Because of the serial weekly reading of sedrahs from the Torah, sometimes the timing gets a bit weird. I mean, here we are in the dead of winter, just finishing the goyish New Year’s, and the reading this week is the Moses origin story, which really belongs in springtime when Pesach rolls around. I blame Trump.

In any case, this week’s sedrah is euphoniously called Parshot Shemot (or Shemos if you’re old-school Ashkenazi). And action-packed it certainly is- this isn’t one of those sedrahs that’s stuffed with arcane legalistics, there’s shit happening. And most of it is Moses’s pre-bugout stuff. It’s the first sedrah in Shemot, aka Exodus, and I will note that “Shemot” means “names.” The Jew names for the books of the Torah are generally taken from the first significant words in the book, which in this case are “v’ayleh shemot.” Now, you might ask, why didn’t we call the book “V’ayleh”? Because that means “and these are…” which isn’t as cool as “names.” Anyway, the referred-to names are the guys from Joseph’s family who came over to Egypt (which we Jews laughingly call “Mitzrayim”) during the good years there: Reuven, Levi, Simeon, Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, Benjamin, Dan, Naftali, Asher, Gad, and Rudolph, who had a BIG red nose and guided his brethren on the right path to get to Egypt.

Most of the story of Shemot will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments, so rather than rehash the stories of Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, I’ll point out a couple bits that didn’t make it onto the silver screen. We all know that the Pharaoh died and the new Pharaoh didn’t like Jews very much. Interestingly, his objection (if you believe the Torah) was that the Jews outnumbered the Egyptians. Now unless the Jews were even more prolific than rabbits, this claim seems a bit dubious. But it’s in the Bible, so it has to be true, right? The Pharaoh then did what any good politician would- noting that if you subsidize something, you get more of it, and if you tax something, you get less of it, he levied (pun!) a tax on the Jews, and created the Egyptian version of the IRS as an enforcement mechanism. Apparently, this was insufficient, so the Egyptians enslaved the Jews. You might ask yourself, “How does this make sense? If the Jews outnumbered the Egyptians and were more powerful, how could they be enslaved?” And you’re going to Hell for even asking that question. The answer is not explicitly given, but my hypothesis is that the Egyptian Jews, like American Jews, tended to be strongly progressive. So they succumbed to guilt, totally unable to bring themselves to resist an onslaught from Egyptian shvartzes.

The Pharisees, of course, did their usual tortured logic to explain things- using some remarkable reasoning, they deduced that every Jew lady had 12 kids. I’m not even going to try to walk through this, it’s as stupid as 9 lawyers in black dresses deciding that raising wheat for your own family falls under the interstate commerce clause of the constitution. I’ll go with my Progressive theory.

Another bit that didn’t make it into the DeMille epic was Yahweh equipping Moses with miracle stuff to prove he was on a mission from God. Yeah, the movie showed the old staff-into-snake sleight of hand, but in the original, Moses’s miracle was putting his hand into his shirt, then pulling it out to show that he suddenly had a major case of leprosy. Once the gross-out sunk in, he would then put his hand back into the shirt and pull it out, now un-diseased. This was a cool enough trick that Moses was a winner in Penn & Teller’s Fool Me, and got him the Vegas invite.

Of course, the movie DID have the whole Burning Bush thing, but… really, in the universe of miracles, that was a pretty low grade one.

Another bit that kind of glided by in the movie was Yahweh’s direction for the Jews to loot Egypt on their way out.

Each woman shall borrow from her neighbor and from the dweller in her house silver and gold objects and garments, and these you shall put on your sons and on your daughters, and you shall empty out Egypt.

Reparations! I’m getting a bit more sympathetic to Pharaoh.

Yahweh, as usual, continues to be an asshole. As Moses and his family head back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh, Yahweh inexplicably tries to kill Moses, apparently because he hadn’t cut off the end of Junior’s wee-wee. Mrs. Moses does so, throws the bloody tip at Yahweh, and that’s the last we ever hear about this unfortunate incident.

Jews are strange. But you know the rest of the story, lots of heart-hardening and then Plagues. But those come next week.

I’ll wind this up with a passage from the Haftorah. Reminder: the Haftorah is a reading from the later books that somehow is supposed to relate to the Torah portion. Confusingly, the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews have different Haftorah selections each week. This is from the Ashkenazi one:

Woe is to the crown of the pride of the drunkards of Ephraim and the young fruit of an inferior fig is the position of his glory, which is at the end of a valley of fatness, crushed by wine…These, too, erred because of wine and strayed because of strong wine; priest and prophet erred because of strong wine, they became corrupt because of wine; they went astray because of strong wine, they erred against the seer, they caused justice to stumble.

For all tables were filled with vomit and ordure, without place.

Pretty much describes our New Year’s Eve.