This Shabbat we study the Parshah Va’era, meaning “and I appeared” (Exodus 6:3). G-d reveals Himself to Moses. Employing the “four expressions of redemption”: take out the Children of Israel from Egypt, deliver them from their enslavement, redeem them, and acquire them as His own chosen people at “Mount Sinai”, He will then bring them to the land He promised to the Patriarchs as their eternal heritage.

Moses and Aaron repeatedly come before Pharoah to demand in the name of G-d, “Let My people go, so that they may serve Me in the wilderness.” Pharaoh repeatedly refuses. Aaron’s staff turns into a snake and swallows the magic sticks of the Egyptian sorcerers. G-d then sends a series of plagues upon the Egyptians. Even after the seventh plague (fire and ice combined to descend from the skies as a devastating hail), still “the heart of Pharoah was hardened and he would not let the children of Israel go, as G-d had said to Moses.”

Chabad.org

We keep hearing about tolerance. Be accepting of other people, of differences. But there are times when too much tolerance can be detrimental. Like when the Jews were slaves in Egypt.

And I shall take you out from under the burdens of Egypt is the promise the Almighty told Moses to pass on to the Jewish people in this week's Parshah. One of my holy ancestors, Rabbi Yitzchak Meir of Gur (widely known by his work Chiddushei HaRim), once re-interpreted the Hebrew word for "burdens" - sivlos - to mean patience (as in savlanut in modern Israeli Hebrew today).

What he meant was that before the Children of Israel could be freed from Pharaoh, G-d had to first free them of their own inner bondage. Years of slavery and drudgery had left the Israelites so oppressed and so hopeless that they had sunk into a terrible tolerance, accepting their situation as final and unalterable. Freedom was unimaginable to them. 

Some of us are too tolerant of intolerable situations and so long-suffering that we ourselves become insufferable. Before 

G-d can take us out of our personal "Egypts" we need to banish the slave mentality from our own headspace.

It pains me when I see many Jewish organizations in our community lowering the bar of and accepting inferior standards on so many levels. We seem to be plagued by a morass of mediocrity. We should always strive for excellence and insist on the highest standards — whether at work or in the synagogue. Patience and tolerance are virtues, but we have become too tolerant.

In order to become truly free we must first remove the shackles of servitude from our own mentality. We must stop being so patient and accepting of all that is oppressive in our lives - whether it be slavery, exile, discrimination, anti-Semitism or mediocrity in general. We can become masters of our own destiny if we want to. But the first step on the road to our own personal exodus is to lower our threshold for tolerance and break out of the prison of patience.

From an article by Rabbi Yossy Goldman 

We left Egypt and its ugly beliefs behind to embrace a value system that was its polar opposite. Money is not a god, merely a means to do good. Our children are not trophies, but precious souls entrusted to us by G-d. And little things do matter. Most of our lives are made up, not of dramatic choices and big events, but of small details and subtle choices, and they all make a difference.

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From an article by Rabbi Aron Moss

As impossible as it sounds, as absurd as it may seem: The mandate of darkness is to become light; the mandate of a busy, messy world is to find oneness. We have proof: for the greater the darkness becomes and the greater the confusion of life, the deeper our souls reach inward to discover their own essence-core. How could it be that darkness leads us to find a deeper light? That confusion leads us to find a deeper truth? Only because the very act of existence was set from its beginning to know its own Author. As it says, “In the beginning . . . G-d said, ‘It shall become light!’”

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

As Lily, a Holocaust survivor, told me about her childhood she taught me an important lesson. Lily was the eldest of three children. Lily kept repeating to me, over and over, “I always had to give in to the others. My mother told me, ‘You are the tallest, the smartest, the strongest. You are the oldest. You must give in to them.’” That meant Lily never got to go first. She never had a toy of her own. She was never right when it came to a quarrel with one of her siblings. And even if she was, it didn’t matter, because she was the oldest, and the oldest has to give in to the younger ones. She was the oldest, and the oldest always has to know better.

Suddenly, in the midst of her storytelling, Lily became quiet. And then she told me: “You have three children. Don’t make the oldest always give in to the younger ones. Don’t think that the eight-year-old knows better than the five-year-old. He doesn’t. Don’t expect them to play together and be friends if you treat them differently. Because if you do, you will turn them into enemies instead of friends.”

These were the words of Lily. They were strong. They were straight. They were right. We see this in our holy Torah:

This is Aaron and Moses, to whom G-d said: “Take the children of Israel out of Egypt according to their legions.” They are the ones who spoke to Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to take the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; they are Moses and Aaron. (Exodus 6:26-27).  On these verses, the famous commentator Rashi writes:

This is Aaron and Moses: Who are mentioned above, whom Yocheved bore to Amram—[these two] are [the same] Aaron and Moses “to whom G-d said,” etc. In some places [Scripture] places Aaron before Moses, and in other places it places Moses before Aaron, to tell us that they were equal. They are Moses and Aaron: They remained in their mission and in their righteousness from beginning to end. Even though they were both great, Moses was without a doubt the leader of the nation of Israel. Aaron was older than Moses, but G-d chose Moses because He saw that Moses was the most qualified one to be the leader of Israel. Moses’ mission in life was to lead Israel. Aaron had a different mission, and even though Moses worried about offending his older brother’s honor, Aaron wasn’t jealous. The Torah relates that G-d told Moses that Aaron “will see you and rejoice in his heart.”  I think that there was no jealousy and that they had such respect for each other because no one ever compared them to each other. Despite the fact that they had different missions and roles, they were given “equal significance.” Sometimes Aaron went first, and sometimes Moses went first.

As a parent, it’s so hard not to fall into patterns. You don’t even realize it, but if you take a step back for a moment, you might see how you always give one child first, or you always give one child more than the others. Your intentions are good; you don’t even notice that you do it, but you do.

The next time the five-year-old is jumping rope and the two-year-old comes along and wants her rope, I stop myself from saying, “Can’t you just give it to him a little bit?” Instead I tell him, “She was playing with it first.” I let him have a tantrum over it, and I pick him up, kiss him, and try to distract him with another toy. My five-year-old smiles at me with a look of gratitude.

Thank you, Lily, for your words of advice.

From an article by Elana Mizrahi