Between Gan Eden and Mitzrayim
The Pivot from Bereishis to Shemos, and What It Means for Us
Sefer Bereishis teaches us about the sin of the Etz HaDaas, which sent mankind out of Gan Eden and cut off our access to the Ohr Ein Sof, now the Ohr HaGanuz. From there, the Avos and the Shevatim work to draw that light into our world and guide it back toward tikkun, returning creation to the clarity of before the sin.
In Bereishis, we chased the Ohr Ein Sof as it flashed through beginnings and promises. In Shemos, the light lies dormant, and we learn to live through darkness as refinement brings it back into view.Sefer Shemos enters another exile in Mitzrayim, and then follows the path toward redemption.
One way to contrast Sefer Bereishis and Sefer Shemos is through the difference between the teivah of Noach and the teivah of Moshe.
There are many distinctions between the two, but one detail stands out: how each one was waterproofed. Noach’s teivah was coated with tar on the outside and the inside. Moshe’s teivah was coated with tar only on the outside, and the inside was lined with clay.
Why is this?
Rav Kook1 explains that before the mabul, the world was defined by pirud, a fragmentation where each person lived for themselves. A society built on isolation and selfishness collapses.
Noach’s teivah preserved humanity’s physical continuity while the outside air turned spiritually toxic with pirud. The teivah also exposed a truth: the world survives through the Oneness of Hashem (achdus). That is why Noach’s teivah gets sealed with tar on the outside and the inside. It creates a full barrier against an atmosphere of separation.
The Mei HaShiloach2 teaches that this state of fragmentation is an echo of the early worlds of Tohu, realms that shattered because their vessels could not contain the light. Those first emanations fell through excess revelation of light and the early generations followed the same pattern. They lived without the balance of concealment and light, the tzimtzum that sustains creation.
Moshe’s teivah played a different role. It protected the soul of the world, so the tar stayed outside, and the inside was lined with clay so Moshe breathed in a different air. Smell reaches the neshama directly, which is why we smell besamim on motzei Shabbos as the neshama yeseirah departs. Tar carries a foul odor, and here that odor became the scent of fragmentation and brokenness. Moshe needed to be breathing in an inner world tuned to the achdus of Hashem.
The Zohar teaches that the generation of the mabul fell by rejecting Shem Shakkai, the Divine Name that says “Dai,” enough. They chased expansion without boundary and pushed away the tzimtzum that brings balance to Creation. Once measure disappears, judgment arrives as the correction. The Flood became that correction, with heaven and earth merging without limit, showing what happens when the boundaries that sustain life dissolve.
Noach’s teivah shows what it takes for a fractured world to keep existing at all. When society dissolves into pure pirud, fragmentation, survival demands insulation, distance, and full separation from a poisoned environment. Moshe’s teivah points to a deeper stage. Redemption begins only when the redeemer’s inner world already lives in achdus, steady enough to remain open to the outside without absorbing its fragmentation.
Rav Kook also explains that each nation expresses a different human strength; partial strengths that collide and produce struggle. Humanity holds together through an inner unifying force, and that force is Knesses Yisrael, the spiritual core that harmonizes the world around it. With that inner center, the parts find their place and their harmony. Without it, they dissipate into oblivion.
The teivah of Noach saved the world’s outer layer, the part that keeps bodies alive and history moving. It created a sealed pocket of life in a place where the air itself had turned poisonous. In that moment, the goal stayed simple: keep what can still live from getting swallowed by what already fell apart.
Moshe’s teivah did something else. It protected the world’s inner life, the place where a future can still form. That kind of protection cannot come through total isolation, because redemption grows inside the world, not outside it. It resembled a fruit: the peel faces the bruises and pressure, while the fruit stays intact and sweet.
The world’s air become compromised at the very start, with Adam and Chava eating from the Etz HaDaas. From that moment, reality itself became a blend: good threaded with evil, holiness tangled with distortion. Rav Kook understands Moshe’s teivah as the beginning of a mission to save the world’s soul through unity, but unity lives or dies by what contains it. Unity needs a vessel down here. That vessel is Knesses Yisrael.
That sets the order of Sefer Shemos. Before the Torah enters the world as light, a people has to form who can receive it. That forging did not happen in Gan Eden. It happened in galus. It happened in the pressure-cooker of Mitzrayim, not because the outside stays out, but because the struggle itself shapes the inside.
Mitzrayim literally means meitzarim, narrow straits. Exile narrows breath, imagination, and movement. It trapped a person inside patterns that feel hard to escape. In that sense, Mitzrayim names both a place and a condition, the inner constriction that precedes any real breaking free.
Sefer Bereishis taught us what it means to live in a world where the Ohr Ein Sof can still be traced. It flashes at the beginning of creation, then it slips into hiding, but it never disappears from the story. Even after the Etz HaDaas, even after violence and confusion spread, there is still something to reach for. The avodah in Bereishis is learning how to notice that light, name it, and move toward it, sometimes in obvious places, and sometimes in the cracks.
Sefer Shemos shifts the experience. Moshe enters a world where the light rests dormant, not because it is gone, but because the time for open revelation has not arrived. In that space, the question stops being “Where is the light?” and becomes “Who am I when I cannot see it?” The work becomes survival with loyalty, moving forward with emunah while the darkness stays thick, and letting refinement do its slow work until the light can return without shattering the vessel.
Let me explain by bringing us back to Parashas Bereishis. Before we watch a nation receive Torah, we return to the first fracture, because that moment pulls reality into the quagmire of concealment we still live inside.
The Ramchal in Derech Hashem3 teaches that when HaShem created the world, He created Gan Eden and placed it within the physical world. Chazal locate it between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what we call modern-day Iraq. Gan Eden was meant to serve as HaShem’s dwelling place with mankind, a life of closeness without death. A world that felt whole.
Then Adam and Chava sinned, everything got upended. Death entered the world, and they were sent out of Gan Eden. From that moment, the purpose of mankind became tikkun, bringing creation back toward the garden.
Before the sin, good and evil stood apart as separate realities. After the sin, they intertwined, and that mixture turned human choice into something far more dangerous. It opened the door to the generation of the mabul, Sedom, inquisitions, holocausts, and the rest of history’s worst chapters. It also explains the dynamic of Kayin and Hevel, where jealousy and distortion took hold causing the first murder to take place.
The work of the world became to separate good from evil, and to make space for what belongs. That task plays out on the individual, the national, and the global level, and it demands real refinement and steady work.
In Bereishis, we tried to do this by searching for the light. By the time we settled in Mitzrayim, that approach no longer fit the moment. When Yaakov tried to reveal the light, he saw that the world still lacked the vessel for it. We still needed to pass through a harsher refinement before returning to anything like a pre-cheit state.
Mitzrayim became part of that refinement. We stood on the edge of disconnection from God, already at the 49th level of tumah. One more step would have pushed us to the 50th.
These levels of tumah can feel abstract and hard to picture, so my father, Rav Yaacov Haber explains the concept using an effective and clear mental image.
Think of a copper electrical cable made of 50 thin metal strands. The fewer strands that carry a given current, the more heat builds up across the wire (due to the resistance in each strand of metal). With enough strands, the wire stays stable. With too few, it runs hot, its reliability drops over time, and it turns dangerous.
Likewise, we have 50 connections to HaShem. Each “level of tumah” means a certain number of those connections get cut. The first level means one connection gets severed, leaving 49. The 25th level means 25 get cut, leaving 25. Just before Bnei Yisrael left Egypt, 49 out of the 50 connections were cut. They were hanging on by the last strand. That strand ran burning hot, and the light on it flickered.
