Dvar Torah on Parshat Shemot

Recently, a lot of ink has been spilled and pixels generated over the American-Jewish demographic question. A survey, commissioned by a leading American Jewish organization, at tremendous cost, initially seemed to indicate that the number of American Jews has dropped, and will continue to drop, at what is, for many, an alarming rate. In fact, these statistics are so alarming and threatening that the full survey has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, and will apparently not be released. A recent op-ed piece in the NY Times discussed this obsession with numbers, and strongly criticized it.

It is important to remember that this is no idle academic discussion (my apologies to the busy academics out there). There is a lot of money involved here; if our numbers are shrinking, and if that is a bad thing, and if the cause, as is generally believed, is inter-marriage, then we know in what direction to throw our communal money, and we know what kind of educational and communal policies to adopt. If numbers are not an issue, or if intermarriage is not a demographic problem, but, rather, an opportunity (we could double our numbers pretty quickly if we just decide to adjust our definitions of whom we want to count as Jews, as many are advocating), then perhaps we should be spending our Jewish money elsewhere, and in different ways.

I think that this week's Parsha offers us some interesting material pertaining to demographics. The Book of Exodus begins with what looks like a demographic survey. We are first told that the original 12 sons of Yaakov, while in Canaan, multiplied to a tribe of 70. Then, in Egypt, during the years after the death of Yosef and his brothers, "the children of Israel were fruitful and multiplied, they swarmed, became many, grew mighty in number, exceedingly, yes, exceedingly, and the land filled up with them." Surely a description of demographic health to warm the heart of any Jewish census-taker! And yet, the success that the Jewish people had in the numbers game did not, in fact, serve them well. The immediate effect of all this multiplying is to frighten the Egyptians into state-sponsored anti-Semitism: "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who knew not Yosef. He said to his people, the nation of the children of Israel is many, more and mightier than we. Come, let us use our wits against them." In order to oppress and control them, and limit their population growth, the Jewish people are gradually enslaved by the Egyptians.

In a dramatic narrative, we are told of the Egyptian people's growing distaste for the Israelites, who, no matter how badly they are persecuted, continue to thrive and grow numerically as a people. The Egyptian response is an ever-escalating series of abuses, climaxing, ultimately, in Pharaoh's awful decree:"And Pharaoh commanded his entire nation, saying, every boy that is born, throw him in the river, and every girl may be allowed to live." It is at this horrible and dramatic moment that the narrative comes to an abrupt stop and, in a very cinematic way, the scene shifts:"Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as a wife a daughter of Levi. The woman became pregnant and bore him a son." This son is, of course, Moshe, and the story now shifts from that of the entire people to that of Moshe's family - how his mother and sister, along with the daughter of Pharaoh, save him from Pharaoh's awful decree, and how he embarks on his subsequent career as the savior of his people.

From this point on, the focus of the story moves from the national to the personal. The people become a dim, usually annoying background to the closely-described actions, words, and emotions of Moshe and those close to him. As we follow his career, in this week's parsha and as it continues into the exodus from Egypt and the journey through the desert, we can not help but notice how reluctant the Torah seems to be to focus on the nation as an entity and prefers, rather, to focus on Moshe, essentially seeing the nation through his eyes.

I think the implication is clear. The nation's tremendous demographic success is not what saves it, or what ultimately gives it what it needs to survive. On the contrary, the big numbers lead to problems; they seem to invite anti-Semitism, and, as we watch Moshe during the course of his career, beginning with his failure in this week's parsha to make peace between the two fighting Israelites and continuing all through his interaction in the desert with this "stiff-necked people", the mass of Jews is depicted as a problematic bloc, stubborn, and difficult to manage and educate. It is the individual, starting with the parents of Moshe and continuing with Moshe himself, along with his brother and sister, who brings salvation.

The mass of the Jewish people is not the narrative focus of God in the Torah. They are almost always, when presented as a group, seen as difficult and unruly, in need of the acts of individuals to lead and inspire them. In terms of the contemporary debate about the 'how many Jews are there and how many will there be in 50 years time?', it would seem that this parsha is telling us that, as educators and community leaders, as Jews who care about the future of our people, our attention should NOT be turned only to the numbers, and to the Jewish people as an abstract entity, but, rather, to the specifics of creating families and individuals who will be exceptional, who will lead, who will step up to the plate, as Moshe and his family did, and, in spite of the lethargy of the mass of the population, act in an inspired and inspiring fashion. Judging from the way our parsha presents our people's history, the unit in which the Jewish community should be most interested is the individual; it is from he or she that salvation stems.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix