JANUARY 12 • 2023 | 39

Ancestral History
Revelations
I

n Hebrew, a single letter
can mean a thousand
words. This is true of the
vav that opens the book of
Shemot: v’eileh shemot b’nai
yisrael ha’baim mitzraymah, et
ya’akov ish u’veito ba’u. Many
of our translations erase
this vav, translating
this verse, “Now these
are the names” (OJPS
translation) or “These
are the names” (NJPS
translation).
A more accurate
translation is, “
And
these are the names of
the children of Israel
who journeyed to Egypt
with Jacob, every man
and his household
came.” Though opening
a sentence, let alone a whole
book, raises grammatical eye-
brows, our sages understood
that every letter in the Torah
begs to be interpreted.
In 11th-century Spain, Ibn
Ezra noted that this vav cre-
ates a narrative connection
between Bereishit and Shemot,
between the story of Jacob’s
family and their descendants
in Egypt. One hundred and
fifty years later, also in Spain,
Ramban elaborated on Ibn
Ezra’s observation, seeing
the vav as an allusion to the
closing chapters of Bereishit
in which we learn that Jacob
brought all his offspring down
to Egypt with him. Bereishit
46:8 and Shemot 1:1 open with
the identical phrase, v’eileh
shemot b’nai yisrael ha’baim
mitzraymah. From the redun-
dancy in these verses, Ramban
concludes that our vav is
making a textual connection
between the family of Jacob
coming down to Egypt and

the beginning of the exile of
the people of Israel.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
also teaches on this connec-
tion between Bereishit and
Shemot, explaining that the
entire book of Bereishit is the
story of a family. Until
that family learns to get
along with one another,
they cannot function as
a nation. He explains
that this verse reveals
the transition from
Jacob’s sons to the nation
of Israel. This isn’t the
only possible interpreta-
tion, but the biblical par-
allelism in its structure
makes it a compelling
argument.
I’d like to suggest that
the lesson we draw from this
vav is that each of our stories
is irrefutably linked to the
stories of those who come
before us. Every human comes
from somewhere. One painful
human truth our Torah exhib-
its throughout Bereishit is that
the hurts we experience in life
most often come from those
closest to us, not those most
distant. There is nothing easy
about looking first to ourselves
and to our family systems for
healing. In fact, it takes our
Torah 50 chapters just to reach
a tenuous peace among the
family of Israel.
Nonetheless, we begin our
next book, Shemot, as a fam-
ily that is ready to become a
nation. May we learn from our
ancestral stories that healing
and growth is not incidental to
the larger story of redemption,

rather it is the whole point.

Rabbi Blair Nosanwisch is a rabbi

at Adat Shalom Synagogue in

Farmington Hills..

SPIRIT
TORAH PORTION

Rabbi Blair
Nosanwisch

Parshat

Shemot:

Exodus 1:1-6:1;

Isaiah 27:6-

28:13,

29:22-23.

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