Parashat Shemot | Rabbi Felicia Sol | January 10, 2026

It was good to say goodbye to 2025.

New years offer new opportunities.

We can turn over a new leaf or make New Year's resolutions.

But the first week of 2026 has not felt so new.

It feels like more of the same

and maybe a little bit worse.

First came the invasion into Venezuela,

the capture of Maduro, and the death of approximately

4440 Venezuelans.

Then we marked the fifth anniversary of January 6th

and the assault on our capital.

All the people who did that are free.

And next, the killing of Rene Cogan,

a widow and mother of three children,

by Ice agents in Minneapolis.

In the wake of such

significant and horrifying events,

the leadership of this country mocks international law,

spews falsehoods about Rene Cogan, amongst many other things, and lacks

any moral leadership, compassion or attachment to truth.

A few days ago, about a week ago

now, Ezra Klein hosted an episode, an episode of his podcast,

and it was named This Question Can Change Your Life.

Has anyone listened to it?

And some okay.

I'm a regular listener of Klein's podcast,

but I had missed this one and Becca pointed me to it.

During the episode, Klein, who has a meditation

practice, talks about how hard it is right now to stay present

and less reactive in this

very unsettling world of ours.

How do we resist our constant need for certainty,

our impulsivity?

He puts the question to Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist meditation teacher and author

who has written a book with his wife Martine, called

What Is This?

What drew me into that

episode was their discussion about how curiosity, doubt

and wonder can open us up when we ask this question,

what is this?

Over and over again in fact, the author Stephen

Batchelor, spoke about doing this practice 12 hours a day, staring at a wall,

asking the question over and over again, what is this?

That will not be my personal practice.

But still, the point was well-taken.

What is this? Keep asking that question.

What would it mean to sit in that question?

What is this?

The question resists certainties

because it was continually asking, what is it?

So if you knew what it was, you wouldn't keep asking.

Instead, it invites an exploration

beyond our immediate thoughts and reactions

and lets us sit in the feelings of what they present for us

in that particular moment and open a door

to what it might reveal.

It resonated deeply me because it's difficult.

I think for me, many of us, if not all of us,

to live in this world where harshness and cruelty abounds.

Fueled overwhelmingly by those in the highest powers of our offices of power.

Listening to the news this week, I found myself on the one

hand, feeling rage and heartbreak and righteous indignation.

And on the other hand, I sensed a part of me like was dying

with a sense of despair and a sense of shutting down,

the sense of profound constriction

where nothing could penetrate.

Life under this administration

has made despair par for the course.

Add to all that that we are living

in a postdoc Tobar, seventh world's

both here and in Israel, and it comes with many things

with fear of anti-Semitism, with deep despair and rage.

Also at the Israeli government, with profound concern and heartbreak

for the inability to move past any sense

of possibility, for what's to come.

We're living in this world where everything is divided

into perpetrators and victims, good and evil.

There's a box for every person, every every experience to fit into

neat character categories of certainty,

which often feel impenetrable.

It makes it hard even to live in community

and hope for a path forward

beyond whatever our activism might be at this time.

And I know many here are very engaged on the issues at hand.

How do we stay open

and porous

to what might be possible, both in the soul

and in the world outside of us?

How do we stay open and porous?

And so the question, what is this?

Invites us to pause,

to get curious, to go

beyond our own immediate reactions, assumptions

and touch, to push beyond our constriction

and ask a question, what is this?

As we open a new book

in the Torah this week, the Book of Smote,

we encounter a new landscape for the Israelites.

Yaakov, Yosef and their generation have died off,

and the Torah says, you've any sort of power over you.

The various threats to the your beloved smooth

beam administered with similar Haaretz outcome.

But the Israelites were fertile and prolific.

They multiplied and increase very greatly

so that the land was filled with them.

Viacom

Omni time I share low yada gets yourself

a new king arose who did not know yourself.

This, according to most, is the major turning

point in the story when things go downhill.

It's the moment when realize that something has changed, and now moment

we know it's not going to be good for the people of Israel.

Many commentators at this point ask

bachelor's question what is this?

What is happening in this moment?

And one response is that the new

a new king, a new pharaoh did come to power.

