When the People Couldn’t Breathe

How Hashem Restores Breath, Strength, and Creative Partnership

Dedication

In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel:

Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua.

Last week marked the azkara for Ephraim HY'D, and this week for Yakir HY'D. Their souls are already in the highest

place, beside the Kisei HaKavod. May Hashem bring comfort, strength, and consolation to their families.

On my husband’s birthday a few years ago, one of our sons gave him what may have been the highest compliment a child can offer a parent. He said that when he was young—when the car broke down, or when something suddenly went wrong—he felt calm because he knew that his Abba would be there to solve the problem. He was a little child, and the responsibility to fix things did not rest on his shoulders. His father would step in, take care of what needed to be done, and restore order. Breath would return.

That moment stayed with me. It captured something essential about leadership: the ability to hold the weight of a situation for someone who cannot yet carry it themselves. When I read #ParshatVaera, I realized that the Torah is describing this exact dynamic on a national scale.

When #Moshe brings words of redemption to the Jewish people, the Torah records their response with rare precision:

“Moshe spoke thus to the Children of Israel, and they did not listen to Moshe, because of kotzer ruach and avodah kashah.”(Exodus 6:9)

The Torah describes a human state shaped by circumstance rather than a lapse of will. The people are experiencing avodah kashah—crushing labor—and kotzer ruach—a constricted inner life. Together, these describe a human being whose internal space has collapsed. Breath is shortened. Attention is narrowed. Receptivity is compromised.

This moment becomes a foundation for understanding how the Torah views trauma, leadership, and the restoration of human capacity.

How a People Lose Their Inner Space

Pharaoh explains his strategy openly:

“Let the labor be heavier upon the men… and they will not turn to words.”(Exodus 5:9)תִּכְבַּד הָעֲבֹדָה עַל־הָאֲנָשִׁים וְיַעֲשׂוּ־בָהּ וְאַל־יִשְׁעוּ בְּדִבְרֵי־שָׁקֶר

The Torah reveals something essential here. Pharaoh calls Moshe’s message divrei sheker—words of falsehood—but the commentators focus on something deeper: not the truth of the words, but the human capacity to receive any words at all. Intensified labor functions as saturation. By filling every moment, Pharaoh prevents inward turning—thought, imagination, and hope. Shemot Rabbah names this directly: the labor is increased so that the people have no p’nai laḥshov—no space to think (Shemot Rabbah 5:18).

Avodah kashah operates on two levels at once. It exhausts the body, and it collapses the inner world. When there is no pause, there is no breath. When there is no breath, words cannot enter.

Ramban sharpens this insight. He explains that Moshe’s words were words of comfort, and that the people’s difficulty lay in the continuity of their suffering. Consolation requires interruption. Without rhythm, even truth cannot be integrated.

Sforno adds that the people could not imagine redemption because they had never experienced freedom. Imagination depends on lived possibility. When experience has been entirely shaped by constraint, the future cannot yet be pictured.

Leadership When the People Cannot Process

At this point, the Torah introduces a decisive turn. Until now, Moshe has spoken to the people—bringing words of redemption, reassurance, and promise. Their response makes clear that they cannot receive those words. Breath is constricted, inner capacity is gone, and faith cannot yet function. This raises the central leadership question the Torah now answers: What is the correct response to a person—or a people—who cannot yet breathe?

The Torah does not move toward further explanation, persuasion, or education. Instead, it redirects Moshe entirely:

“Go, speak to Pharaoh.”(Exodus 6:11)

This move is deliberate and counterintuitive. When the people lack inner space, leadership does not demand belief or insight from them. Responsibility shifts away from the overwhelmed and toward the source of the overwhelm. The work of leadership becomes the removal of pressure rather than the cultivation of response. Only once space is restored can words return.

This pattern appears again at the sea.

The Sea: When Movement Comes Before Meaning

Trapped between the Egyptians and the water, the people find themselves in a moment of absolute entrapment. Behind them is the Egyptian army—horses, chariots, and soldiers who represent everything they have just escaped. In front of them is the sea, an impenetrable barrier. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to turn, no visible path forward.

