Dear TBE Community,
According to a midrash in Shemot Rabbah, the children of Israel were redeemed because of four meritorious acts:
They did not change their names; they did not change their language; they did not reveal their secrets; and they did not abandon circumcision.
Even in a strange and hostile land, the Israelites clung to their names and culture. They guarded their secrets—the midrash specifies that those were details Moses revealed to them about the night of their escape from Egypt—and they kept their rituals sacred.
Another midrash, this one from Devarim Rabbah, offers a different list. Rabbi Elazar teaches that Israel was redeemed for five reasons:
because of their distress (Exodus 2:23), because of repentance (Exodus 2:23), because of the merit of the patriarchs (Exodus 2:24), because of mercy (Exodus 2:25), and because of the end—the fulfillment of a destined moment (Exodus 2:25).
These two midrashim present very different understandings of redemption—different reasons for why the Israelites were rescued from slavery, as is recorded in this week’s parasha.
The first underscores human action: faithfulness to commandments, cultural resilience, loyalty to a shared identity.
The second shifts the focus almost entirely to God: divine mercy toward a suffering people, remembrance of covenant, knowledge of a larger plan unfolding through history. In this second vision, “all” the Israelites had to do was suffer, repent and “let God.”
These are two very different mindsets at work. One is proactive, proud, and resilient. The other rests primarily on God’s compassion.
And yet both rely on the same underlying concept: zechut, merit. For one reason or another, the Israelites were “worthy” of redemption—either because of what they did, or because of how God responded to them.
I struggle with this idea of behavioral reward, especially in a religious context: If you are good to God, God will be good to you. Millennia of history suggest that it is not so clear-cut. The rabbis of the Talmud wrestled with this as well, as this passage from Bavli Moed Katan 28a shows:
Rava teaches that length of life, children, and sustenance do not depend on merit, but on fate. He illustrates this through two sages, Rabba and Rav Hisda—both righteous, both pious. When each prayed for rain during a drought, rain fell. And yet their lives could not have been more different. Rav Hisda lived to ninety-two years; Rabba died at forty. Rav Hisda’s home celebrated sixty wedding feasts; Rabba’s home endured sixty calamities.
Meaning, if piety were the true measure of merit, Rabba should have merited a long life filled with joy as well. But he did not. This is the persistent and infuriating question: how do we live with the reality that bad things happen to good people – or good things to bad people?!
This question lies at the heart of how Jews understand religious practice. There are observant Jews who do believe in a cause-and-effect relationship between human behavior and divine response. But there are also many observant Jews who keep mitzvot not primarily because they are certain about God, but because they are committed to the cultural, historical, and communal inheritance of Judaism—by birth or by choice.
Here lies a key difference between Judaism and most, or all Christian traditions. Judaism speaks of awe, even fear, of the Divine—but it is far less certain that faith alone is the path to redemption. In Judaism, first you do—and only then, perhaps, you hear.
So why do we do what we do? Why do we follow mitzvot even when we doubt their divine origin? Do we need certainty about God in order to show reverence for the Divine?
Why do we commit ourselves to synagogue life even when we struggle with belief, when we could find easier or more comfortable ways to belong to other, inherently non-religious communities?
Maybe because the synagogue is one of the few places where these questions are not a failure of faith but part of the practice itself. Maybe because our own searching is mirrored most clearly in the searching of those around us. And maybe because, while we want to be full participants in a pluralistic world, there is something deeply comforting about being among people who know our language, recognize our names, and share—at least partially—our secrets and our rituals.
Even when we do not observe the mitzvot perfectly. Even when our belief feels incomplete.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch