Send Forth My Son, Part I 

Translated from Rabbi Arush’s feature article in the weekly Chut shel Chessed newsletter. The articles focus on his main message: “Loving others as yourself” and emuna. 

We All Have the Same Collection 

There are people who love to collect special things such as stamps or old books or various memorabilia. There are those who don’t like to collect things; they only hold on to useful objects. But there is one type of thing that all of us, with no exception, collect throughout our lives  and we possess a very large and impressive accumulation of them… 

What are these things? 

New beginnings. We all collect piles and piles of new beginnings, of potential fresh starts.   

How many times in the past have we begun to learn daf yomi, joined an ongoing Torah class, decided to pray better and do hitbodedut, worked on shmirat  einayim (guarding the eyes from unsuitable sights), avoided getting angry, and  attempted to acquire so many other good habits? How many times in the past have we begun to eat healthy food, to exercise, to begin a process of overcoming an addiction, or to make various changes in our lives? 

But what really interests us are new beginnings in the service of Hashem. When we’ve begun something and after a day or two, or a week or two, then the excitement dimmed, the fire went out,  and we came back to the same place we were at the beginning, only in greater despair… 

Our life’s storeroom is full of a great many ‘fresh starts’ that are collecting dust, and we have no room for more. Most of us, seeing all our previous  beginnings, can’t believe that we can begin again, and even if we begin, we don’t really believe that it will last long term. 

What Can We Build On? 

Ask any person: What’s the problem? Why do you only start doing things but don’t continue them? His reply will be: “I have a problem of sticking to things…”, as if it’s only his private problem. The fact that many people have this problem might console him, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a problem shared by the vast majority of human beings, aside from rare and special individuals. 

Is there something to be done about this? Of course! To do anything about it, we must understand why we fail. 

We start on a project with much enthusiasm. Hashem yitbarach helps and provides us with the enlightenment, renewed desire, and strong feelings – but feelings have a way of waxing and waning, like the waves in the sea. One moment you are up high and a moment later you crash. You cannot build your life and your wishes on a spiritual feeling, as powerful as it might be. It won’t hold when you are down, and being down, as we mentioned, is an inseparable part of your life. Your enlightenment is taken from you and you are tested how well you get through the hard times: Do you hold on to your wishes, or do you get angry and resentful? 

So, what can you build your life, all of your forward movement, and all of your stability on? 

Only on emuna (faith)! 

Moods change. One day a person gets up happy and enthusiastic, but the next day he can, chalila, wake up broken and in complete darkness; but faith doesn’t change. “To sing… of Your faith at night”¹, and also “Though I sit in darkness, Hashem is my light.”² The Creator is the same Creator, and the faith is the same faith, when things are good and when things are not. The Creator loves you no matter what situation you are in, and even when you walk in the valley of death, He is with you, by your side. 

Very Strong Life 

And that is what Rabbeinu Hakadosh says – that emuna (faith) is a very strong thing: “And truly, emuna is a very strong matter and one’s life is very strong due to emuna.”³  Rabbeinu says further that that is the secret of how to achieve holy desires: “Emuna is a very strong thing, and then, when he walks only with emuna… he merits to come to a level of ratzon (will, desire) that is even higher than wisdom, in other words, he will merit to have an immense ratzon to reach Him, yitbarach, with very  intense longing.”³ 

Build your ratzon on emuna – not just on a feeling and spiritual illumination. Rather, build on the clear knowledge that is the basis of belief that Hashem is omnipotent and good and that He is a Father Who always loves you. He loves you when you feel it and even when you don’t feel it. Then you will always be able to move forward under any circumstances, and you will never leave the good path that you have begun to walk on.  

It could be that there will be days in which you will feel spiritually illuminated, and you will advance nicely. And there will be days when you will experience spiritual darkness, when you will not advance very much – but you will always move forward. These are “the paths of teshuva”, different paths for days of upward movement, and different paths for days of downward movement, but you don’t leave the paths. At the end, you will see and understand that on those “bad” days, when you thought you were not advancing very much – those were the most significant days, when you advanced the most.  

There Are No Shortcuts To Geula 

And how is all this connected to this week’s parshat Shemot⁴? 

The Redemption from Egypt is not something that happened in the past, but rather it is the prime example and symbol of all our redemptions, both national and personal. Anyone who wants to truly be free – free of base desires and bad middot (character traits) – gets his strength from Yitziat  Mitzraim (the Exodus from Egypt).  

The parsha sends us a message: There is no Geula that is instantaneous, a one-stroke act. There is no such thing. Geula is a long process, step by step, and during this process there will be downs – many  downs. If you don’t hold on to your emuna, you won’t be able to keep going. 