Although they have physically left Egypt, their bodies return immediately to an Egyptian reality. This moment is a national flashback. The sensations are familiar: being cornered, overpowered, and helpless. Breath tightens. Self-direction collapses. The trauma response reasserts itself. The people cry out, not from panic.

Moshe turns upward, and God responds:

“Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the Children of Israel and let them journey forth.”(Exodus 14:15)

This response echoes the earlier redirection away from the people and toward Pharaoh. Here too, the Torah teaches that when a people are overtaken by acute threat, prayer itself is out of place because the body cannot yet breathe.

What is required instead is movement, which is an embodied interruption of the freeze response. The sea only opens only after Nachshon steps forward into the water (Sotah 37a). That step restores a sense of power before it restores safety. Action precedes understanding. Passage comes before meaning.

Only after the threat has passed do we hear song. Shira emerges once the body knows it is safe.

Redemption as Birth: Why Rhythm Matters

Chazal describe the Exodus as God taking a nation from within a nation (Deuteronomy 4:34). The language is unmistakably that of birth.

Birth unfolds through contractions that contain pauses. Those pauses allow pressure to rise and release rather than overwhelm. Egypt represents unbroken contraction. The plagues introduce something new: rhythm. Each plague begins and ends. For the first time, suffering becomes finite.

That experience alone changes the inner landscape. When pressure eases, breath returns. When breath returns, imagination begins to reawaken. This is the first stage of becoming a people.

All mothers recognize this from the inside. The strength that emerges afterward—the fierce, embodied sense of I am woman, hear me roar—does not come from the absence of pressure. It comes from rhythm. Contractions rise and fall. Pressure builds and then releases. Those pauses make it possible to stay present, to remain engaged, to trust that the process is leading somewhere meaningful. Breath returns again and again, and with it the knowledge that this pressure is purposeful and temporary.

Read this way, the birth metaphor becomes exact. God takes a people who have known only unbroken pressure and introduces pause into their suffering. The plagues are acts of judgment and simultaneously the first moments of space. They teach the body that pressure can ease, that the present moment can end, that a future exists beyond it. Redemption begins when breath is restored and the process becomes one the people can inhabit—with hope, participation, and trust in what is being born.

Complaints as a Sign of Healing

Soon after, the people begin to complain. In the Torah’s arc, this marks a significant shift. Complaint requires voice, expectation, and relationship. Silence belongs to collapse; speech signals that inner life is returning.

This dynamic appears explicitly in Chazal. Shemot Rabbah comments on the early complaints in the wilderness that the people were now able to speak because they expected to be heard. The very act of complaint assumes relationship and responsiveness. A slave cries out into emptiness; a free person protests because someone is listening.

Rashi, commenting on the people’s first complaints after the Exodus (see Exodus 15:24; 16:2), notes that they turn their words toward Moshe and Aharon. This turn itself is meaningful. They are no longer silent under pressure, nor frozen in despair. They have begun to articulate need, frustration, and expectation.

The Torah thus presents complaint as an early stage of recovery. Before gratitude and song can be sustained, voice must first return. Speech—even difficult, unrefined speech—indicates that breath has come back online and that relationship has been reestablished. The people are no longer shut down; they are engaged, reactive, and alive.

From Avodah Kashah to the Melacha of the #Mishkan

This stage emerges only after the Torah has fully taken stock of where the people actually are. Breath has returned and voice has begun to reemerge through complaint, but the people have not yet internalized freedom. The episode of the Golden Calf makes this unmistakably clear. Faced with uncertainty and delay, the people regress toward a familiar pattern: seeking an external figure to hold power, certainty, and control. This is not moral failure alone; it is the reflex of a people still healing from life without self-direction

Hashem does not abandon the people at this point. Instead, He responds with precision. Having seen where they are truly holding, He introduces the next, deeper stage of healing: choice, imagination, and creative authorship Rather than demanding a level of faith the people do not yet possess, God invites them into a process that can rebuild it from the inside.

The Torah’s language shifts decisively after the Exodus. In Egypt, work is called avodah. In the building of the Mishkan, the Torah speaks of melacha (Exodus 35–39). This change in language reflects a change in the human condition.

