When Moses starts to redeem the Jews, he is facing the problem that they have given up hope. He has to get them to understand that they will be redeemed. This is true thought-out history, It is hard for those enslaved to believe that the end will be good.
D’var Torah – Parashat Shemot: Leadership, Hope, and Not Knowing the End
In this week’s parashah, Moshe Rabbeinu is given an almost impossible task. We, as readers, don’t always appreciate how difficult it truly was—because we know how the story ends. We know there will be redemption, the Exodus, the splitting of the sea.
But no one inside the story knows that. Not Moshe, and certainly not Bnei Yisrael.
From their perspective, Moshe arrives on the scene and everything gets worse. He confronts Pharaoh, Pharaoh retaliates, and the suffering intensifies. Work becomes harder, hope seems farther away, and the natural human response follows: they turn on Moshe.
This is one of the Torah’s most profound lessons. It is easy to have faith when you know the outcome. It is much harder when you don’t.
We see this pattern throughout history.
In 1962, Glenn Richter and Rabbi Berman helped launch the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. They were told—especially by the Jewish establishment—“Don’t demonstrate. Don’t protest. You’re just making things worse. Quiet diplomacy will work.”
If you had told them that within thirty years the Soviet Union would collapse and Jews would leave in massive numbers, people would have laughed. Nobody believed it. And yet, they persisted. They organized demonstrations, pressured Congress, helped bring about the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and forced the Soviet Union to confront its moral bankruptcy.
History proved them right—not the experts.
The same lesson appears in 1949 during the Berlin blockade. The Soviets cut off West Berlin, hoping the West would abandon it. The experts told President Truman it couldn’t be supplied. “There’s nothing we can do,” they said.
Truman asked one simple question to Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay:
“Can we supply Berlin by air?”
LeMay paused and said, “It’s doable.”
Truman replied, “Then do it.”
What followed was the Berlin Airlift—hundreds of planes a day, landing and taking off within minutes, supplying an entire city for over a year. Once again, the experts were wrong, because leadership refused to surrender hope.
This is Moshe’s challenge in Parashat Shemot. His job is not only to confront Pharaoh—it is to give hope to a people who see no end, to insist that suffering is not permanent, and to lead even when the path forward is unclear.
When people tell you to give up hope, that is the most dangerous moment of all.
The Torah teaches us that redemption begins before it is visible. Faith is not believing after the miracle—it is acting before it happens. As bleak as things may sometimes appear, we believe that God has not abandoned His people, and that our actions, even when they seem futile, can shape history.
That is the message of Moshe.
That is the message of Shemot.
And it is something worth thinking about.
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