Parshas Shmos

Bs”d

Parshas Shmos (5774)
by Mordechai Dolinsky

Awesome, Pharaoh is making a great effort to eliminate the savior of Yisrael and Basya, his daughter, brings him to the palace of Pharaoh, to be part of his personal household. Awesome, hakol biyedai Shomayim. Basya had the zchus of giving the name to the Rebbi of Klal Yisroel and the name Moshe was a memorial that she took him from the water, her intention probably being that it should be a constant reminder for him that he was not really part of the Egyptian royalty. We can see its success in where his loyalty lay in the incident of his killing the Egyptian.

2:10 Rashi brings two subtle differences in the meaning of Moshe. In loshon Arami it means taking out, the connotation being just going from one place to another. In Ioshon Ivri it means to remove, the connotation being the evacuation of something from where it doesn’t belong. An insight into the significance of this can be that Moshe, through the giving of the Torah to Klal Yisroel, lifted Klal Yisroel from the life of empty materialism and put them down in a different plane of existence. This may represent two ways of understanding the relationship of the simple materialistic world and the world he brought us to. How much are we connected to or part of it in essence? Did he just put us on a higher plane of existence or remove us from a place that we don’t really belong at all to a new and different level of existence?

Moshe Rabeinu, Moshe Rabeinu; Yismach Moshe b’matnas chelko.

Bracha V’Hatzlacha.