Avodah becomes destructive when it is kashah: imposed from the outside, unrelenting, and identity-erasing. It reduces a person to function. Avodah in the Mikdash, by contrast, is chosen service—bounded by time, structure, and meaning, oriented toward relationship with God. It preserves the human being even as it demands devotion.

Melacha adds another layer. It is creative authorship. It allows human beings to act as builders rather than survivors. In the Mishkan, the people bring materials freely, contribute skill and imagination, and see their inner world translated into tangible form. This is not forced labor; it is volunteered creation. Trauma recovery reaches a new stage here: the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist and to bring it into being.

The Mishkan thus represents a profound shift—from endurance to expression, from collapse to construction. A people who were once defined by what was done to them are now defined by what they choose to build.

Shabbat then enters as the Torah’s safeguard. By requiring even melacha to stop (Exodus 31:13–17), Shabbat preserves inner space. It protects creation from becoming compulsive and ensures that meaningful work never collapses back into endless service. Breath, rhythm, and dignity are guarded weekly, so that creation remains an expression of freedom rather than a return to bondage.

Our Time: A Pharaoh Without Bricks

Pharaoh’s defining move was the removal of p’nai—inner margin, the space required for reflection and inward turning. Our generation faces a different form of saturation. Screens, constant input, and uninterrupted stimulation fill every gap. Silence is rare. Attention is fragmented. Processing time is scarce. What Pharaoh once achieved through physical labor is now accomplished through perpetual engagement.

The Torah gives us language for this condition. When p’nai (inner space) disappears, kotzer ruach follows—literally, a shortness of breath, a constricted spirit. The result is diminished capacity. People struggle to listen deeply, to imagine alternatives, to choose deliberately. Inner life narrows under constant pressure.

Seen this way, the symptoms of our time are recognizable. Reactivity replaces reflection. Urgency crowds out presence. Choice gives way to impulse. This is a predictable human response to continuous occupation of attention and breath. The Torah already described it: remove space, and the spirit contracts.

The Hashem Way Forward

The Torah’s path forward now comes into focus. Redemption begins with restoring space. When breath has been crushed by unrelenting pressure, leadership protects rhythm, creates pauses, and reduces saturation. Before asking for belief or understanding, it restores the conditions that make belief possible. Before demanding meaning, it makes room for breath.

This is how Hashem heals a traumatized people. He confronts the source of the pressure, interrupts its continuity, and gradually returns a sense of authorship to those who lost it. Breath returns. Voice follows. Choice reemerges. Imagination awakens. Only then does God invite the people into partnership as creators capable of building.

The movement from Pharaoh’s avodah to God’s melacha is therefore therapeutic and covenantal. Endless service gives way to bounded creation. Fear-driven reaction gives way to chosen action. The Mishkan stands as proof that healing culminates in positive, creative work freely offered—materials, skill, vision, and heart.

Seen this way, the Exodus ends with dignity restored. Hashem teaches His people how to live again—how to breathe, how to speak, how to choose, and how to build.

Perhaps this is the deepest echo of that moment my son described. A child who cannot yet solve the problem finds calm when someone trustworthy carries the weight. So too, a people crushed by kotzer ruach find breath when Hashem steps in, holds the pressure, and slowly hands back responsibility.

From that returned breath emerges strength. From that strength comes creativity. And from that creative partnership, a nation is born—not only freed from Egypt, but capable of building a dwelling for God in the world.

Last week, we celebrated the birthday of our oldest daughter, Aliza. As her mother, I feel deep gratitude for what it meant to become her mother first. Through her birth, I was introduced to the process of birth itself—the revelation of strength I did not yet know I carried, the power of rhythm and breath, and the beginning of my own creative journey. In that moment, I learned what it means to move through pressure toward life, and to discover strength through participation in a process filled with hope.

I bless my sweet daughter Aliza, and her future husband Aviram, with all goodness and blessing. May their lives be filled with breath, creativity, partnership, and the strength to build a home of faith, joy, and peace together.