Today we began the story of the Exodus, the central narrative of the Torah: a new Pharaoh fears us and so enslaves and oppresses us, and orders the killing of Israelites baby boys. A leader emerges in Moshe, thanks to the bravery of the righteous women of the story: the Hebrew midwives, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Moshe’s sister Miriam. And God reappears in the story after what seems to be quite some time. We know from elsewhere in the Torah (Ex. 12:40) that we had been in Egypt for 430 years, 430 years since Joseph’s brothers and their father Jacob came down to escape the famine in Canaan. And, as we read today, God seems to emerge to take note of our suffering. “God heard their moaning, and God remembered God’s covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God knew.” (Ex: 24-25)
Four different words for God beginning to pay attention: God heard, remembered, looked, and knew. It’s interesting that four different words are used for God waking up to our need for redemption – maybe you can think of a reason why the Torah would use this fourfold language (4 expressions of redemption, which correspond to 4 cups of wine at seder)– but, more importantly, these words raise one of the central questions of all religious thought: Where had God been before God started paying attention? Where was God for the 400 years before God woke up?
The medieval commentators draw our attention to this question in their commentaries on our verses. What does it mean that God “knew,” as our verse says? Rashi explains: “God paid attention to them and did not hide his eyes.” Rashi implies that until this moment, God had not been paying attention to them, that God’s eyes had been closed, so to speak. And the Ramban confirms that reading; in his commentary, he says “at first God’s face was hidden from them, but now God hears their cries and sees them and will no longer hide God’s face from them.”
The language of God hiding God’s face, of God’s eyes being closed to us is the Torah’s way of conveying that human experience of “God isn’t there,” the feeling that we’ve been abandoned and that God doesn’t care. It’s that sense that the Torah suggests here just before the beginning of the exodus. See, we know that the Torah is not just a telling of events that took place in ancient history, but is an expression of the inner experience of every human being. That’s why the Hasidic masters talk about Mitzrayim as being not just Egypt, that place by the Nile River, but being meitzarim, that narrow, constricted place of suffering, where we all live from time to time. That’s why when we tell the story of the exodus at our Pesach seders, we say that “in every generation, everyone must see themselves as leaving Egypt.” This story applies to each one of us.
QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION: So as we reflect on our own lives in this story of the exodus, I’d like us to think about this fourfold language of God waking up to our suffering. Why does God suddenly open God’s eyes and care for us? What does God only now hear, remember, see, and know? Was God absent before now? Hiding God’s face? And if so, what brings God back to redeem us?
AN ANSWER: While this question is an eternal one, one that we can never fully answer, Dr. Avivah Zornberg, in her book on Exodus, the Particulars of Rapture, offers a beautiful possibility. If we look back one verse before God begins to pay attention, we see another set of four’s; we cried out in four different ways: the Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out, and their cry rose up…and God heard their moaning. Four different words for crying are used by the Torah to be matched by four different expressions for God listening and responding.
What does this mean? As Zornberg explains it, the turning point in the story of our enslavement, the moment that God goes from being absent and in hiding to listening and remembering us, is the moment that we cry out. Zornberg quotes the Hasidic master, the Sfat Emet, who describes it like this: “Before this we were so deep in exile that we did not feel we were in exile. Now that we understood exile and groaned, a little redemption began.” The Torah suggests that it is our crying that wakes God up and invokes God’s compassion and attention.
Our crying is redemptive because it transforms our “brutalized silence” to calling out in prayer. (p. 33) And that is the beginning of redemption. Redemption is closely tied to the ability to speak instead of being silent. Slavery is marked by silent suffering, and remember Moshe had a speech impediment and didn’t have the confidence in his ability to speak to Pharaoh and to lead his people. But redemption is marked by singing out as we crossed the sea, and we celebrate our redemption each year by speaking – by telling the story of the exodus at our seders – Maggid, the central part of the seder means “telling,” as does Hagadah. And so crying out, vocalizing, verbalizing begins the process of redemption.
Zornberg also brings the teaching of another Hasidic master, the Mei HaShiloach, who says that it’s actually God who arouses the cry within us. It’s God who wants to help us when we’re suffering, so God gives us the feelings of pain and rage and lack to stir within us our own cry, and that cry, that things are not right and need to change, that begins the movement toward redemption. In other words, when we cry out, it is the Divine within us, sparking the transformation from our suffering to our freedom.
So, we can’t know why there are times that God feels absent, times that God’s face is hidden from us. But sometimes from that absence, there emerges a cry within us. The Torah uses extra ink and parchment to describe four kinds of cries, paired with four kinds of responses from God, creating a pair between the two, a kind of call and response – suggesting to us that already in the crying out, there is a response to our suffering. Already in the vocalizing that something is wrong, we are listened to. Already in the speaking out about oppression, there is the beginning of freedom, and already in the prayer itself, in the prayer that says “where are You, God?” is the answer – that God is there.
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