In Yitziat  Mitzraim the Jewish People were a people of slaves. Moshe arrived, gave them all the signs that he was the redeemer, and they were enthusiastic: “And the people believed. When they heard that Hashem was watching over Bnei Yisrael and that He had seen their misery, they bowed their heads and prostrated themselves.”⁵ 

But after their enthusiasm subsided, the redeemer disappeared for a few months and their subjugation just got worse. All their enthusiasm was replaced with double the despair they had before and with deep darkness. When Moshe finally returned, they attacked him with accusations, to the point that Moshe himself complained to Hashem yitbarach.⁶  

Why did this happen? Because they were living on intense feelings and enthusiasm, and were not strengthening their emuna. The Torah tells us something novel: The hiding of the redeemer and the overcoming of darkness are a must. They are an inseparable part of the process of the Geula, because this is the true test of one’s emuna, and our job is to overcome our doubts and become strong and fight for our emuna. 

As the midrash says: “My beloved is like a gazelle – just like this gazelle appears and then disappears, so too the first redeemer appears and disappears… and the final redeemer is like the first redeemer…”⁷ The midrash goes on to say that in the final Geula there will be very difficult times of hiddenness, and whoever is staunch enough will live! 

What happened in Yitziat Mitzraim is the model for our own personal  redemptions:  Remember! There will be failures and difficulties; make sure to hold on to your emuna with all your strength!  

From Slaves To Children 

When we talk about holding on to our emuna, it means to hold on to the emuna that Hashem is a good Father and He loves me and does only good things for me. 

Indeed, the redemption from Egypt can be explained by this idea. The Egyptians are descendants of  Ham, and therefore bear the aspect of slaves – Egypt is called “The house of slaves.”⁸ The Egyptians rejected the idea of a ‘son/child’, and all they wanted to do was to “deal wisely with them” so that the Jewish People would descend from the level of being children to the level of being slaves. 

That is why their king was called Par’oh (Pharaoh), which has the same letters as oref (back of neck). This means that Hashem was hiding His face from the Jewish people as if He didn’t love them. 

But the Geula is a huge revelation of love, the revelation that we are not slaves, rather we are children! And therefore, when Hashem commands Moshe to go to Par’oh, He commands him to say to him: “Yisrael is My son, My firstborn son. I have told you: Send forth My son, so that he may serve Me, but you have refused to let him go…”⁹ 

And so, in the evening prayers (Maariv) our Sages determined that we should say, “Sons saw His gevura, and they praised and thanked His Name” – the Jewish people were redeemed by being able to understand that they are sons and to go from being ‘slaves’ to being ‘children’. That was what our slavery in Egypt consisted of: We forgot that we are His children and that Hashem loves us, and we descended to the level of being slaves and having Hashem hide His face from us.  

The main battle to maintain emuna is to hold on to this knowledge that Hashem is a good and loving Father – always, in any situation, and especially when you are going through failures and feeling that Hashem is hiding from you. The yetzer hara wants to head you off from the good beginnings you are attempting. So that is precisely the time to strengthen yourself with great emuna that Hashem loves you, and not to lose your faith that Hashem loves you. In spite of the fact that you aren’t feeling any sort of love now, emuna is a strong, stable, and set thing that never changes. When you hold on to the emuna that Hashem is a Father, you will never fall! 

Next week we will see how all this is connected to the days of Shovavim¹⁰. We will see how the knowledge that Hashem is a Father is the secret of lasting shmirat  habrit (maintaining  purity) and of rising higher and higher in kedushah (holiness). 

Editor’s Notes: 

¹ Tehillim (Psalms) 92:3 

² Micah 7:8 

³ Likutei Moharan II (Tanina), Torah 5:1 

⁴ Shemot (Exodus) 1:1–6:1 

⁵ Shemot 4:31 

⁶ Shemot 5: 21-23 

⁷ Shir HaShirim Raba (Midrash on Song of Songs) 2:9 

⁸ Genesis 10:6 lists Mitzraim as the second son of Ham; Tehillim 78:51 and 105:23 refer to Egypt as “the land of Ham”; Genesis 9:25-27 associates Ham’s descendants with servitude “Curse of Ham” 

⁹ Shemot 4: 22-23  

¹⁰ “Shovevim” literally means “mischievous children” (Yirmiyahu 3:22), but in this context it is an acronym for the first six weekly Torah portions in the Book of Shemot: Shemot, Hava’era,  V‘bo, V‘beshalach,  Yitro, and Mishpatim.