D’Var Torah (Words from the Torah)
D’Var Torah – January 2026
Beshallach
This week’s Sedrah is Beshallach in which the children of Israel finally leave Egypt. They are chased by Pharaoh and his hosts and complain to Moses that they might as well have stayed in Egypt, but God parts the Red Sea for them and then drowns all the Egyptians. They praise God by singing Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea, before complaining at their next camp that the water is too bitter to drink. Then they complain about not having enough to eat and again about not having enough water. Finally they are attacked by the Amalekites but defeat them in battle.
I’ll be reading Shirat Hayam and the paragraphs before and after it. I’ll read it first in English.
In fact, the Sedrah describes not one but two songs: Shirat Hayam which is 18 verses long and is sung to a special tune, and then one in which Miriam leads the women in dancing with drums or tambourines, which is recorded in a single verse, the words almost the same as the first line of Shirat Hayam. Rabbi Danielle Upbin on myjewishlearning notes that some scholars suggest that the two songs were the same and the Torah only refers to Miriam’s very briefly to avoid repetition. But she disagrees and says that there really were two songs and they served different functions. Shirat Hayam is a record of events when the Israelites had full faith in God and trust in Moses their leader. Miriam’s song is more like a prayer.
First, consider the length of Miriam’s song: just one verse. In Eastern religions, one word or phrase can serve as a focal point of prayer. Reciting the word again and again, the worshipper can get lost in the experience of the sound. In the Hasidic tradition, this is how the niggun works – the repetitive melody becomes a meditation, stirring the soul and captivating the heart. She imagines the dancing women as swirling colours on the shores of the sea, timbrels in hand, singing to God.
Second, consider the structure. Miriam’s song has an urgency to it. Shirat Hayam is introduced in the future tense – I will sing to God – “Ashirah Ladonai” – but Miriam’s song is written as an imperative: “Shiru ladonai” sing to God! The Midrash recognizes this, stating that when Israel emerged from the sea, the angels came to sing to God first. But God said, “Let my children sing first because they are of flesh and blood. They must sing now before they die. But you, as long as you desire, you remain alive and can sing.” So Miriam seized the moment.
Finally, consider the instruments. Rashi wonders where the Israelite women found their drums. Why, as they rushed from their Egyptian homes in the middle of the night with only a few precious belongings and some matzah, would they pause to pick up drums? Rashi quotes a Midrash to explain: “The righteous women of that generation were confident that God would do miracles for them; so they brought drums with them from Egypt.” We can assume from this commitment to bring the instruments from Egypt that music must have played a central role in ancient worship. And glancing through the Book of Psalms, it becomes clear that music was in fact very important in prayer. Psalm 92 reads: “A song for Shabbat: Sing to God with a ten stringed harp with a voice and lyre together.” And Psalm 150: “Praise God with the blast of the horn/ with the violin and harp/ with timbrel and dance/ with lute and pipe/ with resounding cymbals/ with loud clashing cymbals.” In the ancient temple, the Levites would accompany the sacrificial offerings with singing and musical instruments. So using the timbrels helped to make Miriam’s song more like a prayer.
Moving back to Shirat Hayam, I found an interesting piece on a website called truah.org. Truah is an organisation I hadn’t come across before, an American rabbinic group campaigning for human rights in the USA, Israel and Palestine. In relation to Shirat Hayam, Cantor Hinda Eisen Labowitz raises an interesting question. In Mishlei, the book of Proverbs, 24:17, we are told “Do not rejoice as your enemy falls, let your heart not rejoice as he falters.” In context of the biblical story, we can understand and even sympathize with the Israelites’ celebration: the long-lasting yoke of oppression was lifted, and they were watching as their oppressors were overtaken in a Divine act. But is it right to rejoice in human suffering, even if those who suffer are our enemies? On Pesach, we spill some of our wine as we recite the ten plagues that were inflicted upon Egypt. The usual explanation for this custom is that it allows us to recognize that Jewish salvation in the Exodus came at the expense of Egyptian lives. In contrast, others explain it as symbolic of revenge, spilled blood, or placation of evil spirits. For centuries, it was important to our ancestors to feel that God would be ready to do the same for them if the need arose, and that is reflected in other parts of the Seder – particularly “sh’fokh chamat’kha,” in which we call upon God to exact vengeance on our oppressors.
