When we were kids, we used to see our extended family quite a bit. We would play with our cousins on Saturday afternoons at my grandparents' house, celebrate the holidays together and meet at celebrations and family events. Over the years, we grew and matured, got married and had children, and G-d the family grew and grew.
The trouble is that as the years go by, I meet my cousins much less. The Seder can no longer be celebrated together, because no one has a big enough house to accommodate everyone. It's also hard to invite all the new branches that have joined the family, and with sorrow I notice that my children don't really know my cousins. I take comfort in the fact that they know and are happy to meet their cousins, but I know that it is the nature of the world that even this will not be preserved forever. The family will continue to grow, and each branch will converge within itself.
The portion of Exodus describes how this process happens to the family of our forefather Jacob. At the end of Genesis and at the beginning of Exodus, the Torah lists the names of all family members who descended from Egypt. About 50 cousins subscribe there by name - plus uncles and grandfather, of course. The sons and grandchildren of our forefather Jacob continue to fruit, including: "And the children of Israel shall prosper and multiply and multiply and grow very much, and the earth shall be filled with them" (Exodus <>:<>). The name "Israel", which was used throughout the book of Genesis as the first name of the father of the family, becomes the family name of his descendants. At this moment, when the population is growing and cohesion is fading, Pharaoh sentences Israel to extermination and slavery.
But Pharaoh did not take into account that there is nothing in the world that unites like a common enemy. This family has already experienced severe internal conflicts: splits between the sons of different mothers, alienation, and even violence between siblings. Naturally, when the family became a huge clan, it could have become fragmented and scattered – but in the face of a common enemy it reunited. The clan of Jacob's descendants transforms from a collection of families into one people. Ironically, whoever first defined it this way would call the family a "people," the same Pharaoh himself: "And he said to his people, Behold, the people of Israel are greater and mightier than themselves" (ibid. 9).
Unlike Amir Gilboa's well-known song, a person does not suddenly wake up in the morning and decide that he is a people. Peoples form in a long process - from a small family unit, to an extended family, to a large clan. At first, everyone still gathers during celebrations and holidays, then we meet less, but still everyone knows everyone, and at some point that doesn't exist anymore. The moment of coming together for a people contains at the same time separation and connection – separation that stems from the large number of the population, and connection from the recognition that they are members of the same people.
In many ways, a similar process is happening to Israeli society. There is a combination of two common mistakes here - we are used to thinking that Israel is a small and divided country, and it seems to me that both things are not quite true. Israel is not large, but most countries in the world (about two-thirds of them, to be precise) are smaller than Israel in the number of their inhabitants. Israel's population growth rate is particularly high – we are a country with the life expectancy of an advanced Western country, and a birth rate that rivals the Third World. During the Gulf War, half of the residents living there today lived in Israel, during the Yom Kippur War we were a third of our number now, and since the Six-Day War we have grown about fourfold.
The sense of polarization and alienation we feel today is related, at least in part, to the fact that the family has simply grown tremendously. The children born in recent decades do not know their parents' cousins. Not because of some heated conflict, but mainly because Grandma's living room no longer has room for everyone. As in Pharaoh's Egypt, today, in the face of the enemy harassing us, we feel and feel our unity and connection again, even though we are no longer the same small family we once were.
We have great and turbulent social challenges, and burning disputes that must be addressed. But at least part of the sense of division and polarization is simply because we have grown and grown. Paradoxically, this distance is also part of the fact that we, "the people of Israel," are simply one big family. √
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