The New Shul

Parshat Sh’mot

This week’s parashah, Sh’mot, tells the story of our enslavement in Egypt and the beginning of our liberation. The parashah opens by recounting the names of the children of Israel who had gone down to Egypt many years earlier.

According to the Baal Shem Tov, the Torah recounts those names to hint at how God will ultimately redeem their descendants. Slaves are anonymous. They have no claim to dignity, no identity of their own. Redemption from oppression always starts as an internal process. It begins when those who are oppressed reclaim their sense of self, when they remember that they are not anonymous cogs in a machine but human beings with names, individuals deserving of dignity, unique images of God. The story of our liberation starts with names, according to the Baal Shem Tov, in order to teach us that redemption means remembering who we really are.

The challenges of everyday life – not to mention those in times of crisis – erode our sense of self. Anxiety degrades our dignity. It makes us forget that we are images of God. When that happens, we too are in Egypt.

At those times, it is our mitzvah to liberate each other. Even just a smile, a word of encouragement, an acknowlegement of one another’s presence, can be profoundly redemptive. Those small things have the power to remind another person that s/he matters,  that s/he is a human being created in God’s image. By reminding one another who we are, we all have the capacity to be redeemers.