Excerpted from Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider’s Torah United: Teachings on the Weekly Parasha from Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and the Chassidic Masters, co-published by OU Press and Ktav Publishing House
Taking Our Time
In one of the most dramatic scenes in the Torah, Moshe orders Pharaoh, “Let my people go” (Exodus 5:1). Pharaoh’s response is swift:
On that day, Pharaoh ordered those overseeing the people and his officers saying, “You shall not continue to give straw to the people to make bricks . . . let them go and gather straw for themselves” (Exodus 5:6–7).
The Israelite slaves are forced to maintain their quota of bricks without being provided the raw materials with which to make them. This looks like a typical kneejerk reaction, “I’ll show them who they’re dealing with.” Pharaoh appears to be demonstrating to the Jews that their leader’s efforts on their behalf will only make things worse.
Various commentators, however, suggest that Pharaoh’s response is part of a calculated plan. Previously the toil was backbreaking, now it is meant to be soul-crushing. The Midrash tells us that in addition to withholding the physical components of the bricks, Pharaoh also eliminated a key temporal and spiritual space from the slaves’ lives: Shabbat. One of our greatest kabbalists and ethicists, the Ramchal, wrote about Pharaoh’s plan:
His intention was not merely to deprive them of all leisure so that they would not come to oppose him or plot against him, but he strove to strip their hearts of all thought by means of the enduring, interminable nature of their labor.
By severely overburdening the slaves without even a weekly reprieve, Pharaoh made them unfree to contemplate anything beyond survival.
The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidut, taught that alongside the physical exile of slavery in Egypt there was a spiritual exile of da’at, which we might translate as consciousness. Living on autopilot, the Israelites had no time to consider their lives, and collapsed in exhaustion at the end of each day of punishing labor.
Following Pharaoh’s new edict, the slaves complain to Moshe, who dutifully brings their complaint to God. When He commands Moshe to reassure them that the slavery will soon end and God will take them out of Egypt, the people do not listen due to “shortness of breath and hard labor” (Exodus 6:9). Overworked and oppressed, the slaves have never had a moment to catch their breath and see the larger picture. Pharaoh’s strategy worked.
Chassidut instructs that the Egyptian exile is a state of mind. Like Pharaoh, the evil inclination successfully uses this tactic against us on a daily basis, as further explained by the Ramchal:
This is one of the cleverer devices of the evil inclination – to mount pressure unrelentingly against the hearts of men so as to leave them no leisure to consider and observe the type of life they are leading. For it realizes that if they were to devote even a slight degree of attention to their ways, there is no question but that they would immediately begin to repent of their deeds and that regret would wax in them until they would leave off sinning altogether.
How are we to combat this? By practicing what the Ramchal terms zehirut, consciousness of and being attentive to our lives and our surroundings, which requires making time. In fact, the redemption of the slaves from Pharaoh’s iron fist, was, in a sense, set in motion by Moshe’s attentiveness and willingness to deviate from his set path, from his routine. “Moshe thought, ‘Let me turn aside now and see this great sight – why the bush does not burn up’” (Exodus 3:3). In a spare moment, he discovered God, and the rest is history.
We have the power to shape time, no matter how “pressed for time” we may be. The first commandment given to the Jewish people in Egypt was to sanctify the new moon. “God said to Moshe and Aharon in the land of Egypt, saying, ‘This month shall be before you the head of the months; it is the first of the months of the year for you’” (Exodus 12:1–2). With this, the Jewish people were given the power and responsibility to mark the passing months and create a calendar. Why does this mitzvah take precedence at this exact moment? God was conveying to the enslaved, whose daily regimen had been inflexibly set by demanding taskmasters, that they were now masters of their own time. Neither the sundial nor the clock rules the Jew.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov encouraged setting aside time every day to seclude oneself in order to think about life and meet God in a personal way. He referred to this as hitbodedut, self-seclusion. While Jewish observance breaks up the constant drone of everyday life that drowns out our thoughts, whether through daily prayer, Shabbat, or the Festivals, Rebbe Nachman felt more is necessary for man caught in the daily grind of the modern world. During hitbodedut, one can express, naturally and uninhibitedly, personal prayers and requests in one’s mother tongue, which engenders a closeness to God that is much harder to achieve through the fixed, statutory prayers recited in Hebrew.
We are all enslaved in our private Egypts by work schedules often set by others, and vacations or leisure time completely filled with activities that we impose upon ourselves. Today, the mark of success is often how busy one is. This state of being “too busy” has been identified by contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and physicians as one of the greatest maladies of our age. It impacts negatively on all of our relationships – with ourselves, with others, with God. How do we extricate ourselves from this Egypt? When we make time to identify our aspirations and yearnings through daily moments of self-reflection, we enhance our self-awareness, foster growth and creativity, and nurture those relationships. In short, we liberate ourselves.