And with the change of leadership comes new, a new story.

Right?

And another response suggests

that it was the same Pharaoh, the same king,

but he enacted new policies as if he didn't had and never known Yosef

Pyro, the king

has become fearful, according to the commentaries,

because the Israelites have grown so numerous,

their their proliferating in such capacity,

and so he becomes very afraid of what's going to happen

with the Israelites, though, as Doctor James Loeffler writes,

his fear, Pharaoh's fear, oscillates incoherently.

The Hebrews might be allies with external enemies,

or they might flee, depriving Egypt of slave labor.

Are they a potential fifth column who will join Egypt's enemies

or valuable assets whose departure would weaken the kingdom?

The Israelites are both an external threat

and now also a demographic danger.

It's very interesting if you think about that in response

to the world we're living in.

I'll leave that for another time, but it is worth reading Doctor

James Loeffler piece on this week's Paracha, which is and,

I think it's Reform Judaism.

It is this pact, the fear of, oh,

the fear that either the Israelites are going to attack

because they have come numerous or because they're going to disappear and lose.

Egypt will lose its force of its labor force.

That precipitates the force, that power.

Oh, the this that, that

that Piro uses on the Israelites.

And as Talmud Sota describes it, the Egyptians decision

decision to entice the Jewish people into slavery,

which began gradually subjugating them until they lose their freedom completely.

It speaks about how first they just invited them to do some labor,

and then it became harsh labor, and then it became more.

And then they were completely enslaved.

And so our story is told

with the evil, oh, the enormity of the suffering

of the Israelites and the trajectory of this narrative

from slavery to freedom, our redemption

song, the leitmotif of our tradition,

and often the story we turn to day in and day

out, both in our liturgy and in our world, writ large.

When we think of, of course, also what's coming up

next week marking Martin Luther King Jr weekend,

how he use this story as the leitmotif of the civil rights movement.

When the 16th

century Italian commentator asks, what is this?

What is happening on these two verses of the proliferation of the Israelites

and the arrival of the new king, he takes a radically different response

and focuses on the language

of in the verse where it says VI ish ritsu

via zoom, which literally means swarms,

that the Israelites swarms Egypt.

And he states.

After the last of the original 70 migrants had died,

the Israelites whole lifestyle became more like that

of creeping insects, creatures headed

for destruction.

Saw no notes

that though the annals of Egyptian history must have recorded

how Yosef saved Egypt from the famine, and therefore was highly esteemed,

the idea that the present day Hebrews deserves

special consideration on account of their illustrious forebears,

did not occur to anyone observing the way

these Hebrews behaved at the time.

In fact,

that means that Paro, there is a reason Pharaoh didn't recognize them

because they weren't behaving the way they used to behave.

They had lost their traditions.

They had lost their distinctiveness as a viva.

Zaun Burg writes in two generations

they lost their claim to their own names.

There are no names mentioned, actually, after the list of names.

When the people come down to Egypt, which begins the Alamo

at the beginning of the parish, once the names of those of that 70 group,

there are no actual names of people until Mosiah.

So she writes, in two generations they lost their claim to their own names,

and their swarming is not a token of blessing,

but a symptom of alienation from the that true self

that even a Pharaoh will acknowledge.

It's for no

offers a disruptive answer to what

took place during the opening lines of the Book of Smote.

He indicates that the Israelites distinguished themselves

not because of their spiritual refinement,

but quite the opposite,

and in contradiction to many commentators like Pure Rabbi,

these are a midrash that states that the Israelites merited

going forth from Mizrahim from Egypt because they hadn't

changed their names or their language, or they didn't slander one another's.

Foreknow contends that the Israelites moral decline

and assimilation was their very own responsibility,

and it was in fact a part of who they were before

they became enslaved.

I want to pause for a moment, because one might conclude,

then, that sworn understanding absolves Pharaoh.

Pharaoh. But it does not.

He is still cruel.

He dehumanizes the Israelites, he exploits their vulnerability.

And he is guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty

even if he is not solely responsible for the predicaments of the Israelites.

And of course, he is not only abhorred by the Israelites, but by God.

