Parashat Shemot: Leadership, Conscience, and the Courage to Protect Life

With this week’s parashah, Shemot, one era comes to a close and another begins. Yaakov, Yosef, and their brothers have passed from the world, and a new king rises in Egypt. This is more than a change of government; it is a shift in paradigm. Power no longer recognizes history, gratitude, or humanity—it chooses the path of oppression and dehumanization of the people of Israel.

It is in this dark landscape that the Torah first presents us with the figure of Moses, our teacher and leader, the man who will free the people and transmit the Torah. Yet Moses does not appear as the archetype of the confident, heroic leader. When God calls him, he responds with a question that echoes through the generations:

"Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?" (Shemot 3:11)

Moses does not feel worthy, nor capable. He sees himself as small before the enormity of the mission. And he is not alone in this reaction. Throughout our history, great leaders have doubted:

Shaul hid among his household goods,

Jonah tried to flee to Tarshish,

Jeremiah protested that he was too young,

and Moses himself insists:

"I am slow of speech and tongue" (Shemot 4:10),

and later:

"How will Pharaoh listen to me, if I am slow of speech?" (Shemot 6:12).

The question is inevitable: among the six hundred thousand Hebrews who left Egypt, was there no one more eloquent, more charismatic, more self-assured? Why did God choose someone who needed his brother to speak for him?

Perhaps, that is exactly why.

Moses’ mission was not to dazzle—it was to serve. He was not meant to make the people fall in love with him, but to guide them to the Torah. Moses would be the bridge between God and the people, the instrument of redemption, but not its center. God did not want a leader who would create false expectations or confuse charisma with truth. God wanted the people to fall in love with the message, not the messenger.

It’s like those advertising blunders where the commercial dazzles so much that you can’t remember what product was being sold. When the flash overshadows the substance, the purpose is lost. The same happens in public life: when we choose based on style rather than substance, we never really know what we are choosing. That is why God chose Moses: so that, if the people were to fall in love, it would be with the Torah alone.

But the Torah teaches us something even deeper. Before Moses, before miracles, before plagues, redemption begins with two women: Shifrá and Puá, the midwives.

Pharaoh gives them a clear order: kill the babies, and the Torah responds with a revolutionary line:

"The midwives feared God… and let the children live" (Shemot 1:17).

Redemption begins with a quiet act of ethical defiance. Not speeches, not power—but the decision to protect life.

Rashi explains that Shifrá cared for the baby’s body—she cleaned, protected, and tended to its health—while Puá cared for its soul, speaking gently, calming it, comforting it. Technique and compassion. Professionalism and humanity. They did not work alone or mechanically: they worked in partnership, and they looked at the person before them.

Amid slavery and cruelty, they were light. And it is no coincidence that the Torah chooses to begin the journey toward redemption with such figures. A people is built not only with visible leaders and solemn laws, but with those who can say “no” when an order contradicts ethics, and “yes” when someone’s life is at stake.

Each of us is on a mission. At times, its enormity paralyzes us, because we feel we lack the strength, the voice, or the capacity. But therein lies the mistake: the mission is not measured by its content, but by the devotion, dedication, and commitment we bring to it.

Parashat Shemot marks the passage from intimate history to collective history. Bereshit spoke of a family; Shemot speaks of a people. And this people is defined not only by its destiny, but by its values. The Torah is not delivered in ideal conditions, but in the middle of the wilderness, teaching us that even there, human dignity can and must be preserved.

Today, in a world rife with legitimized violence, dehumanizing discourse, and orders that attempt to silence conscience, this parashah speaks to us with force. True danger begins not with explicit hatred, but when indifference becomes normalized and obedience is mindless.

When a woman dies in custody, when immigration policy turns blind to human suffering, when state machinery executes procedures without conscience, we face—however uncomfortable to admit—the same question that Shemot poses: what happens when we obey without ethics, and worse, when wrongdoing is not punished but approved?

It is a moral alarm. It reminds us that the danger starts not when someone hates, but when many accept that “this is how things work.” Shifrá and Puá could have said: it’s not our responsibility. They could have hidden behind the system. But they chose to fear God over power.

Pharaoh also had laws. He had arguments of security, control, and stability. But the Torah does not legitimize them. It exposes them.

And the same is true today when we look at Iran, or at the last 20 years in Venezuela, where people rise—women, youth, ordinary citizens—demanding dignity, life, and freedom, and a regime responds with repression, imprisonment, and death. Again, the same pattern: fear as a tool, violence as language, dehumanization as governance.

The Iranian regime does not fear chaos; it fears conscience. Every totalitarian system knows that the true enemy is not the noisy protest, but persistent ethical resistance. That is why it punishes, silences, and executes. Every person who refuses to obey an unjust order becomes, like Shifrá and Puá, a crack through which redemption can enter.

Shemot teaches us that God does not begin liberation with thunder or plague, but with people who refuse to normalize evil. Before Moses, there are midwives. Before visible leadership, there is conscience. Before the miracle, there is human responsibility.

The message comes back to us, full force:

Not all of us will be Moses,

but all of us can be Shifrá or Puá.

Not all of us will speak before Pharaoh,

but each of us chooses—every day—whether to protect life or look the other way.

When we closed Bereshit, we said Chazak, Chazak, Venitchazek: be strong, and let us strengthen each other. When we begin Shemot, we understand what kind of strength is needed today—not fanaticism, not empty shouting, not sterile confrontation that leads nowhere. But the strength of temperance, moral clarity, and active humanity.

May we reject selfish and futile goals, those that do not build community nor heal wounds but deepen divisions. May we have the courage to uphold human dignity even when systems push in the opposite direction. May we learn from Moses that true leadership is measured not by eloquence, but by fidelity to the message. And may we learn from Shifrá and Puá that even at the margins, even in silence, the course of history can be changed.

Because yesterday in Egypt, today in Iran, today at our borders and in our cities, redemption always begins the same way: when someone chooses to protect life, resist dehumanization, and act with conscience.

Shabbat Shalom Umevoraj.

Rabbi Gustavo Geier