VaTehayena Et HaYeladim - Let the Children Live, a Request to Liberal Jews

Today we concluded Sefer Shemos but in light of the terrorist attack in Yerushalayim let us go back for a moment to its beginning as Pharaoh decrees that all the Jewish boy children be thrown into the river. How does he do this? He goes about the process the way that virtually every oppressor down to the modern day, the Nazis, the Communists and the Muslims, have-- by enlisting Jewish collaborators.

And so Pharaoh addresses the Jewish midwives and he tells them, 'When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, ye shall look upon the birthstool: if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.'

Being a king and they members of an enslaved people he takes it for granted that they will do what he said. After all Jewish slaves are already supervised by Jewish foremen. The Jewish foremen report to Egyptian officers. And in the next stage when Pharaoh begins having Egyptian soldiers throw Jewish children into the water, many of the Jewish couples begin to separate out of despair. When Moshe rises up and kills an Egyptian beating a Jewish slave, it is the slave himself who tells on him. Egypt has succeeded in getting the Jews to oppress themselves, to inject slavery into their souls and turn them into the first Galut Yidden and it will take some of the greatest miracles the world has ever seen to change that.

Yet this time Pharaoh is wrong. The midwives do not collaborate with him. They do not kill Jewish children, instead they invent an excuse. And what follows next?

'And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that He made them houses.'

Commentators say that these were the houses of the Monarchy and Priesthood and that the women were the sister and mother of Moshe. Yet why did G-d offer such a great reward? After all not murdering the boys and keeping them alive was their duty. It was heroic under the circumstances but was it really such an extraordinary thing to not collaborate with the enemy?

It is easy to look backward and say that. But let us look to the present day and see how many Jews simply refuse to collaborate with the enemy? How many Americans or Europeans for that matter refuse to collaborate with the enemy? How many Jews today support Obama, support surrendering more land to terrorists, support pressure on Israel? How many Jews leap up in fury when Rav Rabbi Hershel Schachter suggested rightly that Israeli soldiers given the order to surrender Yerushalayim should refuse to obey it and remove the Prime Minister from office as a traitor who lack a fraction of that anger when it comes to the murder of teenage students at Mercas HaRav (e.g. Shmarya, Tzvee) ?

And thus in the context of our time we see the true heroism of these midwives and why the Jewish monarchy and priesthood was worthy of emerging from them, because their refusal to collaborate with the enemy was in fact a noble and extraordinary thing, an act of heroism and leadership.

No doubt the Datans and Avirams of the time, like the liberals of the present day, would have had plausible arguments for collaborating with the authorities. "After all the Egyptians were implementing aggressive population reduction measures, the prehistorical version of Zero Population Growth. Yes the Jews were mainly targeted but then it was the insistence of backward superstitious religious fanatics among the Jews who insisted on reproducing that was endangering all of Egypt and threatening the nation with famine. No wonder Egypt had to enslave the Jews to try and recover their lost resources. And now it was vital that the policy of aborting the males had to be carried out. And this would allow the Jews to finally assimilate and become one nation with Egypt."

And yet the midwives refused to obey Pharaoh. And they refused to obey those Jews who were willing to collaborate with him. They kept the male children alive. And for this trait, they were chosen to give birth to the future leaders of the Jewish people, its priests and kings, who were meant to carry on those traits. VaTehayena Et HaYeladim. Let the children live.

Today Jewish children in Israel are being murdered and the liberals occasionally make some weak charade of caring even as they pester Israel to go back to surrendering to the terrorists. Some like "Rabbi" Michael Lerner make sure to condemn Israel, equate this to Israel's war with terrorists and blame Israel for the attack. There is no outcry against this administration for its insistence that Israel conclude its Gaza operation incomplete. And so Jewish children go on being murdered.

VaTehayena Et HaYeladim. Let the children live. That is all that is being asked of liberal Jews today. Not your own Jewish children, we know that's a lost cause. Eat your pork and shrimp. Marry whomever you want. Spit on religion, throw unions for homosexuals, abort your own children in the move but VaTehayena Et HaYeladim, let our children live.

You don't identify with Israel? Fine. You have a problem with a state that has to exist by force, don't live there. Someday you'll learn the hard way that every state has to exist because rough men are ready to do violence to keep it safe and free, but move to the suburbs and that day may wait. But leave our country alone and leave us alone. Slather your humanism, your bleeding heart social concerns on the whales, the trees, the shrubs, anywhere but on us. Stop pressuring Israel to negotiate. Stop sending money to Peace Now and the New Israel Fund and the Abraham Fund and other groups whose goals are the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. Stop having your clergy write letters to the President calling for more pressure on Israel. VaTehayena Et HaYeladim. Let our children live.