Here is the key point - as long as even one connection remained, every other connection could be regenerated. At the 50th level of tumah, complete disconnection sets in and the path back disappears. Baruch HaShem, we left Egypt while that last strand still held. From there, we rebuilt one connection at a time, until we stood at 49 connections again, ready to receive the Torah at Har Sinai.
As mentioned earlier, the task was to separate good from evil. My father, quoting the Arizal, explains that the slavery in Mitzrayim was called the Kur HaBarzel, an iron crucible. He compares it to a mine. When metal first comes out of the ground, it is rough, coated in soot, and filled with impurities. Only after refinement does it become valuable. In the same way, the suffering in Egypt served as a refining process, creating a tikkun that moves the world back toward Gan Eden. Mitzrayim becomes the laboratory where good and evil begin to separate after the Etz HaDaas fused them together.
At the sneh, this idea turned into something Moshe could see. The staff he carried represented pure good from Gan Eden. Rabbeinu Yonah on Avos teaches that it traced back to the Etz HaChaim. The snake represented the force that drove Adam and Chava out of Gan Eden. When Hashem told Moshe to throw the staff to the ground, it became a snake, showing good and evil bound together in a single form. When the snake turned back into a staff, it showed that tikkun remains possible. Later, the Egyptians tried to imitate Moshe. They could turn staffs into snakes, but they could not reverse the process. They could display corruption, but the restoration stayed beyond their reach.
The Beis Yaakov4 teaches something sharp about galus. Galus does not mean redemption that stays afar, rather that redemption itself goes into hiding.
Hashem’s word stays true, but it starts to feel fractured. The promises look like they clash with reality. Darkness starts to feel louder than anything else. That is “shevirah,” not because Hashem breaks, but because the message hits a world that cannot yet hold it.
Michal Oshman5 names this experience in deeply human terms. She writes that “brokenness is universal,” and that it does not signal failure. “Nothing is more complete than a broken heart,” she explains, because growth and learning take place precisely in the cracks. What feels shattered becomes the very space where something truer and stronger can form.
This concealment is deliberate.
Hashem gives a flash, then pulls it back. Not to abandon us, but to draw something out of us. A cry that comes from the gut, not from certainty. A tefillah that rises because life doesn’t seem to make sense.
That cry changes the redemption. It stops being a quick momentary miracle that passes by, and it becomes something we own. It becomes part of us. So what looks like a delay becomes a way of planting the geulah deeper. What feels like abandonment becomes the setup.
The suffering in Mitzrayim was real and so was the work. Redemption has to pass through human longing and human effort, until it can come to fruition.
As Rav Yitzchak Dovid Schwartz explains6:
“If one were to create a timeline charting the salvation from galus Mitzrayim, the starting point would be that moment that B’nei Yisrael emitted a collective national groan. Before that point, they had no impetus, no drive to pray and call out to G-d. Only when the Divine will decreed that the time for geulah had arrived did Hashem stimulate their desire to be extricated from galus, producing a will to pray for this salvation. For the dawn of every salvation is the desire for deliverance. The Beis Yaakov develops this concept further: The period of nocturnal darkness most intense and most concealing is the time directly preceding dawn’s first light.”
Oshman sharpens the point with one hard line: “If you change nothing, nothing will change.” Brokenness alone does not move a person or a people. Movement begins when someone responds, even from a place of pain, even with a groan instead of clarity.
Ultimately, the Jewish people sinned again, and we fell short of the full tikkun. Still, this teaches us what our role looks like as we move back toward tikkun. Sometimes things seem to open and then darkness creeps back in. Even that regression becomes part of the build, making the final geulah that much more momentous and meaningful. May it come soon.
Shemuos HaReiyah Shemos 5691
Noach
1;3
end of Shemos
What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid
From The Waters of The Shiloach
Had it just been the connections between each Teivah, I would have been enough, but you gave us so much more. Thank you!!!!
It’s always great to see teachings from your father.