Rabbi Miriam's sermon - delivered Shabbat 18th January 2025
In 2020, I was lucky enough to have a Zoom call with Rabbi Dr Burt Visotsky, who was the Jewish consultant to Dreamworks, for their 1998 movie The Prince of Egypt, which is based, of course, on this week’s parasha, and the parshiot which follow, right up to the closing scene of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.
Dr Visostsky shared many fascinating details of that experience, including that when he became a Rabbi and scholar of midrash, he never expected his career to involve business class flights to Hollywood (please God by all Rabbis). He told us about the midrashim that influenced the making of the movie, including how to portray the sound of the voice of God and how the burning bush might have looked. One detail that particularly stuck with me was that the screenplay was choreographed in terms of high tension, excitement, and more relaxed dialogue, and that this was mapped out as an undulating line of red as tension rises, and blue as it lulled, paced at a scientific ratio of something like 12 minutes of tension for every 8 minutes of lull.
They wouldn’t have needed to work that hard, because our parasha, Shemot, is full of the rises of hope and the horror of despair.
We start low - a new king, slavery, oppression, Israelite numbers being seen as a threat by Pharoah
It gets lower - every boy is to be killed on birth.
Then a rise of hope - a baby is born who escapes the death sentence. A conspiracy of women keeps him alive - Yocheved, Miriam, the daughter of Pharoah, who midrash tells us is called Batya.
Hope rises higher, but it is a dangerous and provocative hope - this boy, Moshe, kills for justice. He has to run away, and for 20 years the situation stagnates. The enslaved people are stuck.
Until וַיַּרְא אֱלֹקים אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַיֵּדַע אֱלֹהִים
God looked upon the Israelites, and God understood them.
Then the burning bush, which is its own scene of hope and despair, before Moshe agrees to return to Egypt.
At first things go brilliantly. The Israelites, downtrodden by over 200 years of suffering, believe Moshe, they remember their God, just as they have been remembered, and they bow low.
But Pharoah laughs at the demand to release, makes their work doubly, impossibly hard, and calls them נִרְפִּים נִרְפִּים, “shirkers, shirkers” and the prospect of getting out of Egypt feels further than ever:
“Moses returned to Hashem and said, “O my Lord, why did You bring harm upon this people? Why did You send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has dealt worse with this people; and still You have not delivered Your people.”
And the sedra could have so easily ended there. In fact the chapter, perek heh, chapter 5 of Shemot finishes there. But here’s the thing - the chapters and verses that are printed in our chumashim, which are so crucial to our study of the Torah, were not written by Jews. Our tradition divides the Torah up by the paragraph gaps in the Torah scroll, which can be quite few and far between, and the divisions between parshiot. The chapters and verses, by contrast, were created by the 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury Reverend Stephen Langdon. And they are so brilliant that we have adopted them. But there are a small handful of places, and the end of our parasha is one of them, where there is a real ideological divergence between Rev Landgon’s division, and our own Jewish division.
Here, the Christian chapter ends with despondency. But the Jewish parasha includes one more verse, which is the following:
“Then Hashem said to Moses, “You shall soon see what I will do to Pharaoh: he shall let them go because of a greater might; indeed, because of a greater might he shall drive them from his land.”
We end with hope. We end with the glimmer of salvation, but we don’t quite know what is to come next.
I actually cannot think of a better expression of how I am feeling this Shabbat. We too, have been on a rollercoaster of lows, and lowers, and glimmers of hope, this past fifteen months. In November 2023 there was relief as 80 hostages were returned. But that was over a year ago, and since then we have been stuck. It has felt like the 20 year stuck-ness when Moshe was in Midian, and sometimes like the bad-to-worse quality of the end of our sedra, with more hostages killed, more terror attacks in Israel, and in Gaza, unfathomable numbers of civilians dead, and homes and infrastructure destroyed.
And it is also really important to recognise the differences between our situation and that of Shemot. The Israelites of Shemot were utterly powerless. They were 100% victims. Today, Jews have been victims in this conflict, but we are not 100% victims. Israel has great power, and has used it.
And another significant difference is Hashem’s role. In Shemot, Hashem uses visible and direct power to free the Israelites. Today, where is Hashem? Where has Hashem been for the past 15 months? This is an impossibly difficult question to answer. We pray as if Hashem has an intricate involvement in our everyday lives. And yet the Tanakh clearly sees Hashem slowly stepping away from humanity, leaving us to our own devices. The Chassidic thinkers imagined Hashem crying as humans suffer, and this, I think, is the soundest theology for this moment. Hashem is watching, and crying along with us as things have gone from bad to worse.
But then, there’s the last verse of the parasha, boldly defying the Christian chapter division, which extends to us some hope. We end the parasha with the glimmer of salvation, but we don’t quite know what is to come next.
Just as we don’t know what is to come next for our own story. As Shabbat came in, it seemed that indeed this deal is over the line, that hostages will begin being returned tomorrow. We will start to see the faces behind the names and still photographs, taken when they were ordinary people in kibbutzim or at parties, which have at least for me become familiar and close over the past 15 months. As our parasha starts וְאֵלֶּה שְׁמוֹת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, “And these are the names of the children of Israel”, these are today’s names: Emily, Romi, Ariel, Kfir and Shiri, Liri, Karina, and Naama. Offer, whose niece I met and spoke to 2 weeks ago, and Oded, whose son I sat next to and spoke to, and who told me how precarious his father’s situation is. And another 90 names, each one a precious world. Let my people go. Bring my people home.
I think we need to emotionally prepare ourselves for the coming days and weeks. Because I sense there will be huge ups and downs to come. We don’t know which of these precious souls will be alive. Discovering that even one of them is not will be a blow. We can only assume that of those alive, their mental and physical state will be poor. We’ll need to respect that their return will be both a very public and deeply private business. We will also need to grapple with the price Israel is paying for their return, and the internal divisions within our people as a result. With fresh attention in the global press, we’ll need to expect questions and projections from our non-Jewish friends, neighbours and colleagues.
So while our parasha ends with hope, and this Shabbat contains hope, it is a precarious and tense hope. To come full circle, we have lived that film screenplay that Dr Burt Visotsky saw, of tension, and hope, and lows and even lowers. We don’t need a movie of it because it has been so real for us. I pray that this hope extended at the end of our parasha, and with this ceasefire deal, is the beginning of an upward trajectory. It is in the Torah, but even in the Torah, we know there is much more heartache, loss, and complications to follow. Forty years of it, or you could say 3,000 years of it.
So let’s prepare ourselves for complications to come. But let’s also hold onto this hope, that this is the beginning of the release of all the hostages, the permanent end to violence, the beginning of rebuilding homes and the beginning of healing hearts.
Shabbat shalom
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