{"id":61304,"date":"2018-12-26T09:39:29","date_gmt":"2018-12-26T14:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=61304"},"modified":"2018-12-26T09:44:16","modified_gmt":"2018-12-26T14:44:16","slug":"cc-family-edition-the-light-at-the-heart-of-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/parenting\/cc-family-edition-the-light-at-the-heart-of-darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"C&C Family Edition: The Light at the Heart of Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Covenant & Conversation: Family Edition<\/em>\u00a0is a new and exciting initiative from The Office of Rabbi Sacks for 5779.\u00a0 Written as an accompaniment to Rabbi Sacks\u2019 weekly\u00a0Covenant & Conversation<\/em>\u00a0essay, the\u00a0Family Edition<\/em>is aimed at connecting older children and teenagers with his ideas and thoughts on the\u00a0parsha<\/em>. Each element of the\u00a0Family Edition<\/em>\u00a0is progressively more advanced;\u00a0The Core Idea\u00a0<\/em>is appropriate for all ages and the final element,\u00a0From The Thought of Rabbi Sacks<\/em>, is the most advanced section. Each section includes\u00a0Questions to Ponder<\/em>, aimed at encouraging discussion between family members in a way most appropriate to them. We have also included a section called\u00a0Around the Shabbat Table<\/em>\u00a0with a few further questions on the\u00a0parsha<\/em>\u00a0to think about. The final section is an\u00a0Educational Companion<\/em>\u00a0which includes suggested talking points in response to the questions found throughout the\u00a0Family Edition<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Download as PDF<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Covenant and Conversation on OU Torah<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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The Parsha in a Nutshell<\/strong><\/p>\n

With\u00a0Shemot<\/em>, the defining drama of the Jewish people begins. In exile, in Egypt, they multiply, until they are no longer a family but a nation. Pharaoh, fearing that they pose a threat to Egypt, enslaves them and orders their male children killed. Moses, an Israelite child adopted by Pharaoh\u2019s daughter, is chosen by God to confront Pharaoh and lead the people to freedom. Reluctantly, Moses agrees, but his initial intervention only makes things worse, and on this tense note the\u00a0parasha<\/em>\u00a0ends.<\/p>\n

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The Core Idea<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pharaoh\u2019s daughter is one of the most unexpected heroes of the Hebrew Bible. Without her, Moses might not have lived. The whole story of the exodus would have been different. Yet she was not an Israelite. She had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by her courage. Yet she seems to have had no doubt, experienced no reservations, made no hesitation. If it was Pharaoh who hurt the children of Israel, it was another member of his own family who gave them hope: Pharaoh\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n

This is how it happened. Pharaoh had decreed death for every male Israelite child. Yocheved, Amram\u2019s wife, had a baby boy. For three months she was able to conceal his existence, but no longer. Fearing his certain death if she kept him, she set him afloat on the Nile in a basket, hoping against hope that someone might see him and take pity on him. This is what follows:<\/p>\n

Pharaoh\u2019s daughter went to bathe in the Nile, while her maids walked along the Nile\u2019s edge. She saw the box in the reeds and sent her slave-girl to fetch it. Opening it, she saw the boy. The child began to cry, and she had pity on it. \u201cThis is one of the Hebrew boys,\u201d she said (Exodus 2:6).<\/p>\n

Note the sequence. First she sees that it is a child and has pity on it. A natural, human, compassionate reaction. Only then does it dawn on her who the child must be. Who else would abandon a child? She remembers her father\u2019s decree against the Hebrews. Instantly the situation has changed. To save the baby would mean disobeying the royal command. That would be serious enough for an ordinary Egyptian; doubly so for a member of the royal family.<\/p>\n

More than that, she is not alone when the event happens. Her maids are with her; her slave-girl is standing beside her. She must face the risk that one of them, perhaps after an argument, or even just to gossip, will tell someone. Rumours spread quickly in royal courts. Yet she does not shift her ground. She does not tell one of her servants to take the baby and hide it with a family far away. She does not flinch. She has the courage of her compassion.<\/p>\n

QUESTIONS TO PONDER:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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  1. Do you think it would it have been understandable for Pharaoh\u2019s daughter to not save the baby?<\/li>\n
  2. Why do you think she did it despite the risks?<\/li>\n
  3. What does the word hero mean to you? Was Pharaoh\u2019s daughter a hero? Who are your other heroes and why?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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    It Once Happened…<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, was sent, at the age of thirty-two, to be part of the Swedish diplomatic mission in Budapest in July 1944. By then the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews was under way. Over 400,000 of them had already been killed in Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

    With courage, imagination and a single-minded sense of purpose he resolved to do what he could to save at least some of those who remained. He printed and handed out Swedish protective passports. He created safe houses where Jews could take refuge. In some cases, he even rescued people who\u2019d already boarded the transportation trains. And he managed to delay Adolf Eichmann\u2019s (one of the main organisers of the Holocaust) planned massacre of Budapest ghetto, so that when the Russians reached the city two days later they found over 90,000 Jews still alive. One way or another he saved more than 100,000 lives.<\/p>\n

    We don\u2019t know what happened to him. Suspected of being an American spy, he was taken to Russia, and there all traces of him disappear. He remains the hero without a grave. But as long as humanity remembers those days, his name will remain a symbol of courage in the face of seemingly invincible evil. He stood firm. He refused to be intimidated. He resisted, knowing that in dark times what we do makes a difference. The good we do lives after us, and it\u2019s the greatest thing that does.<\/p>\n

    BBC \u2018Thought for the Day\u2019, 4th<\/sup>\u00a0March 2004<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

    QUESTIONS TO PONDER:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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    1. What similarities are there between the story of Pharaoh\u2019s daughter and Raoul Wallenberg?<\/li>\n
    2. What do you think you would have done in Raoul Wallenberg\u2019s situation or in Pharaoh\u2019s daughter\u2019s situation?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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      Thinking More Deeply<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Immediately after discovering the crying baby, Miriam the baby\u2019s sister reveals herself to Pharaoh\u2019s daughter and presents her audacious plan: \u201cShall I go and call a Hebrew woman to nurse the child for you?\u201d (Exodus 2:7) She proposes a plan brilliant in its simplicity. If the real mother is able to keep the child in her home to nurse him, we both minimise the danger. You will not have to explain to the court how this child has suddenly appeared. We will be spared the risk of bringing him up: we can say the child is not a Hebrew, and that the mother is not the mother but only a nurse. Miriam\u2019s ingenuity is matched by Pharaoh\u2019s daughter\u2019s instant understanding and consent.<\/p>\n

      Then comes the final surprise: When the child matured, [his mother] brought him to Pharaoh\u2019s daughter. She adopted him as her own son and named him Moses. \u201cI bore him from the water,\u201d she said. (Exodus 2:10) Pharaoh\u2019s daughter did not simply have a moment\u2019s compassion. She has not forgotten the child. Nor has the passage of time diminished her sense of responsibility. Not only does she remain committed to his welfare; she adopts the riskiest of strategies. She will adopt him and bring him up as her own son. This is courage of a high order.<\/p>\n

      Yet the single most surprising detail comes in the last sentence. In the Torah, it is parents who give a child its name, and in the case of a special individual, God Himself. It is God who gives the name Isaac to the first Jewish child; God\u2019s angel who gives Jacob the name Israel; God who changes the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah. We have already encountered one adoptive name \u2013\u00a0Tzafenat Pa\u2019neah<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 the name by which Joseph was known in Egypt; yet Joseph remains Joseph. How surpassingly strange that the hero of the exodus, the greatest of all the prophets, should bear not the name Amram and Yocheved have undoubtedly used thus far, but the one given to him by his adoptive mother, an Egyptian princess.<\/p>\n

      A Midrash draws our attention to the fact: \u201cThis is the reward for those who do kindness. Although Moses had many names, the only one by which he is known in the whole Torah is the one given to him by the daughter of Pharaoh. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, did not call him by any other name.\u201d (Shemot Raba 1:26) Indeed Moshe \u2013 Meses \u2013 is an Egyptian name, meaning \u201cchild,\u201d as in Ramses (which means child of Ra; Ra was the greatest of the Egyptian gods).<\/p>\n

      Who then was Pharaoh\u2019s daughter? Nowhere is she explicitly named. However, the First Book of Chronicles (4:18) mentions a daughter of Pharaoh, named Bitya, and it was she the sages identified as the woman who saved Moses. The name Bitya (sometimes rendered as Batya) means \u201cthe daughter of God.\u201d From this, the sages drew one of their most striking lessons: \u201cThe Holy One, blessed be He, said to her: \u2018Moses was not your son, yet you called him your son. You are not My daughter, but I shall call you My daughter.\u2019\u201d (Vayikra Raba 1:3) They added that she was one of the few people (tradition enumerates nine) who were so righteous that they entered paradise in their lifetime.<\/p>\n

