Daniel Price - Dvar Torah

This week’s Parshat is quite relevant to what’s going on in the world today, and to me personally. It tells the story of Moses’s attempts to free the Israelites from Slavery, his negotiations with the Pharoah, and the first 7 plagues. More than that it shows us how we have to keep trying, and that if we don’t give up, neither will Hashem.

This parasha tells us how Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt . God identified himself to Moses and told him to go and free the Israelites but Moses was afraid that they would not listen to someone with a stutter. So God sent Aaron, Moses’s brother, to help him speak.

They went to pharaoh and demanded that he let the Israelites go, telling him that their God had sent them. Pharaoh asked for proof and Moses transformed his staff into a snake. But then the pharaoh's prophets did the same with their staff’s, and the pharoah wasn’t convinced, even after Moses’s snake staff ate all the others. It was then that God began to send the plagues through Moses

Moses touched the water of the Nile with his staff and turned all the water  (Egypts life lines and only source of water) to blood - proving God’s power over nature and man. Pharoahs refused to let us go.

Moses brought forth frogs - Pharoah refused

5 further plagues followed:

Lice, Flys, The death of livestock, boils and Hail. Not just Hail but Hail of Fire!

Every time Pharoah refused. It would take three more plagues (Including the death of all of the first born Egyptians) before we would eventually be free. But I’ll save those for the next BMitzah student!

There are two things that we can take away from this parashat:

One is we must persist. If Moses had given up after only the first plague things would have turned out very different but he didn't; he kept coming back every  day until the Israelites were free. Victory most often comes simply to ones that are willing to try, again and again and again until they win. 

The second thing is G-d will always give you a chance to do things for yourself. Moses could not speak to pharaoh because of his stutter, but he wanted to try, and G-d was willing to help. G-d sent Aaron to help him speak. G-d could have sent all the plagues at once, or gone straight to the killing of the first born, but he didn’t, he kept giving the Egyptians chances to help themselves.

Life is difficult, especially for Jews across the world right now. I don’t need to list the problems we face, we see them everyday on social media, in newspapers, and written on walls around the world. But this weeks parsha tells us G-d will help us. As long as we are willing to get our heads down, never give up, and help ourselves.