I wrote this D’var Torah three years ago. At the time I had been watching the three part documentary “The US and the Holocaust” with its graphic descriptions of the Holocaust which made me think about the Nuremberg trials and how to square my opposition to capital punishment with my feelings towards the defendants. Since then, we have witnessed not only October 7th
but also murderous attacks on our communities in Manchester and Sydney, and my sentiments towards the perpetrators are just as tangled.
But for two years after October 7th , we read on Shabbat in the prayer in a time of war that at the Sea of Reeds the angels wanted to sing a song of praise before God but God rebuked them, saying ”My children are drowning in the sea, would you utter a song before Me in honour of that?”
Cantor Labowitz ended on a concept which Colin often refers to: Tikkun Olam. She said that we Western Jews need no longer fear for our lives from constant pogroms, hate crimes, and random anti-Semitic acts as our ancestors and grandparents did. Three years on, our fears have risen and it is clear that that struggle is far from over. So are we still able to believe that our enemies are also God’s children; that our job in repairing the world is to build bridges and facilitate understanding between groups, undermining the hate? However difficult that may be, I wish it were so.
Bo: Shemot 11:1 – 12:11
I can remember since I was a child being told about the plagues and particularly this last one, the killing of the firstborn, the most terrible one, but thinking of it as a demonstration of God’s power, and the last step in freeing the Israelites from slavery. The reality of the story has really only really dawned on me recently.
Rabbi Cliff Kulwin from the World Union for Progressive Judaism writes: “What could be more horrible than the tenth plague that God visits upon the Egyptians, the slaying of the firstborn? Is there anything more tragic than the death of a child, anything an adult fears more than the possibility that a son or daughter who has ventured out into the world may not return? And not only the firstborn of the leaders or the soldiers were slain. As the text relates, “…every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the firstborn of the cattle.” (Exodus, 11:5) How could God do this?”
The medieval commentator Sforno says that the verse, “from the first-born of Pharaoh…to the first-born of the captive,” which describes the scope of this last plague, is shorthand for a more accusatory phrase: “from the most guilty of parties [Pharaoh] to the least guilty of parties [the children of the captives who were sitting in the dungeon].”Sforno’s comment highlights the fact that these “least guilty” were neither in a position to enslave the Israelites initially nor to free them in order to stop the plagues, yet they were punished collectively with those, such as Pharaoh himself, who were.
Why must the powerless slave woman suffer along with the all-powerful Pharaoh in the slaying of the first-born? What sense can we make of this collective punishment?
As you might imagine, there have been various commentaries on this by the sages over the centuries. One of the traditional responses is that only an extreme measure would force Pharaoh to relent. The fault was not God’s; the fault was Pharaoh’s for being so stupidly, arrogantly hard-hearted. And yet our text says that for the last half of the plagues it is God who hardens Pharoah’s heart, so that he will not let the people go, so that God’s power can be shown in the land of Egypt and people will know God’s power. Another explanation is that the death of so many was expected or normal at that time – and one might say the same is true up till the present day, looking at the tragedies and hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world who are losing their lives in conflicts like this in many places, for instance, Sudan, ostensibly for the sake of freedom. But the fact that it was normal then (and often now) doesn’t to my mind make it any more OK. Rashi circumvents these questions, saying that the Egyptian slaves and captives lost their first-born children in the plague because “they, too, enslaved [the Israelites] and took joy in their suffering.” According to Rashi, the plague of the first-born was a punishment for each Egyptian who participated in the oppression of the Israelites, and not collective punishment with all of its unjust implications.
