Sh'mot notes, 5769

Here's the original.

Some thoughts from this morning's reading:

• Call me a faithless coward, but if someone, or even The One, told me to grab a snake by the tail . . .
• I remembered someone having told me, in a comment to a previous post, that the idea that Yisrael (Israel)--that is, Yisrael the Jewish People, not Yisrael/Yaakov (Jacob) the patriarch--is HaShem's/G-d's firstborn came straight from the Torah, and sure enough, there it is, in Parshat Sh'mot, in Exodus chapter 4, verse 22. After doing a search of my blog, I found the aforementioned previous post, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Steg's been reading and commenting on my blog (and, in this case, citing chapter and verse) since 2005!
• I've always been a bit ambivalent about Yosef (Joseph). What he did was, essentially, to create a feudal state in ancient Egypt, with the native Egyptians as serfs. No wonder the Egyptians had no kind feelings for the Hebrews, as my husband pointed out in his d'var Torah on the story of Yosef.
  

There's a good, link-filled post on Sh'mot by DovBear here.