[Avodah] Moshe Rabeinu and his family

[Arie Folger]

On 9/03/2011 2:15 PM, Arie Folger wrote:
> I don't claim that Bat Par'oh [...] told Moshe who his birth mother
> was, nor that she knew (though the narrative strongly implies this
> was clear to all participants

RSZ replied:
> How is it implied, strongly or weakly?  On the contrary, I think the
> text implies that she did *not* know.

Very simple. If you read the text without preconceptions, you see that
it highlights a number of interesting twists. First of all, there is
the already mentioned fact that the daughter of the Pharao is the one
who notices and then decides to save the boy, making a conscious
decision against her father's policies.

But then, it gets stranger. It isn't the boy's mother who watches from
afar to see what is going to happen to him, but his sister. This jibes
perfectly with the midrash that Yokheved prompted her parents to get
back together - what both factoids have in common is that it is the
girl who took charge of things, messing up the usual hierarchy.

It becomes however positively daring when the slave girl* disregards
all protocol and addresses the mighty princess directly. When you put
all these together, ought we not to ask why a girl would, out of
nowhere, appear and suggest haeilekh lakh ishah meineqet min
ha'ivriyot? It becomes quie clear to all present that this girl must
have some relationship to the boy, making it very likely that the wet
nurse, the ishah meineqet, is the boy's mother. After all, wet nurses
don't just run around by the thousands among the poor, the destitute
and the downtrodden. It's a profession for those employed by the most
wealthy, not for downcast slaves and their cousins.

Then, the Pharao's daughter tells the woman to take that boy to nurse
him, and she will pay her wage, which is as much as asking the
presumed mother to relinquish her motherhood, since she will now nurse
the child as Bat Par'o's child, not as her own.

All this information is transmitted wordlessly, but it's very present.

( * = never mind 'Hazal's statement about shevet Levi not being
enslaved; they could not have been too high on the social ladder, or
otherwise they would not have been as worried about keeping the boy at
home)

For the sake of lehavi geulah la'olam, I'd like to acknowledge that I
learned this insight from R' Yoshua Berman.

-- 
Arie Folger,
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