      Instead of \u201cPharaoh\u2019s daughter\u201d read \u201cHitler\u2019s daughter\u201d or \u201cStalin\u2019s daughter\u201d and we see what is at stake. Tyranny cannot destroy humanity. Moral courage can sometimes be found in the heart of darkness. That the Torah itself tells the story the way it does has enormous implications. It means that when it comes to people, we must never generalise, never stereotype. The Egyptians were not all evil: even from Pharaoh himself a heroine was born. Nothing could signal more powerfully that the Torah is not an ethnocentric text; that we must recognise virtue wherever we find it, even among our enemies; and that the basic core of human values \u2013 humanity, compassion, courage \u2013 is truly universal. Holiness may not be; goodness is.<\/p>\n

      Outside Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, is an avenue dedicated to righteous gentiles. Pharaoh\u2019s daughter is a supreme symbol of what they did and what they were. I, for one, am profoundly moved by that encounter on the banks of the Nile between an Egyptian princess and a young Israelite child, Moses\u2019 sister Miriam. The contrast between them \u2013 in terms of age, culture, status and power \u2013 could not be greater. Yet their deep humanity bridges all the differences, all the distance. Two heroines. May they inspire us.<\/p>\n

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      From the Thought of Rabbi Sacks<\/strong><\/p>\n

      Judaism has a unique dual structure of ethics. On the one hand there is the covenant of Noah, which binds all humanity on the basis of seven fundamental commands. On the other is the Abrahamic and later Sinai covenant that binds Jews by a more detailed and demanding system of commands. Judaism is constituted by this basic tension between the universal and the particular. Its way of life is intensely particular, yet its God and ultimate gaze are universal, concerned with all humankind, indeed all creation. How are we to understand the significance of this duality?<\/p>\n

      Helpful in this context is the distinction suggested by the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit between\u00a0morality<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0ethics<\/em>. Morality refers to the universal principals we use in dealings with humanity in general: our relationships with strangers. Ethics, by contrast, refers to our relationships with those with whom we share a special bond of shared memory and belonging: family, friends, fellow countrymen, or people with whom we share a faith. The two systems have a different tonality: \u2018Morality is greatly concerned, for example, with respect and humiliation\u2026 Ethics, on the other hand, is greatly concerned with loyalty and betrayal\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

      This is the best way of understanding the difference between\u00a0tzedek<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0mishpat<\/em>\u00a0on the one hand,\u00a0chessed<\/em>and\u00a0rachamim<\/em>\u00a0on the other.\u00a0Tzedek<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0mishpat<\/em>\u00a0belong to morality.\u00a0Chessed<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0rachamim<\/em>\u00a0belong to ethics. The former are about justice, the latter about loving attention, for which the simplest English term is\u00a0care<\/em>. Justice is and must be impersonal. \u2018You shall not recognise persons in judgement\u2019, says\u00a0Deuteronomy (16: 19). The beauty of justice is that it belongs to a world of order constructed out of universal rules through which each of us stands equally before the law.\u00a0Chessed<\/em>, by contrast, is intrinsically personal. We cannot care for the sick, bring comfort to the distressed or welcome a visitor impersonally. If we do so, it merely shows that we have not understood what these activities are. Justice demands disengagement.\u00a0Chessed<\/em>\u00a0is an act of engagement. Justice is best administered without emotion.\u00a0Chessed<\/em>\u00a0exists only in virtue of emotion, empathy and sympathy, feeling-with and feeling-for. We act with kindness because we know what it feels like to be in need of kindness. We comfort the mourners because we know what it is to mourn.\u00a0Chessed<\/em>\u00a0requires not detached rationality but emotional intelligence.<\/p>\n

      To Heal a Fractured World, p. 51<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

      QUESTIONS TO PONDER:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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      1. Did Pharaoh\u2019s daughter and Raoul Wallenberg act in the way they did from a moral perspective or from a perspective of ethics?<\/li>\n
      2. Which do you think would be more heroic in their stories?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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        Around the Shabbat Table<\/strong><\/p>\n