By Eliana Kahan
Sunlight slowly enters my window and my eyes open. I mumble birkhot hatorah, the daily blessings on studying Torah, as I make my way downstairs and across the sunny dried out winter Israeli landscape to the chadar ochel of kibbutz shefayim. Coffee. I breath in the warm scent and sneak the cup back to my room.
I pray alone this Shabbat morning, quietly whispering my way through the many psalms screaming out God’s greatness. I think. I think through my week and the week ahead of me. I glance at the clock. I quickly snap out of my musings and finish t’fillah. I walk briskly to the room our cohort has been meeting in throughout the week.
A few friends sit playing games with the Rabbis’ children. Time moves slowly. Shabbat Ba’boker. Aaron Torop, a fellow cohort member, begins his Torah Study session on Parshat Shemot. He explains and leads birkhot hatorah to the small cluster of people who have come to study.
Nachshon participants trickle in as Aaron continues. The many morning prayer options have finished and people gradually come together out of their own individual motivations to study Torah.
I turn to my study partners, Dan Afriat and Sam Balogh, and read the texts in front of us. “Parashat Shemot – The Power of Individual Resistance” the title on Aaron’s sheet frames the characters of Parshat Shemot as ethical actors. The midwives, Pharaoh's daughter, Moshe’s family, and Moshe himself come together to form a picture of human collective movement towards freedom.
I pick up on a pattern in the paragraphs pasted on the paper before me:
(1:17) וַתִּירֶאןָ הַמְיַלְּדֹת The midwives saw, feared
(2:2) וַתֵּרֶא אֹתוֹ כִּי־טוֹב הוּא She saw him, that he was good
(2:5) וַתֵּרֶא אֶת־הַתֵּבָה בְּתוֹךְ הַסּוּף She saw the basket amid the reeds
(2:6) וַתִּרְאֵהוּ אֶת־הַיֶּלֶד She saw him, the child
(2:11) וַיַּרְא בְּסִבְלֹתָם He saw their suffering
Before each of these individuals act, they observe. The Hebrew root י.ר.א. means both to see and to fear, to be aware. The Exodus comes closer as actors open their eyes.
I look up at my fellows now clustered in crowded concentric circles sharing pages of text. In the almost still time of Shabbat morning, a community sits together examining words of Torah. As individuals look at what the text has to say, an active community slowly begins to form.
