Weekly Thoughts

B"H. Shabbat Parashat Shemot, 23 of Tevet 5773

Our Sages Say...

Educating Our Children

Pharaoh did not merely allow the Jewish girls to live; he commanded to "make them live" (techayun, in the Hebrew). Every son that is born you shall cast into the River, and every daughter you shall make live (1:22)

And the priest of Midian had seven daughters; and they came to water their father's ock (2:16) Jethro was at rst a priest to idolatrous worship; but when he saw that there was no truth in it, he summoned his townsmen and said: "Hitherto I ministered unto you, but now I have become old; choose another priest." And he returned unto them all the insignia of his priesthood. Whereupon they excommunicated him, that no man be in his company, or work for him or tend his ock; he asked the shepherds to look after his ock, but they refused, and he had to employ his daughters.

Pharaoh's decree of annihilation against the Jewish people consisted of two parts: to throw every Jewish newborn male into the Nile, and to make live every female. The boys were to be physically murdered. The girls were to be murdered spiritually by making them live the Egyptian life, by indoctrinating them into the perverse lifestyle of Egypt. The boys were to be drowned in the Nile. The girls, too, were to be drowned in the Nile - conceptually, if not actually. The Nile, which irrigated the elds of rain-parched Egypt, was the mainstay of its economy and its most venerated god. The girls were to be raised in this cult of the river, their souls submerged in a way of life that deies the earthly vehicle of material sustenance.

(Midrash Rabbah)

! Shabbat Shalom!

In our own day, the Pharaoh-instituted practice of drowning children in the Nile is still with us: there are still parents whose highest consideration in choosing a school for their children is how it will further their child's economic prospects when the time will come for him or her to enter the job market. The people of Israel survived the Egyptiangalut because there were Jewish mothers who refused to comply with Pharaoh's decree to submerge their children in his river. If we are to survive the presentgalut, we, too, must resist the dictates of the current Pharaohs. We must set the spiritual and moral development of our children rather than their future "earning power" and "careers" as the aim of their education.

Chassidic

Thoughts
If Moses' basket lay beyond her reach, why did Pharaoh's daughter extend her arm? Could she possibly have anticipated the miracle that her hand would be "extended for many armlengths"? There is a profound lesson here for each and every one of us. Often, we are confronted with a situation that is beyond our capacity to rectify. Someone or something is crying out for our help, but there is nothing we can do: by all natural criteria, the matter is simply beyond our reach. So we resign ourselves to inactivity, reasoning that the little we can do won't change matters anyway. But Pharaoh's daughter heard a child's cry and extended her arm. An unbridgeable distance lay between her and the basket containing the weeping infant, making her action seem utterly pointless. But because she did the maximum of which she was capable, she achieved the impossible. Because she extended her arm, G-d extended its reach, enabling her to save a life and raise the greatest human being ever to walk the face of the earth. (Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk)

Access to a Sold but Illegal Storage Area

Case: The plainti (=pl) lives in an apartment building in which the defendant (=def) owns one oor of commercial establishments and an underground parking lot. Pl bought a large storage room from def, located among the parking places, which she uses for clothes that she sells out of her house. At the time of the sale, the parking lot was open to the public, and this enabled pl to have deliveries made to the storage room. Now, def has closed o the parking lot and has told pl that if she wants to have vehicles enter, she has to rent a parking space. Def argues that pl cannot have rights to allow unloading of deliveries because the area of her storage room is slated by the municipality for parking and not for commercial storage. Def acknowledges that when they sold the area to pl, the area already had walls and a door that made its presumed use that of a storage room, not a parking space.

Ruling: From a legal perspective, one must distinguish between rights between pl in relation to the public and between pl in relation to def. The erection of a structure against the law does not generally provide the owner with rights in it, since the authorities do not have to allow it to remain. On the other hand, in respect to the relationship between the seller and buyer of the illegal structure, the seller cannot withhold rights from the buyer based on the claim that the buyer does not have legal rights. After all, the seller received payment for the structure despite the legal limitations, and, therefore, he has to give it over appropriately, from his perspective, as if it were the sale of a legal structure. Thus, pls rights are not more limited, in relation to def, than that of a legal buyer. The question is: does one who buys an area, for which he must traverse through the sellers area, receive rights just for traversal by foot or even with vehicles. Rabbi Akiva and the Chachamim dispute (Bava Batra 64a) cases where there is a doubt as to what rights the buyer received, including a case where someone bought a water hole in the midst of his friends eld. Rabbi Akiva said that he bought the right to go in freely to take the water. The Chachamim state that he has to buy rights to a path to the hole because it was not included in the sale of the hole. The gemara (ibid. 64b) explains that they disagree on whether one who sells something is assumed to sell with a generous eye or not. The Shulchan Aruch (Choshen Mishpat 214:1) rules that we assume that one sells with a generous eye. What that means in each case depends on the particulars of what is bought (see Shut Torah Chayim I, 31). In our case, where the storage room was tting and appropriate for commercial use, this should be assumed to extend to delivery by vehicle. If def wants to claim that the permission was limited to access by foot only, he has to prove this. Thus, the ruling is that pl must be given access for delivery by automobiles.

Note:One Should NOT derive any Halachik Conclusions from the above