Parashat Vaera: Redemption and Responsibility: The Voice Fear Tried to Silence

This week marks the beginning of the journey toward the redemption of the People of Israel—a beginning still devoid of epic grandeur. There are no visible miracles yet, no victories to celebrate. There are only words, spoken before an exhausted people. Words that are vast, even overwhelming, for those living under the crushing weight of forced labor and daily humiliation:

“I am the Eternal; and I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egypt, and I will deliver you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God.”

Four verbs. Four promises. Four languages of redemption.

The Talmud connects these four promises—Arba’ah Leshonot shel Geulah—with the four cups of wine we drink on the night of the Passover Seder (Jerusalem Talmud, Pesachim 10:1).

There is something deeply revealing in the way the Talmud understands this mitzvah of the four cups.

A well-known halakhic principle states that women are exempt from positive commandments that are bound to a specific time (mitzvot aseh she-hazman graman). Yet this principle does not apply to the four cups that commemorate the Exodus from Egypt. Why? Because, says the Talmud, women were part of that miracle (Pesachim 108a).

They were not spectators of redemption.

They were a condition for its possibility.

Our sages say this without hesitation:

“By the merit of the righteous women, our ancestors were redeemed from Egypt”(Yalkut Shimoni, Tehillim 68).

And among them emerges a figure both quiet and decisive: Miriam.

The Midrash places us in one of the darkest moments of the narrative.

Pharaoh’s decree orders that all male infants be cast into the Nile. Confronted with such violence, Amram—one of the leaders of his generation—decides to divorce his wife. He chooses not to bring new life into a world that seems to have rejected life altogether. And the people follow his example.

It is then that a young girl rises to confront her father and speaks words that still unsettle us today:

“Your decree is harsher than Pharaoh’s. Pharaoh decreed only against the males; you have decreed against both males and females. Pharaoh decreed only concerning this world; you have decreed concerning this world and the World to Come…” (Talmud, Sotah 12a).

There is no naïveté here. There is clarity.

Miriam understands that when fear dictates decisions, the oppressor has already won something essential: the cancellation of the future.

Because of her intervention, Amram returns to his wife. Because of that return, Moses is born. The Torah hints at this with a spare, almost technical phrase, and the Talmud reveals what lies beneath it: that man followed the counsel of his daughter.

Miriam does not deny the danger.

She does not romanticize reality.

But she refuses to allow terror to determine the future.

And because of that refusal, the Torah can state—almost in a whisper, as a prelude to everything that will follow:

“A man from the house of Levi went and took a daughter of Levi as his wife”(Exodus 2:1).

“Where did he go?” asks the Talmud.

“He went after the counsel of his daughter.”

Moses is born because someone refused to turn despair into death.

And yet, when that same Moses later speaks in God’s name, the people cannot hear him. Not because of a lack of faith, but because of exhaustion. The Torah does not spiritualize trauma—it names it. The oppression of the spirit and the brutality of the labor have stripped the people of the ability to imagine something different. The deafness is emotional.

This detail is decisive.

Redemption does not begin by demanding hope; it begins by acknowledging harm. No heroism is demanded from those who are broken. Before any miracle, the text carefully describes the system that dehumanizes.

And here, the parashah becomes unsettlingly contemporary.

Because it forces us to take a stand against the Egypts of every generation.Against regimes that imprison, silence, persecute, and kill in the name of order.Against systems that normalize cruelty as governance.

And alongside peoples who dare to raise their voices, fully aware of the price they may pay. Supporting a revolution against oppression is not political romanticism—it is moral consistency.

But that consistency demands more. It requires the unequivocal rejection of every unnecessary death, every crushed life, every human being reduced to collateral damage. The Torah never celebrates bloodshed—not even when the oppressor falls.

What unfolds next in the narrative is not arbitrary magic from an all-powerful God, but the gradual collapse of a system built on exploitation. When power is sustained by cruelty, it becomes ungovernable. It does not fall for lack of strength, but from an excess of violence.

Supporting the pursuit of freedom in the face of oppression is not a slogan; it is an ethical consequence of our tradition. Yet that coherence has clear boundaries. The Torah does not glorify death. It does not justify bloodshed, even when the tyrant is struck down. Every life destroyed is a moral failure, never an acceptable cost.

That same ethic confronts us when hatred is once again legitimized in spaces that call themselves democratic. When antisemitism resurfaces with new language but familiar mechanisms; when a climate is enabled in which Jews are once again singled out, mocked, or held collectively responsible—even in cities like New York; when a Synagogue is burned and the claims are not heard, when the glorification of terrorist organizations such as Hamas is tolerated under the guise of manipulated, ignorant rhetoric that disguises violence as virtue—Jewish memory does not allow neutrality or silence.

But neither does it allow moral arrogance.

Having been slaves does not automatically make us righteous. History is not a certificate of ethical superiority. It is a burden of responsibility.

When the suffering of others becomes abstract, when human dignity is subordinated to interests, identities, or slogans, the danger is clear: we begin to resemble what we claim to oppose. Our tradition does not promise that power will not corrupt us—it warns us that it can.

That is why the Exodus does not begin with the splitting of the sea, but with a far quieter and more demanding decision: not to cancel the future, not to justify the unjustifiable, not to allow fear to dictate our ethics.

That was Miriam’s act.

And that remains the challenge.

Shabbat Shalom u’Mevorach

Rabbi Gustavo Geier