I find this equally hard to believe. Every single Egyptian took joy in the suffering of the Israelites?
First of all, we have examples of Egyptians who resisted the oppression in the Egyptian midwives, Puah and Shiprah, who refused to obey Pharaoh’s commands to kill the male children of the Israelites.
Secondly, babies and children are being killed – they must surely be regarded as innocent and not taking part in the oppression at least for the first few years of life.
Thirdly, in the next chapter when the exodus happens, the Torah says that alongside the Israelites leaving Egypt, a “mixed multitude” left with them. So this implies that there were Egyptians who were sympathetic to or admired the Hebrews.
Fourthly, just looking around at any similar situation, are there not always people who don’t and won’t acquiesce in oppression? The righteous gentiles of the Shoa for example, or the whites in South Africa who fought for the freedom of black people there under apartheid.
In fact, more than not believing in it I find this idea actually objectionable. It implies that all of a group or a people think alike and paints them all with the same brush, as uniformly guilty. It sees nations or groups or peoples as goodies and baddies, justifying any violence against the baddies. As a people who have been, and still are, so often treated in this way with dire consequences surely we should be the last to do this.
So I have to say that none of these explanations work for me. Moreover, we have lots in our own Torah that if not explicitly condemning the killing of the first-born, argues against killing the innocent for others’ wrongdoing.
Rabbi Eitan Cooper writes: “doesn’t justice still have to be fair? The Egyptians were guilty of enslaving the Jews and murdering male Jewish children, but why kill their first-born? What did they do? How can we explain slaughtering innocent babies or the sons of handmaidens?
The Bible itself provides contradictory answers. While in several places (found in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), it is taught that God punishes descendants to the third and fourth generations, in other places such as the Book of Deuteronomy and then the Book of Ezekiel, there are explicit teachings NOT to punish children for the sins of their parents, as God did to the Egyptians.”
Similarly, suffering caused in the name of justice bothered many rabbis throughout the ages. The ancient custom until today is to sing an incomplete “Hallel” on the last six days of Pesach, because the joy is not be complete if Egyptians suffered as a result of our being freed.
Proverbs 24 reads; “Do not rejoice at the downfall of your enemy.” And when we spill drops of wine at the Seder, it is to remind participants that our freedom came at huge cost to ordinary Egyptians.
And again, after the tenth plague, when the Israelites finally leave, as our siddur says, the angels wished to sing a song of praise before God. But God rebuked them, saying “my children are drowning in the sea, would you utter a song before me in honour of that?”
In the real world, just outcomes often cause suffering, and not everyone who suffers is evil. What amount of suffering is worth the ensuing freedom is perhaps a subject for another davar torah, but Judaism teaches us to respect life. The reason that the Tower of Babel was destroyed, we are told was because someone died and no-one even noticed. We are told that when you destroy a life it is as if you had destroyed a whole world.
So perhaps it is right for us to baulk at this last plague even as we celebrate our ancestors escape from slavery. Certainly when I read this passage in the future at Pesach and in our annual cycle of readings I shall think of it differently from the rather simplistic view I was sold when I was a child.
Todays’ Parasha is Vaeira, Exodus 6:29 – 7:18.
It can be found in the Hertz Chumash on page X.
Torah tells us that by the time of the exodus, the Israelites numbered some 600,000 men of fighting age. Scholars have used this to estimate the total number of Israelites living in Egypt at the time of the Exodus at between 2 and 3 million. That’s a lot of Israelites.
The person who God would choose to lead these people out of Egypt was going to have to achieve two seemingly impossible feats. One would be to convince Pharoah to let 2 to 3 million people who had been contributing slave labour to the Egyptian economy to just up and leave. The other, which I have always considered to be by far the greater, would be to convince 2 to 3 million Israelites – people who had been living in Egypt for generations – to accept him as their leader and to leave all they were familiar with and follow him into an unknown wilderness.
