From: JoshHoff@aol.com

Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 4:54 PM

To: JoshHoff@aol.com

Subject: Netvort:parshas Shemos, 5769

                                             Who Needs Enemies?

                       By Rabbi Joshua (bitterly known as The Hoffer) Hoffman


  After the death of Yosef and his generation, the Egyptians began to enslave the Jews who lived in Goshen. Ramban describes the process as an evolution from simple, relatively easy work to humiliating, backbreaking labor. The Torah refers to this labor as 'parech,' or hard labor (Shemos 1:13). The midrash breaks this word into two, reading it as 'peh rach,' or a soft voice. The midrash explains that at first, Pharaoh only had them do easy tasks that he himself did along with them, but, eventually, had his agents force them to do work that was actually very strenuous. To commemorate this process and our salvation from it, we eat, at the Pesach seder, marror, or bitter herbs, which at first are sweet but, eventually, are bitter, as the Talmud in Pesachim (39a), tells us. The Kesav Sofer asks, in his Torah commentary, why there is a need to commemorate the early part of the process, consisting of easy work. He answers by citing the Yerushalmi in Pesachim (2:5), that views the process in a wider context, in the sense that, at first, when Yaakov and his family came to Egypt, they were treated very nicely, and given land in Goshen, the best quality of land in the country, on which to live. Only after Yaakov died did the actual  enslavement begin. However, the enslavement was that much more bitter, because the Jews had previously been treated nicely, and thought that the Egyptians were their friends. In this way, in a sense, in retrospect, the sweet aspect of the nation's stay in Egypt actually contributed to the bitterness that came later.

  Although the Kesav Sofer does not mention this, the particular acuity of bitterness that comes from the change of an erstwhile friend's attitude, is described by King David in Tehillim (chapter 55), in which he describes the treachery with which his former friend and mentor, Achisophel, treated him when he joined the rebellion of Dovid's son, Avshalom, who tried to take over the kingship. Achisophel's actual goal, as the rabbis tell us, was to eventually kill Avshalom and become king himself. David writes that he now sees that he can only trust in God. This was the conclusion of the Jewish nation as well, after experiencing the treachery of the Egyptians, and seeing that even after Pharaoh died and a new king took over, the benefit that Yosef had brought to Egypt was still forgotten, and they were still treated brutally. All they had left to do at that point was to cry out to God. The marror that we eat at the seder is expressive of the kind of bitterness that is generated by the betrayal of friendship that was experienced in Egypt.

  Perhaps we can add to the Kesav Sofer's explanation the fact that the people themselves contributed to the eventual bitterness that they experienced by becoming comfortable in Egypt, and forgetting that they were actually in exile from Eretz Yisroel. Rav Dovid Feinstein recently explained how it was that the people felt the distress of the enslavement only after Yaakov died (see Rashi to Bereishis 47:28). He said that when they accompanied Yaakov's body from Egypt to Eretz Yisroel for burial, they considered returning to Eretz Yisroel. However, as the Torah tells us, they left their children and animals behind. They must have been told to do this, according to Rav Dovid, by the Egyptians, as an assurance that they would come back after the funeral. Thus, the people now realized that what they had thought was a nice vacation home in Goshen was, actually, just a prison. In retrospect, then, they had been imprisoned from the very beginning, and the realization of this was particularly bitter. We are, then, enjoined to eat at the seder, marror, which is initially sweet but eventually bitter, to drive home the additional lesson of not making the same mistake that the Jewish people made in Egypt, and to realize that, no matter how sweet our conditions in golus may be, we are, when all is said and done, still in exile.


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