view from central park: tehilla r. goldberg

Entering Shemot: Exile leaving exile

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Reading the Torah each Shabbat offers the opportunity to look at details of the text within that particular week’s parsha. Aside from the portion often conveying a theme, each of the Five Books themselves also conveys a theme.

Take, for example, the book of Bereishit, which we recently completed. According to one commentor, the central theme of Bereishit could be summed up in one word: separations. Some of the separations are healthy and boundary-defining, while others are quite painful.

There is the separation between man and G-d in the Garden of Eden; the separation within nature in the days of creation; the separation of Abraham from the rest of civilization as he discovers his instinct for monotheism; the bloody separation between brothers Cain and Abel, the first murder, and the separation of brothers again and again, until the very end of the book.

Then comes the book of Shemot, whose central themes we perceive to be of redemption, exodus, nationhood. All positive motifs. Yet a story of redemption is a story of emerging from exile, from a painful place; it is a story fraught with emotional ambivalences, of highs and lows, and ultimately, separation.

You’d think, if a messenger of redemption is sent to those suffering in exile, the response would be gratitude, relief and perhaps cautious joy. Instead, on some level, the theme of separation in Bereishit carries over to Exodus; rather than relief and hope, redemption is met with resistance.

It seems to be hard to separate even from exile, even to separate toward redemption.

We find the five famous synonyms of redemption, that we mark with the cups of wine at the Passover seder, in last week’s Torah portion. These five words symbolize different dimensions of redemption and signal its protracted nature.

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