For these tasks one might have expected God to choose someone who had great oratorical skills. Think of Winston Churchill: we shall fight them on the beaches, or John Kennedy: ask not what your country can do for you, or maybe Martin Luther King, I have a dream. But he didn’t. He chose a man with a speech impediment.
Moses, the man God chose for these tasks, was as surprised as you would have expected him to be and on several occasions tries to get out of the appointment by referring specifically to his difficulties with speech. To quote Moses from an earlier parasha “I have never been good with words. I am slow of speech and slow of tongue“. That was the Hertz translation of ki k’ved peh oo-k’ved lashon anochi. Other translations include heavy and awkward tongue, my mouth and tongue are sluggish, my tongue moves slowly and hesitant of speech which all suggest a physical problem with speaking. The International Standard Version is the most blunt. In their translation, Moses simply says “I have a speech impediment”.
In today’s parasha when God tells Moses to tell Pharoah to let his people go, Moses says Lo sham’u elai ki ani aral sephatayim which Hertz translates as “He will not harken unto me who is of uncircumcised lips”. Most translations also translate aral sephatayim as ‘uncircumcised lips’. I speak pretty good English but am not at all sure what uncircumcised lips are. I’m evidently not alone because there are many other translations of aral sephatayim which include impeded speech, stumbling speech, speak with difficulty, speak with faltering lips and tongue tied – all of which suggest some sort of physical difficulty in making words.
But there is controversy among Torah commentators as to whether Moses had a physical impediment at all. Perhaps, they say, Moses just had a dread of public speaking. This is view is reflected in some of the other translations of aral sephatayim which include unskilled in speaking, poor speaker, not a powerful speaker, not a persuasive speaker and no orator. If Moses simply dreaded public speaking, he was not alone.
The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once said – and I quote. “I read a study that said that speaking in front of a crowd is considered to be the number one fear of the average person. Number two is death. This means the average person at a funeral would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy”.
Some commentators say that Moses’ fear of public speaking could simply have been due to his poor command of Hebrew having been raised as an Egyptian prince. But the consensus among most commentator is that Moses really had a speech impediment with many calling it a stammer or as Americans say, a stutter.
Larry Glickman of the Union for Reform Judaism in the US and himself a man with a stammer wrote a lovely dvar torah on Parasha vaeira.
“Most Jewish stutterers love this portion which aligns us with Moses, one of the great leaders of history, and reminds us that even with impeded speech we can do great things.
I think the importance of this Torah portion for us should not be that Moses might have been a stutterer, but rather that he had an important message to share – and even with what he characterised as a handicap, he shared the message. And he got creative. And he got help from Aaron. He did not give up. He was relentless – and he got people to listen.
The Jewish stutterers of the world love Moses, but Moses does not belong just to us. He belongs to anyone who has a “thing” they would rather not have. Your thing may be that you have a speech impediment or that you are short or bald or would just rather not speak in front of a group. Whatever the thing is, let it be only a hurdle, not a wall. Hurdles can be jumped.”
Thinking of this morning’s study passage I will add autism to the list of things that can be jumped. Moses jumped so high and so far that our Torah ends with “And there has not been a prophet since in Israel, like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.”
Shabbat shalom.
D’Var Torah – December
Miketz – Emerging from the waters.
