In today’s day and age, students go from class to class, day to day, meal to meal, with little or no awareness of god. It’s an obvious fact of life that we have been galut, exile, for over 2000 years and this is somehting we just have to overcome and deal with, and try to overcome.
Throughout Sefer Shmot, the all main events are centered around by the leaving from Egypt. Similarly, in many of our prayers you can see the theme pop up, zecher litziyat Mitzrayim,or remembering the exodus from Egypt; Rambam says one essential thing a Jew must do is recall is the leaving from Egypt.
Why is this theme so central to all of the book of Shmot and to all of our lives? The root of the word Mitzrayim is Meitzar, meaning a strait. Dictionary.com defines a strait as a narrow passage of water connecting two large bodies of water, or a position of difficulty, distress, or need. We are all right now, and Bnei Yisrael during the time of exile are and were stuck in a narrow river wanting to flow into the two massive bodies of holiness, but couldn’t unless we were taken out of this narrow stream, galut.
The Jewish people have a long lasting tradition, and that is that the ideas, or the messages in the weeks parasha is manifested in that week with a chain energy. We should utilize this week’s parasha so that it should get us out of these narrow straits and we should grow into these massive bodies of holiness by removing ourselves for our materialistic world, and its hard, for thirty minutes a day. Drop the iPad, cellphone, laptop, and television; instead read one halakha, or law, before you go to sleep; Read two chapters of tehillim a day for two weeks, until you ready to move one to the next two. Before you know it you have grown into a person who is now drifted through this narrow strait, and into a holy body of water.
Yosef Nemenpour