One thing that always intrigued me was the difference between the men and the boys and the women and the girls in the Pesach story. It is a difference that is simply huge and it nearly caused the end of the Jewish people.
That difference was known to Pharaoh. He used it in his cunning plan. As he explained to his people, “Hovo Nischachmo lo,” Let us be “clever” how we deal with these Jews.
The Medrash says that the men were given women’s work to do and the women were given men’s work. The average man is stronger than the average woman. Huge weights that men working together could move more easily would be a terrible and painful challenge for women.
The men watched their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters struggling and collapsing under their burdens and it broke their hearts and their spirits. Pharaoh smiled and his people applauded. His plan was working perfectly.
Or so the Egyptians thought.
They were however making a fundamental mistake. They were looking at the wrong people. The men’s spirits were broken. The women’s and the girls’ spirits remained whole and strong.
Even the greatest Rabbi of his generation, Amram decided that there was no hope. He divorced his wife Yocheved and consequently, other Jews followed his lead. There would now be no babies born. Amram had decided it was cruel to bring any Jewish baby into such oppression and suffering. In any case, baby boys would be immediately killed by the Egyptians.
His logic made perfect sense, but his daughter disagreed. Even though she was only a little girl she challenged her father saying, “Your decree is crueler than Pharaoh’s. He has only decreed against the boys, but you have decreed against the boys and the girls!”
Amram agreed, re-married her mother and all the men did the same.
I discuss why the men gave up and the women didn’t in my book, “Truly Great…Jewish Women Then and Now.”
We men have a big problem. As my wife likes to say, “Men are fixers!” If there is a problem, men are often too sure they can sort it out and fix it.
Men… have an ego problem.
When they eventually discover that they can’t fix something after all, they often throw in the towel and give up.
Women have smaller egos than men. Their world is not all about them. It can’t be; after all, they are willing to expose themselves to the very real danger and pain of bringing children into the world.
Unburdened by that male predisposition to feel that every solution starts and ends with them, women know that there are things that they can’t do (giving birth alone is clearly less than ideal!) and consequently don’t feel crushed and depressed when they can’t fix things on their own. Women are far more likely to work with others to find solutions and that includes leaving matters in the hands of Hashem.
That was Pharaoh’s big mistake. He thought the men were the strong ones and that he had to break them. In fact, Jewish women are the strong ones …and he couldn’t break them.
It was the women who forced their demoralized husbands to conceive children with them. It was they who told Hashem after they gave birth, “There is nothing more I can do. I leave it up to You to do the rest!” The Medrash is full of accounts of the Miracles that occurred afterwards to hide the newborn boys.
The women refused to have any part in making the Golden Calf and refused to contribute even one gold ring toward the disaster the men had concocted to “fix” another problem: the seeming disappearance of Moshe.
I remember the first time I spoke at a shabbaton for New York’s “Links” organization, which helps children who have lost a parent. The organizer took me aside to speak to me after the Friday night meal.
She explained that a fifteen-year-old girl was attending for the first time whose father had suddenly died when she was twelve. Her mother had just been diagnosed with cancer. She asked if I would speak to her.
I hadn’t a clue what I should say, nor can I recall anything she or I said, but the feedback was very positive. I saw her at the organization’s annual shabbatons for the next few years.
Four years later, I was flying home to New York from a speaking tour in Israel. As we touched down, I switched on my phone and a cascade of emails, texts and WhatsApps flooded in.
One of them told me that the girl who had lost her father was now sitting shiva for her mother. It asked if I could go and visit her at her shiva.
I shook my head in sadness at the news and also because I had returned from Israel with a heavy flu. Combined with jet lag, I was feeling awful and wanted nothing more than to get home and climb underneath the blankets.
The next day I decided that I had to make the three-hour drive to her home in New Jersey.
The entire drive I was searching in my mind to find words that might help or a story or two that would offer encouragement. Perhaps it was my flu but when I arrived at the house I had thought of nothing at all to say.
When I entered the large home, I was so grateful that Hashem had put the decision to come in my head. The girl was a ba’alas teshuvah. She was sitting shiva with her sister. An aunt and a neighbor were the only other two people in the house.
The sister, who was not religious left us alone. I felt the spotlight fix firmly on me to say the right words, words I hadn’t been able to think of during my drive.
I needn’t have worried. She did the speaking instead.
She told me that she was very sad at what had happened, but she “knew” that it was the “ratzon Hashem,” G-d’s will. She explained that she did not of course begin to understand why Hashem had chosen this to happen to her, but she believed completely in “gam zu l’tov,a, this too is for the best.
I sat listening and thinking that neither Pharaoh nor Egypt would have broken this young woman.
She concluded by telling me that she was scheduled to fly to Eretz Yisrael in two weeks’ time to attend the seminary she had been accepted to in Yerushalayim.
I had made that long drive because I naively thought I might bring words of inspiration to her. Instead, she brought inspiration to me.
She now lives with her husband and their family in Brooklyn.
Jewish women are the heroes of the Pesach story and in fact… every Jewish story that has happened since then too.