Lead Tidbit

Advance to Go (collect $200)

The title of this Lead Tidbit was going to be, “Here we go again!”. It’s about starting from the beginning, again. That’s what Parshat Sh’mot and Sefer Sh’mot bring to mind. The Torah tells us that Yosef and all his brothers and all of that generation died. One of the things that it means is that we are at a new starting point. This time it isn’t only the family of Avraham and Sara, Yitzchak, and Rivka, Yaakov and Rachel & Leah - it is the soon to be Nation of Israel, Bnei Yisrael.

For us, it is a new beginning as we read Parshat HaShavua, but it is also a new beginning, as in “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”. For us too, as it has been for every generation - the previous generation has passed on and we are to continue. We look back into the Book of B’reishit and we need to learn its lessons. The positive ones and the negative ones. There is a lot of behavior of the Avot and Imahot to emulate. And there are a lot of behavior to shun, warnings of many things NOT to repeat.

Yes, we might have advanced to Go, but our new beginning is not from scratch - we have plenty to build upon. With all of the problems from Sefer B’reishit, we’re off to a decent start in Sh’mot with the midwives, Yocheved, Miriam, Moshe, Tzipora… With the people calling out to G-d for help. To put things differently, B’reishit started on a high - the highest high possible - G-d’s creation of the world. And the potential for EVERYTHING. Things went downhill more than a couple of times, and the Book, despite the bright points of our Avot and Imahot, ended on a down.

Sh’mot is starting from about as low as we’ve ever been. And once again, we see the amazing potential. It is all in front of the People.Without going into any of the details of the rest of Jewish History - so far - let’s talk about us. Our generation.

We’ve got the potential. We’ve got loads of details as to what we should be doing and what we shouldn’t be doing. As we’ve mentioned, previous generations are gone. We are here and we are also working on the next generation or two (or three) in the form of our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. We have a lot to accomplish. We need not be the ones to finish the job (but it would be nice for us to chalk up significant progress towards personal and national strivings for Kedusha and Geula), but we may not slacken from it. This is our challenge. No excuses!

• Other Lead Tidbit
• The Middle Matza
• When will we learn?!?
• A Brief Look Back at Chanuka