Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Derivatives must be credited to Nebraska Stories of Humanity, made available non-commercially, and distributed under the same terms. Requests for permission for commercial publication or other use should be emailed to the project team.
This week's Sedra deals with the Ruler of Egypt who considered himself all powerful, and he can do with people whatever he wants.
When he noticed that the number of Hebrews raises, he enslaved them with hard labor.
Then God said to Moses, "Go to Pharoah and relay my messsage, "let the Hebrews free."
This infuriated the King and he made the slaves work even harder.
The phrase "Hardened his heart" means that God gave Pharoah several warnings with lesser plagues which he disregarded and had to be broken down with the severest ones.
The Hebrews finally went out of Egypt with the help of the Almighty and became free men.
They had to begin life anew under hardest conditions.
Those who valued freedom took up the challenge with faith in God. Others grumbled and wanted rather to go back to the fruitless slavery.
As I see it, God had a double purpose in doing that. The first one was to show that no matter how powerful a Ruler or a person is, he still is accountable for the exploitation of another human being. The second one is that we should never take things for granted.
In gratitude we should become better people and worship Him who is above everyone and everything because only He was--He is and will always be, while we are only passing through.
To remember this greatest event in human history--God commanded us to institute the "Passover"--and never enslave one another.
To be free does not mean that we can do whatever we want--but what we should and for a guide He gave us the "Ten Commandments", God's code of ethics for humanity.
How precious they are is evident, that after 3500 years we did not come up with better ones--despite out advances in technology, sciences and other fields.
Our ambition is to reach the sky, but we bypass to improve our human nature, making often an excuse that "We are only human."
We fail to understand and respect our fellow men, but we try hard to develop more accurate destructive devices which will only lead us to doom.
God created all people with the same characteristics and it is up to each one of us to develop the good ones and avoid the bad ones. The choice is ours.
He also made us a little different from one another and this is our right to be individuals.
Though Jews are a minority in the lands they live, they should never feel inferior.
They have a stronghold in God and his Torah from which the ethical values came to all people.
We see the tragedies created by following blindly the crowds or to appease others, but reason and decency should be our safeguards.
Lets guard our actions and wear our Jewishness with dignity to be a model to our children and not leave their upbringing to society.
We have a rich Heritage--important Holidays, each representing an important historical event--all reminders of God's graces to us.
Here we have a beautiful Jewish Community Center, three lovely synagogues, very deciated Rabbis and Cantors who share with us their knowledge of our Torah and their inspiring sermons when we attend the services and they help us with problems we cannot cope with ourselves.
This I call Judaism--a blessing which in many places Jews are deprived of.
Therefore I am taking the opportunity to express my gratitude and pray for all our brethren to appreciate these priviliges for which the generations before us worked and sacrificed with their dedication to our Faith, and we shall continue to keep it up for the next one.
Though we are constantly challenged and enticed with the glitter and ease of other faiths, ours is the root and "Tree of Life" and without it nothing can grow. It is our task to make it bloom and bring out the fruit.
The lesson of this week's "Sedra" has to be repeated constantly
because men are driven by ambitions and forget to consider the
reason they their