Sh’mot: Origin Stories Don’t Define Us

This week’s portion, Shemot, is the beginning of a people’s origin story. Before there is liberation, before there is law, before there is peoplehood as we know it, the Torah places us inside a moment of danger, fear, and uncertainty. It is not a clean beginning. It is saturated with trauma. And that matters, because the Torah is teaching us that origins are rarely gentle. They are complicated, pressured, and often shaped by forces beyond our control.

Within that collective origin story, the Torah zooms in on one life. A child born into danger, hidden, displaced, raised between identities, saved by courage that was not his own. The Torah lingers here because real origin stories are intense and nuanced. This is not just about how a leader is formed. It is about how any human being is formed. What we inherit. What we survive. What parts of the story we are exposed to, and which parts remain hidden from us for years.

Shmot also confronts us with a hard truth: every origin story has equal chances of producing a hero or a villain. Trauma does not decide the outcome. The same wound can lead to compassion or cruelty. The same pain can harden a person or refine them. Hatred, in a world shaped by fear and violence, can feel understandable, even righteous. But the Torah’s restraint is striking. Hatred is present in the story, but it is never rewarded. It may explain behavior, but it never justifies destiny. The difference is never the origin itself, but whether the story is wasted or transformed.

This is another way of naming a core Jewish commitment: we do not waste tragedy. We do not ask for it. We do not romanticize it. We refuse to call it holy. But we also refuse to let it be the final author of who we become. The Torah shows us that pain can become raw material, brick and mortar, for building a life of moral clarity rather than a fortress of resentment. Accepting the terms of a moment does not mean surrendering our agency to it.

So Shemot leaves us with a question that feels painfully contemporary. When hatred feels easy to justify, what do we choose to build from what we have lived? If every origin story can become either hero or villain, then our responsibility is clear. The most important chapter is not how the story starts, but what we choose to do next.