The opening of Parashat Miketz is a gift for me. Not only because like so many of us I can only read these words with Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s, Elvis style Pharoah elevating them with a rich, vivid joy but because these words provide yet another proof text for the passion with which I moved into the current chapter of my Rabbinate. If you had asked me when I was ordained at Leo Baeck College back in 2006 what I would be doing almost 20 years later, “building a mikveh” would be so far down the list of possible answers I would have thought you mad for even suggesting it. I was brought up in a household which represented the epitome of Reform Judaism. With my Dad being Head of the Reform Movement at that time and my mum the head teacher of Akiva School, there were not many other households more committed to Reform Judaism. Mikveh was definitely not a conversation I remember having. It was a ritual regarded as reserved solely for those converting to Judaism and something we had not even needed to reject as progressive Jews because a ritual which was seemingly so antiquated and misogynistic was not even relevant enough to reject. The idea that women would need a ritual connected to menstruation was seemingly absurd and other worldly. Until I learned for myself both on the one hand how devastating each monthly period can be at certain moments in life, and the power of ritual, far beyond the fulfilment of obligation passed down the generations. 18 years in the congregational rabbinate taught me that people face the most devastating adversity in their lives. It is those who seem most able to rebuild their lives despite its new, unexpected turns, who are the ones who had others to mourn with them. To together mourn the image of the life that had been so cruelly changed, to look to the future with a new vision of what it might look like in time, and those who could be in the moment, with structures which held them and bore witness to the experience they were enduring. So how is this relevant to Parashat Miketz? The parasha begins with these words, “After two years’ time Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile, when out of the Nile there came up seven cows, handsome and sturdy, and they grazed in the reed grass. But presently, seven other cows came up from the Nile close behind them, ugly and gaunt, and stood beside the cows on the bank of the Nile.” By this time you are singing so I know you know that “the thin cows ate the fat cows” which you thought would do them good…! The commentators ask many questions of this text, scrutinise what it says, including drawing the conclusion in Genesis Rabbah 89:4 that by Pharaoh standing “over the Nile” Pharaoh in some ways saw himself superior to his god by seeing himself as above the Nile, the source of survival for the people, in contrast to the Israelites who saw themselves as subordinate to God. Yet what I see is the prelude to the Exodus, a new chapter for the Israelites emerging from the water. In a number of weeks, and again when we mark the festival of Pesach, we will celebrate the Hebrew slaves emerging from the parted waters of the sea to a new chapter, the beginnings of freedom. When emerging from “Mitzrayim” the “narrow places”, to begin again, many see this moment of Exodus as a rebirth of the Israelites, equating this narrow place to being akin to the birth canal and the new beginning we needed nationally. Yet, this concept, that from the waters we go from one state of being to another, is exactly what is being set up by the cows in Pharoah’s dream. Coming into focus from the water of Nile – first the cows which represent the next chapter of Joseph and the Egyptian’s life experience, the years of plenty, and then again, coming from the waters, the second set of seven cows, heralding another chapter, the famine which will not only be a challenging time for all the peoples of the area but we know will reunite Jacob’s family and open another chapter in their lives and in the story of the Jewish people of the future. This emerging from water taking us from one chapter to another is for me exactly what mikveh can be for people. How we can give ritual, witness, celebrate or hold people while, in their own lives, they recognise the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another. For some people that will be a celebratory marking – like the fat cows teach us – whether that is a wedding, conversion, marking the 9th month of a pregnancy immersing just before becoming a parent, milestone birthdays, retirement or any meaningful moments or successes. Yet for others the mikveh will be used to create rituals around the moments we hadn’t planned for, never wanted in our lives but know we need the support to move into the next chapter however much we’d rather it was different – whether following a miscarriage, a terminal diagnosis, moving a loved one into a care home, the breakdown of a relationship or the loss of a job. We continue to emerge from the water often into the unknown, like the wilderness or these years of plenty and famine which need careful planning and handling but we do so knowing we have the support to navigate the unexpected terrain. When Wellspring opens, our mikveh will be set at the heart of a centre of wellbeing to help and support people to emerge from the water a little more prepared for their next chapter than before they went in. Whether it is the years of plenty you see before you, or whether it is the lean menacing view of the future you are faced with, Judaism is evolving to ritualise and mark these moments. Our rabbis of the past were psychologists holding us through marriage, death and birth, it’s the role of our current clergy, and those in training, to ensure our Judaism holds us just as effectively at the moments which would not have been conceived of 2000 years ago, but today can be responded to in a deeply Jewish way.
