Why is the first law, after the Ten Commandments that is, to do with slavery? One reason may be that the Israelites have just themselves emerged from slavery, so the first thing they should regulate is slavery itself, thereby avoiding the mistreatment of the weakest in society. Another reason could be that God, in his infinite wisdom, knows that one of the hardest sins to eliminate is the exploitation of others. Last year I mentioned how little time has gone by since the abolition of slavery in the United States and in the British colonies of the Caribbean. I did not remind you that slavery exists until this day, not only in some Arab and African countries, not only in South Asia, but here, in Europe, in Britain. Think of how some refugees are abused and sold into prostitution and forced to labour for meagre, or no, wages. How desperately we need the laws of Mishpatim, the injunctions against murder, kidnap, injury (of slaves, again), stealing, putting your neighbours and your neighbours’ animals in danger by a reckless lack of common concern. How the poor and weak needed, and still need, protection against cruelty and selfishness.

Besides the practical and the moral, there are deeply spiritual, even mystical elements in Mishpatim. God says he will send an angel to safeguard the people on their way. The people for once, speak with one voice in accepting God’s word. Moses, Aaron, his sons Nadav and Avihu, and seventy of the elders go up and see “a vision of the God of Israel, and under His feet was something like a sapphire brick, like the essence of a clear (blue) sky”. Moses then ascends higher and God’s glory descends and rests on Mount Sinai. This is the reverse of the story of the Tower of Babel, when man, in his hubris, tried to reach the heavens. Now, in a way, Moses does reach the heavens. Because he goes up with great humility, God comes down with great grace.

With Terumah we move from a blueprint for building a just society to a blueprint for building a sacred space, upon which the moral and the social will be based. Fittingly, the first of God’s instructions to Moses is to have the people make Him an offering “from everyone whose heart impels him to give”. In other words, the foundation stone of both the sacred and the social-moral is willingness. The people choose to make the Covenant.

And you can choose to come to our service this Saturday at 10.30 to take part in our service. It will be led by Pat Lipert.

Imagine the wonder of it: to witness the plagues, each one more awful than the one before, to see the hail lash the land and darkness to descend for three days, but only outside the Israelite neighbourhoods, to sense the angel of death passing overhead but to be safe inside one’s home, then, after the departure from Egypt, to gaze up at a huge pillar of cloud guiding the way by day and a pillar of fire by night. Most of all imagine what it must have been like to watch the waters divide, allowing passage to the whole people, only for the waters to return and drown the pursuing Egyptian forces: chariots, horses, spearmen and bowmen, officers and soldiers, every last one of them. Wondrous, but traumatic.

Now if I were the Managing Director of Promised Lands and I were interviewing the Israelites for the position of settlers in the land of Canaan, I would not have been much  impressed by them. My first question would have been:

“Can you give me an example of when you have faced a challenge?”

A truthful reply would have had to be along the lines of, “Well, after God led us out of Egypt, we reached the sea and then saw the Egyptians pursuing us. That was a real challenge.”

“And what did you do?” I would have continued.

“Well, we sort of… um… we panicked, I suppose. Mind you, we did give Moses a good telling off for getting us into the scrape in the first place.”

“I see, and now,” passing to the next question on my list, “Can you tell me of an occasion when you took the initiative?”

Their faces might have lit up a little here, as they replied, “Yes, after we defeated the Egyptians… ah, we mean,.. after God helped us defeat the Egyptians – for which, by the way, we thanked Him with a wonderful song –  we came to this place called Marah and couldn’t drink the water.”

“Mmm, yes and…”

“We complained to Moses. We did it without being prompted.”

“And did that solve the problem?”

“Ah yes,” they might have answered, gaining in confidence. “You see, Moses was really impressed. He threw bits of wood from a tree which God showed him into the water and then we could drink it.”

At this point, I would have wished to draw the interview to a quick close but I might have risked one more question.

“Can you give an example of when you have thought and acted strategically?”

“Oh yes, that’s easy. After the affair with the water, we began to take the long view and consider our history, so we accused Moses of taking us out of Egypt to starve us. The thing is that in Egypt we got lots of food, even if we did have to work hard and suffer the odd humiliation and beating.”

Now I would definitely have stopped the interview. I would have thanked them for coming and told them I’d let them know at the latest within the next forty years. And that would have been the end of it for the Israelites. I would have moved on.

“Sarah,” I would have said to my PA. “Have the Nomadic Turkmen representatives come in, will you.”

Except that it wasn’t the end for the Israelites, not the end for us, because God was able to see the potential in the people, despite their complaining and backsliding. They might have kept losing faith in God, but God didn’t lose faith in them. And with His gentle guidance, by the end of B’shallach, they were able to fight a battle against Amalek and win. A fit preparation for Yitro, which starts with Moses’ father-in-law giving him some excellent advice to shift some of the burden of leadership from his shoulders onto those of leaders of thousands, leaders of hundreds and leaders of tens. In this way, the people begin to take responsibility for themselves and to face up to challenges. They are ready now to receive a great revelation. To hear this, come to the service this Saturday at 10.30. Harvey Kurzfield will be leading us.

“Listen heaven! I will speak! Earth hear the words of my mouth! My lesson shall drop like rain, my saying shall flow down like the dew – like a downpour on the herb, like a shower on the grass.”

