This week’s double parsha of Bihar and Bechukotai begins with shemitah, the commandment to let the land lay fallow every seven years.   One of the purposes of this mitzvah is for us to realize that we are not in charge.  We do not make the rain fall or the crops grow, nor did we invent the miracle of nutritious food growing from the ground.  The shmita year helps us to remember that we truly are in God’s hand.  Thus, if we do not keep Shemita, the sabbatical, the Torah says we will be exiled from the land and will then realize that we are not in control.

These days we all feel that we are living in an exile within exile, -confined, limited, and perhaps afraid.  We the powerful, have become the emperors wearing new clothes, unmasked, with little control over our fate.

Exile, as disconcerting as it is, by definition functions as a prelude to redemption.   For us the paradigm of all exile and redemption is Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt.     But exodus is not redemption, exodus is a stage between exile and redemption.  Easily overlooked and often conflated with redemption, exodus is its own step, a doorway, a liminal space between exile and redemption.  The stage of  exodus is a miraculous moment because it stands on its own, unprompted by the dark past of exile which could not fashion a vision beyond itself, and without a clear future in redemption to draw it forward.  So what primes the pump of Exodus?

With regard to yetziat mitzrayim the Torah writes (Exodus 2:23-25): “And it was in those many days, and the king of Egypt died, and the Jewish people groaned from the labor, and they cried out and their cry asended to God from the slavery.  And God heard their cry…and God knew.”  To know one is exiled, to groan, is for the human being the first inkling that is needed to begin the process of Yetzia, of exodus.  Yetziat Mitzrayim is compared, in the Medrash, to birth (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, 14:30).   Birth is the grand Yitzia, the creation of something entirely new, but in reality a transition from one state to another.

With the coronavirus we all find ourselves living in a surreal dystopia that quickly has become the new normal.  How do we see a wider vision?   How do we imagine a new life while still being in the present?   The answer is the stage of Yitzia.  The process of transition from this state of quarantine to a new one will run the risk of becoming nothing more than a reversion, and then all the hidden treasures that might be found in exile will have been lost.  If we can pay attention to the process between here and there, if we can emerge and not just revert or even change, then our transition will be one that is truly redemptive.