Netvort Shemos 5773:            Landfill

By Rabbi Joshua (proliferatingly known as the Hoffer) Hoffman

The Torah describes the proliferation of the Jews in Egypt and concludes by saying “and the land was filled with them” (Shemos 1:7).  Rabbi Ephraim of Lunshitz, in his Keli Yakar, points out that the word used for “with them” should have been “meihem.”  Instead the word “osam,” which implies some kind of effect made by the land or the peoples, is used.  He says that this is an allusion to what the midrash says, that the Egyptians wished to murder the new-born Jewish children in the fields, but the earth miraculously swallowed them up and later sprouted them out.

The Netziv, in his HaAmek Davar, also notes the peculiar usage of “osam” instead of “meihem” but says that the word “osam” means “together with them” and constitutes a criticism of the way the Jews acted in Egypt after the death of Yaakov and his children. What happened, he says, is that the Jews ignored the teaching of Yaakov to maintain an insulated lifestyle in Goshen but, rather, spread throughout the land of Egypt and began to interact with the Egyptian people. This attempt at fraternization backfired, and caused the Egyptians to hate them, and led Pharaoh to issue decrees against them and enslave them. The Netziv sees this as the beginning of a pattern found throughout Jewish history in which anti-Semitism is generated by the efforts of the Jews to become part of general society.  Interestingly, I once heard Nechama Leibowitz, who was a great admirer of the Netziv’s commentaries, say that twentieth century Jewish history has shown that anti-Semitism does not make distinctions between Jews of different lifestyles, and attacks all of them indiscriminately, so that anti-Semitism remains an enigma that cannot be understood rationally. 

In any case, perhaps we can put a positive spin on our verse by referring to another comment of the Netziv that we have mentioned many times in the past. In his introduction to the book of Shemos, the Netziv says that the Behag refers to this book as “the second book.”  The reason for this, says the Netziv, is that while Bereishis presents the physical creation of the universe, Shemos presents its spiritual completion.  Rabbi Menachem Kasher, in an essay on the Rashbam's approach to the Torah's account of creation, says that Shemos is a recreation of the universe.  As such, there are many incidents, as well as verses, in Shemos that can be seen as advanced stages of incidents and verses in Bereishis.  Based on this idea, we can view our verse, “and the land was filled with them”, as an advanced version of the verse in Parshas Noach, “and the land was filled with theft” (Bereishis 9:11). This proliferation of the Jewish people in the land constituted a fulfillment of God’s design to populate the earth, on the one hand, but in a way that conformed to God’s code of ethics.  As the Keli Yakar points out, the opening verses of Shemos allude to the fact that the Jews maintained their basic identity as Jews even while in Egypt, and this enabled them, ultimately, to achieve redemption. Our verse, then, can be seen as a first step in re-creating the world in a way that avoided the corruption that overtook it after the primal creation. The earth, then, was beginning to be filled with a people who would form a nation that carried God’s name, thus bringing creation to its ultimate goal.