Tag: Egypt

  • Being Nice is Not Enough

    When Moses saw the Egyptian taskmaster beating the Jew, he looked around and did not see another man. This is to teach us to do the right thing even if it isn’t the nice thing.

  • Listen To Your Elders

    The reason that the tribe of Levi was not enslaved was that Levi was still alive when Pharaoh succeeded in fooling the Jews. Levi, though saw through Pharaoh’s plot and told his descendants not to be fooled.

  • Moses’s Last Speech

    The Book of Deuteronomy is all about how to set up society once the Jews reach the Land of Israel. Moses’s main concern was that the Jews not copy the ways of the Egyptians or their society.

  • A New Beginning

    The first commandment that the Jewish people received was to declare the 1st of Nisan to be the beginning of the Jewish year. Rosh Hashanah is the day that the 1st man was created. The 1st of Nisan is when the Jewish people became a people.

  • Idolatry is for Children

    When Moses seems to be delayed coming back from Mt. Sinai the Jews build an idol. It seems strange until we remember that they were only recently freed from Egyptian bondage and the only society that they knew was Egyptian.

  • Freedom Comes With a Price

    The portion starts out with the Jews avoiding going directly to the Land of Israel lest they get into a war with the Philistines and run back to Egypt. It ends with the Jews fighting Amalek. They had to learn that there was no going back to Egypt.

  • Getting Egypt Out of the Jews

    More important that getting the Jews out of Egypt was to get Egyptian culture out of the Jews. God wanted the Jews to be a moral and ethical people and to reject the immorality of Egypt.

  • The Reason for Freedom

    Getting the Jews out of Egypt was easy job. The hard job was to make the Jews into a nation.

  • Getting Egypt Out of the Jews

    פרשת תזריע / כ”ז באדר ב’ תשפ”ב

    In Parshat HaHodesh the first thing that the Torah states is the Korban Pesach (The Pascal Sacrifice). This was to get the Jews to look at Egyptian society as not only foreign but as dangerous to their spiritual well being as a nation.