If we sit with sworn oaths, a

radically different approach to the behavior of the Israelites,

we might sit with that question

what is this?

What is this about?

This story of our people?

We might live into the depths of the complexity of this story, rather

than simplifying it and into the depths of the complexity

of our own predicament, and live and set into it.

What is this?

What might be possible when we resist

a simple narrative?

Aviva Gorenberg writes, Sparano

has constructed a narrative of failure, guilt, punishment

where the biblical texts seem to give us only the facts of suffering.

Concentrating on responsibility for one's own predicaments

creates an emotional world in which inner growth

becomes imaginable.

I'm going to say the second part again.

Concentrating on responsibility for one's own predicaments

creates an emotional world in which inner growth becomes imaginable.

So what, then, is this story of redemption?

If we think about it from forno perspective?

Because if you think of the story of the people of Israel, according to

Soros Reed, it really changes the meaning of redemption.

If you think that the Israelites were not pure,

that they were not just God's people, if they were more complicated

than the ones that had to be saved, it

changes the meaning of redemption.

Redemption, then, is not simply rescue

from oppression or extraction of the innocent.

It is not only liberation from Egypt,

but salvation from moral erosion.

It is not only about taking off the shackles of bondage,

but a restoration of human and spiritual dignity.

Foreknow undermines

the comforting idea that suffering

automatically ennobles.

Suffering alone does not purify.

Israel's affliction does

not begin because they were already enslaved.

It unfolds alongside spiritual coarsening.

Redemption, then, cannot be earned

by pain alone.

Redemption cannot be earned by pain alone.

It's for reading also does not idealize the redeemed.

God acts not because

Israel is blameless, but because they are in danger

of disappearing as a moral people altogether.

Redemption is thus an act of covenantal commitment,

not moral endorsement.

I assume

redemption is thus.

It's rough to be a baby.

Redemption

is thus an act of covenantal commitment,

not moral endorsement.

A rescue motivated by love, not by merit.

And of course, in this narrative telling, if Israel is not fully virtuous

at the moment of redemption, then the Exodus.

Exodus is not the climax of moral achievement.

It is the beginning of moral responsibility,

which is actually the way the Torah is constructed.

Of course, because we get the Torah after the Exodus,

which supposedly should be the guide path for moral responsibility

for nose reading, makes the Exodus into

not an an enduring kind of leitmotif

for this powerful story of redemption,

but an enduring cautionary tale,

assimilation and comfort,

and cozying up with power

can corrode just as much as persecution.

Redemption is needed

not only when we are oppressed and endangered,

but when we are losing ourselves.

The danger is not only external hatred,

but internal erosion.

This story of redemption that appears in this book

and starts in the very beginning of these first scheme,

of these first verses, resets our narrative.

It arrests the dehumanization and more decline

and degeneration of Israel.

And it teaches us

we, and by extension, the world

in all of the complexity of our existence,

that everyone is still redeemable.

There are plenty of heroes living amongst us,

and pyro's crimes abound in our world.

The hatred of the other, the immigrants,

the stranger,

the hunger and abuse of absolute power,

the disregard of basic decency,

the desecration of language itself,

and a commitment to the truth.

This is the water that we are all swimming in.

This is the culture of the world we are living in.

This is the leadership that is being modeled

in this country and in Israel too.

And in many places around the world.

And it is certainly possible

and even probable either to become immune

to its pernicious ness

or to become adaptable

to it, and complicit in its

or to become so hardened,

then we can't see any way out.

All of those things are Mizrahim.

All of those things are servitude.

And so it is our religious duty.

I believe,

to ask ourselves, what is it?

Because by asking of ourselves, what is it?

We open up the possibility of not being so hardened,

and instead of hardening our hearts

and living in our certainties

and in categorizing the world

in all these boxes

and desperately preserving our own self, a right sense of rightness

and infallibility, maybe we like sueno

as individuals, as a Jewish community

and Jewish people, and as Americans

need to invite in our questions and doubts

and stay with the uncertainty of it all

and what is unknowable and the things that we will never know.

And in the question, what is this?

What is this?

Find the ethical and moral demand.

Then maybe, just maybe,

redemption will be on its way.

Shabbat Shalom.