Vayeshev
This week’s reading is from the Sedra Vayeshev.. I’ll be reading Chapter 39 of Bereshit which tells the story of Joseph’s appointment as Potiphar’s steward and then his imprisonment when Potiphar’s wife falsely accuses him of attacking her. The list of prescribed readings gives the option of the whole chapter or just the first eighteen of the twenty three verses and I’ve opted for the slightly longer version as the shorter one stops us in the middle of the story. I’ll read it in English first.
Last time I read Torah, you may remember that I drew your attention to the fact that one of the words in the reading was very stretched out, and the same will happen today. It is a cantillation note called Shalshelet and is very rare, only occurring four times. I’d never encountered it before last month, and now twice in successive readings! As I said a few weeks ago, Rabbinic tradition holds that it is always used to indicate that the subject of the verb is wrestling with inner demons and hesitating. In this case, the word is Va’yema’en: he refused, so the choice of Shalshelet tells us that although Joseph refuses to be seduced, he does not do so instantly. We have just been told how good-looking and well-built Joseph is and maybe he was flattered or just found his master’s wife’s advances very difficult to resist. Or perhaps he might have wondered whether it would be to his advantage to give in to her desires before recovering himself and rejecting a sin, not only against his master, but against God.
That’s one interpretation. Rabbi Eric Woodward, on myjewishlearning.com offers a more practical explanation. Joseph is a slave and he is being forced to choose between the sin of adultery with his master’s wife and the sin of refusing to do his mistress’s bidding. Either way he is in trouble. Perhaps it crosses his mind that if he gives in to her, she might protect him. However, there is a midrash that says that at the very moment that she grabbed his tunic, he saw a vision of his father and this strengthened his resolve. Rabbi Woodward adds that rather than being reminded of his father’s authority, Joseph gained strength from the thought of his father’s love for him, showing that authority can be exercised through love and compassion rather than surveillance. He suggests that this is how our relationship with God can be – not God as the Great Surveiller but as God who shares a covenant with us and inspires us through a loving relationship.
As a result of his refusal of Potiphar’s wife’s advances, Joseph ends up in prison. But just as God enabled him to prosper in Potiphar’s household by his competence, he wins the favour of the Chief Gaoler and is again given a position of trust. And it’s the wisdom he shows in interpreting the dreams of his fellow prisoners that brings him to Pharaoh’s attention and leads to his release from prison and elevation to great power as Pharaoh’s Chief Minister. So out of misfortune comes redemption. You may remember that later on, when Joseph is reunited with his brothers, he tells them that he bears them no ill will for selling him into slavery, because had they not done so, he would not have been able to rise to power in Egypt and be in a position to assist them when they were fleeing the famine in Canaan. Equally, though he doesn’t say it himself, had he not been framed by Potiphar’s wife, he would not have been imprisoned and thus would not have come to Pharoah’s attention. Joseph seems to attract misfortune, sometimes by his own failings, as with his arrogance towards his brothers, sometimes just by being himself, as with Potiphar’s wife. But somehow his misfortunes lead to him being in the right place at the right time.
There’s a temptation then to say that Joseph prospers because God is always with him, even when things are going wrong for him; everything happens for a purpose. He has to go through hardships in order to learn and mature. But I think this is trite. Yes, Joseph comes to Pharaoh’s attention because the people whose dreams he has interpreted in prison remember him and he is brought before Pharaoh.. But why couldn’t he simply be recommended to Pharaoh by Potiphar suggesting him as an efficient and trustworthy administrator? That would have saved him spending all those years in prison.
Modern scholarship of course sees the Torah as a collection of legends and folk tales rather than a historical account spoken by God and written down by Moses as orthodox Judaism believes. Instead of seeing a divine purpose in every word of the Torah, we can think about why the authors and editors of the text chose stories and told them in a particular way. Perhaps the point of the story of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph is to show us that we should resist temptation. Adam and Eve didn’t resist and suffered lasting punishment; Joseph did resist and despite all the bad things that happened to him, everything worked out very well in the end. Maybe that is a trite conclusion as well, but it’s the best explanation I can think of for the story of Potiphar’s wife.