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. Stay in the know with all things Jewish... Get The Detroit Jewish News print edition delivered to your door every week for less than $2 per issue. thejewishnews.com/subscription Get The Detroit Jewish News Subscribe Today!