteous endeavor.
[00:19:34] So even though we don't necessarily see a path, we don't necessarily know how we're going to be successful.
[00:19:43] We have to try.
[00:19:45] We have to try.
[00:19:48] And the more important the endeavor, the more incumbent upon us to try, even if we don't see that path, and even if it doesn't seem possible.
[00:20:01] There's so many people today who have started, who have amazing causes and organizations and, you know, it doesn't have to be just causes and organizations, even companies and many different areas in life where they just tried something, they didn't have a path. You know, not everyone has their five year business model and plan of how they're going to scale and do everything. I would say most people, they have an idea and they're just going to try their best to do their best, to give their whole heart to something and it works out somehow.
[00:20:37] And there's many organizations where people had this idea, it was crazy and people discouraged them, but they tried anyways and they were successful.
[00:20:45] And what we see from Basia, the daughter of Paro, is that when it comes to a important endeavor, whether it be our spiritual goals or any type of things we want to accomplish, we have to just try.
[00:21:03] We need to make the effort. And that's why Basia, she saw this baby, she wanted to do something, she just stretched her arms out and Hashem, uh, made a miracle that her arms stretched and she was able to reach the basket to pull him in.
[00:21:16] We just have to try. We have to put our effort in and to do our best. And the results are ultimately not in our hands. It's in Hashem's hands. But we need to try. We need to put our best effort in because many times we will be successful. And we wouldn't even, you know, hindsight 20 20, we wouldn't know afterwards that we're going to be successful in this way. There's so many examples of this in my life. I'm sure in your life, that where we see people just tried and it worked out. That's a powerful lesson we see from this week's Parasha.
[00:21:51] The last idea I want to share with you today takes us to Moshe getting married.
[00:21:58] Now, after Moshe kills the Egyptian because he's about to strike a Jew, Moshe has to flee. He has to flee the land of Mitsrayim, and he goes to Midian. He goes to the land of Midian.
[00:22:13] And the Torah tells us there that when Moshe gets to Midian, there's this scene where all the shepherds are gathering to water their flocks.
[00:22:28] And there's this, you know, there are these women that are being harassed by these other shepherds and happen to be these women. These are the daughters of Yisroel. And Moshe Rabbeinu saves them.
[00:22:43] He gets up and he saves them now. And it happened to be from that Moshe Rabbeinu gets married to Tzipporah.
[00:22:51] But later on, when Moshe is going back to Mitzrayim, the Torah tells us how. And the Midrashim speak about it even more.
[00:23:02] How Tzipporah, the wife of Moshe, saves Moshe's life, Right? That the Midrashim tell us how the snake is coming to bite Moshe Rabbeinu.
[00:23:15] And Tzipporah saves the day and saves Moshe Rabbeinu.
[00:23:20] And there's a very powerful lesson that we see. Chavatz Chaim explains this, that we think sometimes when we do someone a favor, when we do a kindness for another person, we're doing something for them, we're helping them. They owe us one, right?
[00:23:38] But the truth is, when we do a kindness for another person, we're helping ourselves.
[00:23:45] Because the Chavitz Chaim brings down that when you do something for someone else, you always will get repaid. And there's so many stories, amazing stories. I wish I had some of them off the top of my head. But the point of these stories are, uh, there's so many examples. I've heard them again and again and again and again.
[00:24:05] How people did something for someone. And in the end, that act of kindness saved them from being harmed or saved their family. There's even spooky stories where generations later, um, you know, a few generations later, someone from that family that was saved saves the person back, you know, but we're not always going to see the story play out. But the point is, we need to know that the highest level to do a chesed for somebody to do a kindness is to do something without personal gain. But we have to remember that when it's hard sometimes, right, doing chesed, uh, doing kindness is not always easy. It's annoying sometimes. It's taking you out of your way, it's taking your money away, it's taking your time away, it's giving you stress.
[00:24:52] We have to remember, we should. You know, it'll help us that doing chesed for another person will always benefit you. You always will benefit from it. Maybe not right now, but down the line, eventually it will be repaid.
[00:25:08] So with that, I'm going to finish for today's podcast. I hope you enjoyed. If you have any questions, comments, or would like to reach out, feel free to send me an
[email protected] have a great day.
