Hayom Yom: Tackling Life's Tasks - 23 Tammuz

Probing Beneath the Surface

The 42 journeys that our forefathers undertook in the course of their 40-year trek to the Holy Land began when they left the city of Rameses in the Egyptian delta and made their way toward their first encampment, a site in the wilderness called Sukkos. It is thus fitting that their departure from Rameses is termed an exodus, which means “going out.”4

In fact, however, the verse that introduces the list of their wanderings describes all their journeys as“their exoduses”5 — in the plural, implying, as it were, that they left Egypt more than once!

To explain: At that time, our entire nation experienced a historical exodus from the bondage of a geographical Egypt, on their way to Sinai and the Holy Land. In the same manner, every individual Jew experiences the need to break free from the bondage of his own personal Egypt6 — from the shackles of his own unwanted habits and mental blocks, his psychological hang-ups and his spiritual insensitivity.

Now, suppose a person finally succeeds in breaking an unwanted habit. Exultant and relieved, he feels that he has broken free from the bondage of one of his personal Egypts.

At that point, however, the heightened spiritual sensitivity that he has just won throws open before him a new horizon. His avodah is now confronted by a subtler challenge. Relative to his spiritual standing yesterday, today he has indeed shaken himself free of his former Egypt. But relative to where he can hopefully be tomorrow, he realizes that today he is still in Egypt. A new exodus now beckons to him. And so on, ad infinitum, exodus after exodus.

To highlight this dynamic of spiritual growth, allthe journeys on the way to the Holy Land, even after our forefathers were many miles removed from Egypt proper, are also termed “exoduses.”7