so that the water will not come through: Parashat Sh’mot

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Parasgat Sh'mot

Torah Sparks
Exodus 1:1 – 6:1

The quarreling was terrible. They would both come home exhausted, too tired to pay any attention to me or to little Aaron. Too tired to eat. But not too tired to argue. Then they would whisper, “Hush! Miriam will hear us.” They thought I couldn’t hear and that I didn’t understand, but I did. They thought I didn’t understand about babies and all that. I knew that they fought so that they would not have a baby together, because you can only have a baby when you love each other. So they fought to prevent having a baby. So that Pharaoh wouldn’t be able to take it away from them.

But I knew what they were trying to do. And I cried and yelled at them. “Stop fighting!” I told them.  And they told me to be quiet and go watch little Aaron. But I said to them, “What do you think you are doing? If you fight like this then you are worse than Pharaoh. He only wants to kill our boys. But your fighting is killing both Aaron and me. Is that what you want?”

They were very still. Mother started crying softly. Father came over to me and touched my head. “You are more right than we,” he said. They were very tired and went to sleep.

Now, it’s a year later, and I have another little baby brother. Mother says he is a very good baby. But she is miserable. She looks a mess, smeared with clay and pitch.  When I asked her why she is crying when the baby is so good, she explained to me that she is trying to cover the basket so that it will not have holes in it. So that the water will not come through and her baby will not drown. If he weren’t such a big and healthy baby maybe he would not weigh down the basket so much in the water. But he is a good baby, round and heavy. The basket will sit low in the water, but she had not been able to get enough pitch. She cries as she tries to stretch the tar across the sides of the basket. She sheds tears of rage as she tries to get the tar onto the basket. But she cannot get the tar off her fingers.

“No more!” she cries. “I can’t do any more.” She asks me to put the baby into the basket because her fingers are sticky and dirty with the tar. She leans over to kiss him while trying not to touch him with the dirty pitch. We go to the river. She puts the basket into the water, by the bulrushes, so that maybe they will hold it up a little longer before it sinks. She says to me, “I am leaving. I cannot bear to see the death of the boy.”

But I stay and wait. The water is beginning to seep into the basket. The cold water is making him cry. Look, here comes a beautiful Egyptian lady. She looks like a princess.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Greenstein


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image:  “Zella n Mommy” © Quan Ha altered and used with permission via Creative Commons License

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