Hang on a minute. The writer here is  getting ahead of himself. What on earth is he doing quoting from Ha’azinu, which comes right at the end of Devarim, when we have only just reached Va-eira and Bo? The reason is that the man who is speaking these most poetic of words with the authority of a great leader is the same man who in the first chapters of Shemot tells God that he is slow and awkward of speech and most unsuited to representing the Israelites before Pharaoh, never mind to leading a whole people. And the amazing journey from stammering reluctance to majestic eloquence which he has just embarked on will be mirrored by the the journey made by people he will lead.

But what of Va-eira and Bo? Things do not seem to go very well for Moses and Aaron. Despite a succession of requests, threats and plagues, Pharaoh remains obstinate. It seems that Moses is unable to sway him. Does the sovereign of Egypt not understand how the plagues undermine the idolatrous basis of his rule? The sacred waters of the Nile are turned to blood and infested with frogs. The hail blots out the even more sacred sun, and it will soon be blotted out again by three days of ‘palpable darkness’. When Pharaoh does finally give way, it will be at the visitation of a horror similar to that which he inflicted upon the Israelites upon his own people, i.e. the death of the firstborn.

The journey to freedom, both its liberties and its responsibilities, is set to begin. Come and join us at its outset this Saturday at 10.30. Liz will be lighting the way.

As I said last year, Bereshit goes from the macro – the creation, the flood, the scattering of nations after Babel – to the micro, that is the focus on a small family, which takes a book to grow to any appreciable size. From the moment Abram leaves his father’s house to embark on a seemingly endless journey on to the end of Bereshit, when Joseph and his family are reunited in Egypt, the family grows to a mere seventy souls. And now we embark on Sh’mot.

As D’varim is just words, Sh’mot is just names. Ah, but what names! For a start, there are some of the names of God, including the most mysterious, translated in several ways, such as, ‘I Will Be Who I Will Be, and the Tetragrammaton. When Moses goes to Pharaoh for the first time to demand the freedom of the Israelites, the latter asks, “Who is YHVH that I should obey Him and let Israel go? I do not recognise YHVH.” He is deaf to the Name. If he were able to hear it, perhaps he would let the Israelites leave without more ado.

The beginning of Sh’mot is so rich in significance, where can one start or follow? Let’s try Moshe himself. ‘Drawn from the water’, he is adopted by a kindly princess. His childhood is quickly passed over, but imagine him, brought up in the Egyptian court but clearly knowing that he is a Hebrew. What was his relation to his adoptive mother and his adoptive brothers and sisters? Was he discriminated against by anyone? What did he do all day? What education did he receive? What did the court tell him of his own people? That he took pity on them when he saw their hard labour is a telling sign of the great heart that will grow inside him as he guides a fractious group of slaves towards the first stages of nationhood. There is so much to come. And some of it will be revealed this Saturday at 10.30. Patricia Lipert of noble name will be leading us.

The whole of the book of Genesis can be seen as a history of brothers… and sisters… and brother and sister…

“Hang on a minute,” someone is saying. “How can you possibly reduce the first book of the Torah to a single theme like this?”

The thing is, like all creative books and all art, there are many different strands in the Torah which can be newly discovered, revisited, coloured and reshaped. Look at Hamlet, for instance. There are literally thousands of books written about just this one play. As for…

“Hang on a double minute,” that someone is now saying with a great deal more heat. “How can you even think about comparing our sacred text to a piece of literature?”

Read not, ‘Compare the Torah to a work of art, but rather compare the work of art to the Torah’. The Torah is simply the greatest of creative works. Indeed, its words embody the creation of the world, of humanity and of a people entrusted with a holy task. It resonates in its depth, shines with its insights and weaves into its being a multitude of shimmering threads.

So after that preamble, I return to the story of siblings. It starts extremely badly. The first brothers to be born are destroyed when one rises up and murders the other. From then on there are problems of varying degrees of intensity. Ham, the son of Noah, shames his two brothers Shem and Yefeh by observing their father naked. Ishmael and Isaac are estranged. Rebecca seizes the first opportunity to escape the malign influence of her mercenary brother. Jacob so alienates Esau that the latter plans to kill him. Leah and Rachel are rivals for Jacob’s affections. Finally, Joseph’s presumption and snitching enrage his brothers so that they almost kill him,  settling instead for selling him into slavery. It is this final story of sibling friction, culminating in the reconciliation that draws Genesis to a close, which is told in the most detail. Both Joseph and his brothers make a journey towards, on the one hand, generosity, wisdom and forgiveness and, on the other, towards a recognition of guilt and the desire to make amends. The opening words of Ya-yigash are, thus, among the most moving in Bereshit. “Judah walked up to (Joseph) and said, “Please, your highness, let me say something to you personally. Do not be angry with me, even though you are just like Pharaoh.” And so Judah, the brother who has demonstrated most clearly the human capacity for change from evil to righteousness, tells the story of his father’s loss and and his consuming fear of losing his youngest son as he believes he has lost the second youngest. Most importantly, Judah begs to be allowed to be Joseph’s slave in Benjamin’s place.”

As always, the parsha has far more in it than I can possibly touch on. To experience some of this, to share in prayer and song and to take part in a particularly special service at 10.30 on Saturday. A  graduate of Kehillat Kernow and graduand of Exeter University, Murray Brown, together with Pat Lipert will be leading us.