I'm going to try to make posts like this each Sabbath, if I can, assuming there is enough interest and discussion. A Parsha is a fixed portion of Torah. Tradition has many synogogues rotating these throughout the year, so that at the end of the cycle, the full Torah has been read and preached on. There are varying systems for this, but since these are written to an audience that largely does not do the weekly Parshas, I put no thought into which to use, opting to use the cycle I'm already on. This week's Parsha is from Exodus, 6:2-9:35, and is a part of the story of the Exodus out of Mitzrayim (Egypt). We get the name from the opening passage, "G-d spoke to Moses; He said to him, "I am the L-rd. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.." I've heard or read the story a hundred times, as most of us have, and there are any number of great Bible studies and sermons available online, but it is my hope that we can foster independent thinking, so I'm going to try to pose some noteworrtthy facts and questions first, to get dicsussion going. 1) Sometimes G-d spoke to Moses alone (i.e. 6:2, 10, 7:1, 8:1..), often telling Moses to relay a message to Aaron, but other times He spoke to Moses AND Aaron (7:8, 9:8..). Why do you think this was? 2) Moses is often depicted as the major player in the story, the primary conduit for G-d's will. But when we look deeper, the plagues were split up, some done by Aaron, some by Moshe, and some by G-d directly: -Aaron cast his staff on the ground, which turned into a snake, and swallowed the staff/snakes of Pharoah's magicians. -Moses confronts Pharoah at the river, yet Aaron raises his staff to turn the river into blood. -The same thing happens with the frogs. -Without either of them warning Pharoah, Aaron turns the dust into lice. -Moses warns Pharoah of the insects that will infest the land, and G-d does this directly(8:20) -Likewise with the death of the cattle -Moses warns Pharoah that the new plagues will be inflicted on "you, yourself, and on your earth" and then he is the one who raises his hands to the sky and calls for hail.. You can read the story yourself, I dont need to break each one down, and in fact we can go beyond the Parsha, and talk about the full list of plagues. But what is the symoblism behind the differences, when Aaron or Moses calls a plague, and when G-d does it directly without any human intervention? 3) Another interesting topic (to me) is Pharoah's hardness of heart. G-d told Moses ahead of time that Pharoah would be made hard-hearted. Late in the story, it appears that G-d directly made Pharoah hard-hearted (9: 12), but previously (and even after, 9:34) it seemed that Pharoah was hardening his own heart against the Israelites. Reading through the story, do you see significance in the people around Pharoah, or in that after being willfully hard-hearted long enough, the L-rd MADE him hard-hearted?

Post edited by: MattBob_SquarePants, at: 2007/01/20 08:28

I will wait for others to talk about this before I say anything (if I do even say anything). But I will say this: your knowledge of the Torah is noteworthy and I look forward to seeing these each Shabbat.