Parshat Voeira: Four Redemptions Plus One

One can be freed from torture, but can still be plagued by inner turmoil and anguish. One can be freed as a slave, but still have others who act like one’s masters. One can be free from a given country, but still have no country to call their own. One can have Torah which provides us with inner freedom, but we might learn Torah in an exile tainted manner. We need the fifth level of liberation, associated with the coming of Moshiach, when we will have no master other than G-d and our Torah study will rid us of the last vestige of inner exile.

The Four (Five?) Expressions of Liberation

“I will take you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, 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 me as a nation.”

These are the four expressions of Redemption that G-d told Moses to convey to the Jewish people in Egypt.

Why did G-d have to give them the good news of Redemption in four stages? Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to say: “I will liberate you from Egypt?”

In truth, the experience of the exodus from Egypt was a fourfold one. It was crucial that they realized that there was a need to be aware of and show appreciation for all the four stages of redemption.

Stage One

(a) I will take you out from under the burdens of the

Egyptians.

This refers to their release from the tortuous bondage.

Jews were not just slaves; they were tortured in the most cruel and barbaric fashion.

According to the Midrash, Pharaoh ordered Jewish babies be crushed into the mortar if they had not produced their quota of bricks. This and many other cruel and unhuman suffering places the evil of Egypt on a much “higher” (or “lower”) position than “just” slavery.

To be relieved of the persecution, even to remain slaves, would have been cause for celebration.

Stage Two

(b) I will deliver you from their bondage.

This refers to their release from servitude. Even though their emancipation would have left them subjects of Pharaoh in a totalitarian regime, they would have been eternally grateful to G-d for having removed the shackle of slavery from them.

When a human being lacks freddom to live hisor her life it affcts the entireperson. It affects his or her mind and heart.

A human being was born to express their own identity, not someone else’s.

In our society we still practice slavery. Prison, a punishment the Torah never accepted, is slavery! We deny a person his or her humanity.

The only silver lining there was for the Jews to be slaves is that they would ultimately be challenged to submit themselves to G-d to serve as His subjects. That form of slavery and servitude is the most liberating one because it aligns our own being with that of our Creators.

Stage Three

This refers to their liberation from Egypt. Now they were a free people, with the opportunity to express their G-d given potential and follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, unimpeded.

Egypt was also the most depraved society of that time. Living in Egypt, even as free people, had a deleterious effect on the morals of the Jewish people.

Stage Four

(d) I will take you to me as a nation.

This refers to their spiritual liberation that occurred when G-d took them as a nation at Mount Sinai.

To be liberated without being taken by G-d at Mount Sinai would have been incomplete, because, they still would have retained a slave and exile mentality. The experience of Sinai, their receiving of the Torah, gave the Jewish people the ability to rise above the exile mindset. They were now given a positive identity not just the absence of a negative experience and identity.

Drinking Four Cups of Wine

Because of these four expressions of Redemption that appear in this week’s parsha, the rabbis instituted the drinking of four cups of wine during the Seder of Passover.

Alternatively, these four expressions are said to correspond to the four redemptions from the Egyptian and subsequent exiles the Jews would endure.

The Fifth Expression of Liberation

Upon closer scrutiny one finds a fifth expression “and I will bring you to the good land…” This expression is said to correspond to the future Redemption and Messianic Age.

Some commentators state that the fifth cup of Elijah we have at the Seder corresponds to this fifth expression of Redemption. That redemption, we are told, will be ushered in by the prophet Elijah.

The fact that G-d mentioned this fifth expression in the context of the Redemption from Egypt suggests that the future Redemption, in reality, began thousands of years back when the first exodus from Egypt commenced. In the words of the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, “Ever since the Exodus from Egypt we are on our way to the future Redemption.”

What this means is that from the moment the Jews were liberated from Egypt, the entire process and dynamic of liberation was already unleashed. It is not something that we have to create now; it is the culmination of a process. For over three thousand years we worked on making that which has already been generated, complete.

One way of understanding the completeness of the process of redemption as it pertains to the four aforementioned levels, is as follows.

One can be freed from torture, but can still be plagued by inner turmoil and anguish that is just as bad as torture from the outside.

One can be freed as a slave, but still have others who act like one’s masters.

One can be free from a given country, but still feel pain at having left their host country and have no country to call their own.

And finally, one can have the Torah which provides us with inner freedom, but because of exile conditions we might learn Torah in an exile tainted manner.

To correct all of the above, we need the fifth expression and its imminent realization. Then we will be rid of all external and internal turmoil. We will have no master other than G-d and our Torah study which we will hear from the mouth of Moshiach in our own Land of Israel will be pure so that we will be rid of the last vestige of inner exile.

From the book Light from the Future: Parshas Voeira by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.