Facing Your Personal Egypt

Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar

This Dvar Torah for Parshat Va'eira was edited from one written by Dr. Jane Shapiro, the co-founder of Orot Center, a Chicago-based organization.

Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash

Have you ever had a CAT scan or MRI? They send you to a room that looks like something out of Star Trek.

 

If you are like me, you shudder to even think about it. There is something about the machinery, the clanking noise, the lights and the freezing room that is just plain scary.

 

Most of all, however, is that table in the middle.

 

You climb up and have to lie on a very narrow space and just wait for the exam to be over.

 

In Hebrew, a narrow space is called Meytzarim, "straits" geographically, but also any place that constricts you physically or personally.

 

It is also embedded in the word Mitzrayim, which is the Hebrew name for the Land of Egypt.

 

Advanced medical technologies are so important, and we are lucky that they exist. But by making us vulnerable and small, they constrict our lives in some way.

 

I think of this week's parsha, Va'eira, and find a path that gives me some strength of spirit…

 

What is Egypt according to Jewish tradition? It is much more than a country, an ancient place where our ancestors were once slaves to Pharaoh, or the birthplace of our Moses.

 

Egypt in the Jewish imagination becomes any place of narrowness, any place that holds you back or limits you in some way.

 

We may go through life feeling confined by so many things:

 

  • expectations,
  • ideas we tell ourselves about the way things are "supposed" to be,
  • relationships that are painful,
  • the words we choose to use every day,
  • any time we miss the mark and do not meet our potential.

 

These are all Egypt moments, and we experience them each and every day.

But our limitations and constraints do not necessarily define us.

 

Because in Jewish tradition Egypt and its narrowness is just the first part of a story of freedom and redemption. "Once we were slaves but now...."

 

We are all enslaved to something, but inside of each of us is also a free person, a person of wholeness.

 

We are enjoined by God and our beautiful, wise Jewish tradition to make the micro-choices each day with our words and deeds, to act with freedom and dignity.

 

Like Moses, we can unify our inner voice and the words we speak to find a path away from what frightens us towards what makes us strong.

 

Kavannah

Can you identify some place of constraint in your life, a personal Egypt? When are you lying on that "narrow table," and holding your breath. Try to find release from the constraint, freedom from whatever is your fear. Feel how when it is released, it gives way to expansiveness, redemption and love.

Shabbat Shalom!

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