Shalom Brother: Emancipating Ourselves (Shemot 5786)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International

Parashat Shemot פָּרָשַׁת שְׁמוֹת  January 10, 2026 | Tevet 21, 5786

A system doesn’t need your heart to rule you. It only needs your habits. That’s one of the terrors of Shemot: Egypt doesn’t merely enslave bodies; it trains souls. It teaches a society what to notice, what to ignore, and what to call “normal.” Pharaoh’s policy is not only economic; it’s educational. It shapes men into a certain kind of man — useful, obedient, emotionally shut down. The Torah shows cruelty becoming routine.

Oppression recruits men by handing us power over others, or by threatening to take power away. Often it offers a bargain: keep your head down, do your work, protect your own, and you won’t have to feel too much.

Shifra and Puah are ordered to kill the baby boys. Their refusal is a refusal to become what the system needs. When Pharaoh can’t coerce through authority, he diffuses responsibility: “Every boy that is born, throw into the Nile.” Now the crime belongs to everyone and no one. That is how numbness spreads.

Many men know this terrain. You can be decent and still be trained — at work, in family patterns, in social circles — to look away from what is inconvenient, tolerate what is demeaning, laugh at what is cruel so you won’t be next. A system rarely demands your full agreement. It asks for your quiet participation. I didn’t make the rules. It’s just the way it is.

These are protective spells. They keep a man from feeling the cost of what he allows. They also hide a harsher truth: the system isn’t only “out there.” It lives in reflexes, tone, silence, and avoidance. Oppression is a boot on the neck, and it is also a story that teaches you who you must become to survive.

That’s why Bob Marley’s line lands like Torah in another key: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” Marley isn’t blaming the oppressed; he’s naming the hardest battlefield: the one inside. You can walk out of Egypt and still carry Egypt.

Moses enters as a man beginning to unlearn. He “goes out to his brothers and sees their burdens.” That is the crack in the armor. Moses does what the system tries to prevent: he sees — not just suffering, but burden, lives crushed by a structure designed to make the oppressed invisible.

And then Moses strikes the Egyptian. The Torah doesn’t romanticize it. The instinct is protective, but also impulsive. Immediately after, he confronts two Hebrew men fighting. They reject him: “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?” Translation: you want to be the hero now? Where were you when this place trained all of us to survive by turning on each other?

Here masculinity work gets real. Many of us were trained by systems of manhood that reward hardness, dominance, and emotional exile. Some men respond by becoming Pharaoh in miniature: controlling, punishing, always right. Some go numb: disengaged, joking through pain, “fine” until they’re not. Some become Moses too fast: dramatic interventions meant to relieve guilt more than repair harm.

If Marley is right, liberation is not only political; it is inner discipline. And if Shemot is right, the first step is not victory; it is awareness. Not “I’m a good guy,” but “Here is where I’ve been trained.”

So what does it take to emancipate ourselves? To start we can ask ourselves, Where have I been trained to ignore someone’s burden — my partner’s, my child’s, my neighbors, my own? Where do I go numb because feeling would demand change? And what is being used to distract me from that pain?

Practicing humility is the second thing we can do. Moses will become a liberator, but first he becomes a fugitive. Even the right instinct can come out sideways when powered by ego and the myth of the lone-man hero. Hero stories let us feel righteous without becoming accountable. Liberation requires something quieter: pause, listen, own harm, choose repair over performance.

Last, the willingness to choose a different brotherhood. Egypt keeps men loyal through fear and rank — who’s tougher, who’s in charge, who can’t be questioned. Shemot counters that logic by showing early liberators who refuse to let power define who deserves protection: the midwives, Miriam, Yocheved, even Batya, Pharaoh’s daughter.

So here’s the Shalom Brother question of the week:

When a system wants you numb, blind, or ignorant, what practices keep you human and aware? Maybe it’s a men’s circle where strength means truth without mockery. Maybe it’s therapy. Maybe it’s a hevruta (deep learning) partner who asks what you dodge. Maybe it’s learning to apologize cleanly, without defense. Choose one place in your life where you stop outsourcing your conscience to “how things are,” and begin changing how you speak, listen, and respond when you’re afraid.

None but ourselves can free our minds. And Shemot adds: freedom begins before miracles, when we refuse to be trained into cruelty.

Shabbat shalom, brother.