Hello All!
We had a great week this week! We are moving forward in
our Shemot text and talking about the section where Pharaoh decides to put a
road block in front of the Jews, so he refuses to let them have straw (needed
for making bricks), and Pharaoh expects the Jews to fill their brick quota,
without the materials needed. Clearly, it is impossible. The foremen (also Jewish) are in charge of
the slaves and things go a bit haywire.
The slaves blame the foremen, the foremen blame Pharaoh, Pharaoh blames
Moses, and Moses blames God for things going South. This passage reminds me of my childhood home.
My brother,
sister, mother and I were always pointing fingers and passing the blame up and
down the chain of command. It was a mad
house. I also remember (ok.. in all
honesty, things still kind of operate this way) that even though my brother and
sister and I did not get along - as in I would have bitten off my sister's arm
to ride shotgun on any given day.. and at 43, I probably still would... - and we fought incessantly, that when my
parents were being "unreasonable" (you know.. like they refused to
let us have ice cream 3 x in a day, or they thought that playing indoor water
balloon tag at 1 a.m. was a bad idea)... when that kind of 'parental abuse of
authority' was happening in the Silverman household, that my brother, sister
and I would band together to "take down" the dictatorship that was my
parents.
Don't get me wrong. We HATED each other. I spent the better part of my childhood
convincing my sister that she was adopted and trying to change my brother's
perfect A report card to Cs, just for entertainment (I was, I might add, quite
skilled at using carbon copy paper on his report card. Luckily, I was a child
of the 70 and 80s, because my snark never would have survived the digital age),
but when my mom or dad was ... you know... being a parent, David, Jessica and I
were tight. We would do whatever it took
to make sure that the Silverman kids WON the war against the raging
dictatorship of mom and dad. We didn’t
give up. We were united. Now the second
we got our way, we continued hitting and pushing each other, but that's another
story... another time...
We talked about this dynamic (minus the part where I used
to try to derail my brother's perfect report card and dismember my sister), and
about how we have groups of people that we engage with, with whom we don't get
along, BUT once we have a greater enemy, we tend to band together. The kids TOTALLY got this. All you have to do is say: think of a class that you don't particularly love the
teacher (naturally, I told them that I was SURE I was not in their minds :)),
then think about the kids in that class and the one's that you don't
particularly get along with or like. Now
think about a time when that teacher was super unfair: what did you all
do? Unanimously, they said "we all
get together and talk about the teacher." Some things don't change. We did the same thing in the 70s and
80s. A "greater evil" is the
greatest unifier.
Now, back to Shemot.
The Israelites are all fighting with each other. They are mad at their
fellow slaves. Mad at the taskmasters. Mad at Moses. Moses is Mad at God. And God does not act like my parents did in
good old 1979, instead of doling out consequences and subtly veiled
child-friendly curses, God tells Moses "I got this covered."... or
something like that. God basically says,
"wait til Pharaoh sees the show.. .and MAN do I have a good one to put
on." This is a turning point in the
narrative. The Jews will band together and unify against Pharaoh. That is, until things go good for a minute or
two, and then they all complain again, but we are not there yet!
To emphasize this point, we had a lego activity where the
kids had to build 50 legos in 10 minutes, all of equal size and all with wheels
on them. They were in groups, unable to speak to each other and they could only use one hand to
build. Each group had a taskmaster who
could talk and tell them what to do and yell (within reason.) The task was impossible. There were only 8
wheels in the bin. The kids got
frustrated and mad. They started breaking rules. They blamed each other. It was complete entropy. And it perfectly exemplified the system that
fell apart in the torah. We watched a
bit of the Lego movie (more to come on that and how we will tie it in).
Finally, the rabbinical candidate came Tuesday and spoke to us about anti-Semitism
a bit. Sunday, Mr. Miles, our Ramah fellow extraordinaire will join us to bring
our lesson to a new level. Can't wait.
Have a great week, and just an FYI, that I did restrain
myself and my sister still has all of her limbs intact. And I am also sure that
sitting in the front seat as a child is not a safety issue, but a group of moms
somewhere in the late 80s decided that they couldn’t take listening to their
kids fight over shotgun anymore, and so a law was mandated to put all children
under 12 in the back seat. Really: it is only logical....
See you Sunday,
Leah
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