Heroic Women

Jan 20, 2001 By Joshua Heller | Commentary | Shemot

In first few chapters of Exodus, the Egyptian Pharaoh enacts harsh decrees to curtail the fertility and fecundity of the Jewish people (Exodus1:9), “pen yirbeh” – lest the Jews multiply. His increasingly genocidal decrees are thwarted by increasingly heroic women. Last, and perhaps most daring of all, is Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts the young foundling Moses right under her father’s nose, even though she knows that all Egyptians have been commanded to kill any male Jewish baby.

Stranger in a Foreign Land

Dec 28, 2002 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Shemot

Moses names his first born son Gershom, still a common Hebrew name. The child is born to him and his wife Zipporah in the land of Midian, to which he fled after he murdered an Egyptian taskmaster. We do not hear of Gershom again in the epic, yet his name bears on the destiny of his father and his people. The name consists of two Hebrew words, “ger sham,” meaning “a stranger there.” By bestowing it on his son, Moses stresses the complexity of his own fate: “I have been a stranger in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22).

“My voice in everything”

Jan 17, 2004 By Lewis Warshauer | Commentary | Shemot

The Bible came to Broadway years ago. The hit musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat presented a rollicking and hummable version of the Joseph story with a happy ending. Musical theater has not, however, figured out a way of featuring someone whose story is even more important than that of Joseph: Moses. Yet what musical theater has been unable to do, its close relative, opera, has done. Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron is rarely performed (it was featured in New York this season) but makes an important statement.

A (Fearful) Man with a Mission

Jan 21, 2006 By JTS Alumni | Commentary | Shemot

By Rabbi Francine Roston

There is a rabbinic teaching that each of us is to carry two pieces of paper in our pockets. From our left pocket we can pull out the piece that reads: “From dust and ashes I have come.” From our right pocket we can pull out the piece that reads: “For my sake the world was created.” There are moments when we need our feet pulled down to the ground and there are moments when we need to be lifted up from low places.

The Story of a Nation

Jan 16, 2009 By Eliezer B. Diamond | Commentary | Shemot

The great thirteenth-century biblical exegete Nahmanides, noting that the book of Exodus is a direct continuation of the narrative that concludes the book of Genesis, asks why it is that Exodus is designated as a separate book of the Torah. He answers by observing that Genesis is the story of families, while Exodus is the story of a nation. Genesis relates the history of Abraham and his descendants, whereas Exodus begins with a description of the transformation of Jacob’s clan of seventy souls into a “numerous and mighty nation,” and then proceeds to delineate the events that befall it.