Shemos

 Jewish Education

"Every son that is born you shall cast into the River, and every daughter you shall make live”  (Genesis 1:2)
Pharaoh did not merely allow the Jewish girls to live; he commanded to "make them live" (techayun, in the  Hebrew).
Pharaoh's decree of annihilation against the Jewish people consisted of two parts: firstly, 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 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 fields 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 deifies the earthly vehicle of material sustenance.
     
In our own day, the Pharaoh-instituted practice of drowning children in the Nile is still with us: too often we
become obsessed with what course of action will further our children's economic prospects when the time will come for him or her to enter the job market.  We dismiss Jewish education, reasoning that this is something the children can find for themselves whereas a good living and career has to be mapped out from the start. The people of Israel survived the Egyptian exile 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 present situation, we, too, must resist the dictates of the current ‘Pharaohs’. We must set the spiritual and moral development of our children rather than merely their future "earning power" and "careers" as the aim of their education.

Shabbat Shalom!