This Dvar Torah for Parshat Va'eira
was written by Jane Shapiro, the co-founder of Orot,
a Chicago-based organization:
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Have you ever had a CAT scan or MRI? A back that is out of whack or something broken that needs further exploration? They send you to a room that looks like something out of Star Trek.
If you are like me, you shudder to even hear the words. There is something about the machinery, the clanking noise, the lights and the freezing room that is just plain scary.
Most of all, however, is that table in the middle. You climb up and have to lie on a very narrow space and just wait for the exam to be over. In Hebrew a narrow space is called called Meytzarim, "straits" geographically, but also any place that constricts you physically or personally. It is also the word Mitzrayim, which is the name for the Land of Egypt.
Advanced medical technologies are so important, and we are lucky that they exist. But in making us vulnerable and small, they constrict our lives in some way.
I think of this week's parsha, Va'eira, and find a path that gives me some strength of spirit. Moses says to God ( Exodus 7:1-7) : How can I speak to the Israelites? How can I speak up to Pharaoh? I am a person with mangled lips, unable to speak clearly and frightened by my circumstances. I am an alien, a fugitive. I am not sure who I am.
Symbolically, Moses comes to represent a person who is learning to access language as a path towards liberation. He need God's firm encouragement. He needs his brother to prophesy for him, speaking the words he begins to form. He is given a strong arm to hold him up and create plagues that press his point with Pharoah.
In the Zohar we read that Moses represents both voice and speech. As long as his speech was constrained he was in exile, and he could not be understood. In these first stages of the Exodus Moses is disembodied voice without direction. But once he gathers strength and faith he comes forth as our Moses, possessing both voice and language. He brings the people to Sinai when voice and language come together in radiant force. Voice needs shape, and language needs inner spirit to become unified and significant.
What is Egypt according to Jewish tradition? It is much more than a country, an ancient place where our ancestors were once slaves to Pharaoh, or the birthplace of our Moses. Egypt in the Jewish imagination becomes any place of narrowness, any place that holds you back or limits you in some way.
We may go through life feeling confined by so many things: expectations, ideas we tell ourselves about the way things are "supposed" to be; relationships that are painful, the words we choose to use every day, any time we miss the mark and do not meet our potential. These are all Egypt moments and we have them each and every day.
But our limitations and constraints do not necessarily define us. Because in Jewish tradition Egypt and its narrowness is just the first part of a story of freedom and redemption. "Once we were slaves but now...." We are all enslaved to something but inside of each of us is also a free person, a person of wholeness. We can certainly make the micro choices each day with our words and deeds to act with freedom and dignity. Like Moses we can unify our inner voice and the words we speak to find a path away from what frightens us towards what makes us strong.
Kavannah
Can you identify some place of constraint in your life, a personal Egypt? Even when you are on that "narrow table," you may be holding your breath. Feel how when it is released, it gives way to expansiveness, redemption and love.
Shabbat Shalom
