- The new king of Egypt makes slaves of the Hebrews and orders their male children to be drowned in the Nile River. (1:1-22)
- A Levite woman places her son, Moses, in a basket on the Nile, where he is found by the daughter of Pharaoh and raised in Pharaoh's house. (2:1-10)
- Moses flees to Midian after killing an Egyptian. (2:11-15)
- Moses marries the priest of Midian's daughter, Zipporah. They have a son named Gershom. (2:16-22)
- God calls Moses from a burning bush and commissions him to free the Israelites from Egypt. (3:1-4:17)
- Moses and Aaron request permission from Pharaoh for the Israelites to celebrate a festival in the wilderness. Pharaoh refuses and makes life even harder for the Israelites. (5:1-23)
For a mother, the prospect of sending your child away . . . knowing that you may never again lay eyes on that child . . . is horrifying. Particularly if the act is to save the child’s life, the question must still linger “Would my child be safer with me or is there a better chance for survival if I give up my baby?” What an awful choice!
During the Holocaust when the Germans were rapidly applying their final solution to the Jews of Hungary, my grandmother had to face just such a choice. Her daughter, my mother, had been living with her ever since my mother became pregnant with me. My father was in a labor camp so my mother left their Budapest apartment to be with her mother many hundreds of miles away while she awaited my birth.
Rumors had been circulating about Auschwitz and what might be happening there but the Hungarian Jews weren’t sure that these rumors were true. They couldn’t fathom that these rumors could possibly be true. It was too awful to imagine.
In the early Spring of 1944 the ghettos were established in Hungary. The neighborhood in which my grandmother lived was ghettoized. They were trapped but no one knew for certain what was going to happen. I was born in that ghetto in April of 1944.
Although many Hungarian Jews didn’t believe the rumors, some did. In particular, many of the men in the labor camps were beginning to believe that the stories were true and that Hungary’s Jews were in imminent mortal danger. My father heard of my birth, somehow escaped from the labor camp and made his way to the small town in which we lived. He brought with him papers to show to the authorities that proved our “official” address was in Budapest. The Germans were very organized and wanted all Jews ghettoized according to their “official address”. For some reason, my father believed that my mother and I would be safer in Budapest. (His assumption was miraculous because pretty much the only Hungarian Jews who survived were the ones in Budapest.)
He did eventually get what he wanted and was granted papers to allow the three of us to take the train to Budapest. My mother balked. Knowing that my father had already made the decision to go back to the labor camp after he secured us safely in Budapest, my mother was extremely reluctant to be left alone with a new baby during these awful times. She wanted to stay with her mother.
My grandmother trusted my father’s instincts and literally shoved my mother out the door. She firmly told her that it was my mother’s obligation to take her baby and to go with her husband. My grandmother would NOT allow my mother to stay.
What a horror that must have been for my grandmother. Did she know that she would never see her daughter or baby granddaughter again?
When Moses’ mother, Jochebed, placed him in the basket and left her baby among the reeds by the bank of the Nile, she didn’t know if he would live or die. There must have been other choices available to her. Just as during the Holocaust there were righteous gentiles, perhaps she could have searched for a righteous Egyptian woman to take her baby and save him. She may have even considered the possibility of keeping him hidden so that she herself could protect him. Did she so trust in G-d that she was certain her baby would be saved? Did G-d instruct her to do this in order to save the life of Moses? After all, consider the destiny that awaited him. Would there even be a Jewish people today had Moses not lived?
There are some scholars that believe that Jochebed, knowing the role that Moses would play in the future of the Jewish people, “cast” him into the water in order to fulfill the prophecy of the Pharoah’s astrologers. They had predicted that water would be the downfall of the one who would save the Jews and Jochebed hoped that, by casting Moses into the water, the astrologers would consider the prophecy fulfilled and the decree against the Jewish boys would be annulled.
We don’t know the answer to any of these questions. We can only assume that Jochebed didn’t know if her baby would live or die. She was making a decision that she believed would give him the best chance at life.
My grandmother didn’t know what lay ahead. When she pushed my mother, carrying her one week old baby, out the door and firmly closed that door, she couldn’t have known that it was forever.
Jochebed was blessed with the knowledge that her baby survived and was even able to participate in his upbringing for a number of years. My grandmother died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz with her other three grandchildren three weeks after casting out her daughter and infant granddaughter. I wish she had known that the daughter and baby granddaughter she cast out did survive (and were the only survivors, as the entire family eventually perished). From these two lone survivors, my grandmother now has three grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, one great-great-grandchild and two great-great-great-grandchildren. We’re a close and loving family and I know that my grandmother is kvelling.