With the opening of Sefer Shemos the Torah shifts its focus to the experiences of the Children of Israel in Egypt. Parshas Shemos begins with a description of the servitude, anguish and punishing decrees that the Children of Israel faced under the “new king” who ruled Egypt (Shemos 1:8-22). 

The first chapter of Shemos provides us with a complete picture of the blueprint for genocide against our people. First, a new king arose who did not know - nor cared to remember - Yosef and what he did for Egypt (1:8). Then he began to slander the Bnei Yisrael to his nation, accusing them - through propaganda - of all sorts of imagined evils (1:9-10). Once he turned the hearts and minds of the Egyptians against the Israelites, he financially oppressed the Bnei Yisrael (v.11). Increasing their suffering even more, slave labor then began (ibid.). Finally, not content with all that he has implemented, Pharaoh ordered infanticide against the baby boys of the Hebrew women (v.16).

The pattern is complete and the picture, all too painfully, familiar to us. 

In his memoirs, entitled “In Seven Camps in Three Years,” my grandfather, Yitzchak ben Moshe z’l, Yitzchak Kaftan, originally from the town of Krasnik in Poland, wrote: “As soon as the Germans arrived in Krashnik, the subjugation and pain of the Jewish population began. Already, a few weeks after they took over the city, no one could go to pray at a Shul. If anyone wanted to pray with a minyan, then a few elderly Jews gathered in a private residence and prayed. On a certain Shabos, when I went to lead the service at Reb Peretz Goldberg, may G-d avenge his blood, a German accosted me and began to drag me to the marketplace where a large number of Jews were already assembled. I was dressed in a silk Shabos kapote (silk frock coat), with a prayer shawl (talis) and a Chumash under my arm. I just realized that I should have changed my clothes, when we were driven away to the train station where we unloaded coal from box cars all day. I was then so naive and I thought: ‘What are they thinking, the Germans?  It is today the Sabbath of the New Month (Shabbos Rosh Chodesh), we must say Hallel. So where is he taking us?’ This was the first time that I experienced working for the Germans and also received a beating. But the hell had just begun.”

Into this bleak picture of hundreds of years of oppression, we suddenly learn of the birth of a baby boy to a Levite family whose mother is able to hide him for three months. After this time of concealment, she is forced to put him into a little basket, and floats him in the reeds along the banks of the Nile River.

While going down to the river to bathe, the Egyptian princess finds the little basket, protecting a baby within. The heroine of the story now becomes Bat Pharaoh, the daughter of Pharaoh himself, who comes down to bathe in the river.

When she sees the basket floating in the reeds she sends forth her maidservant (or stretches out her arm, Rashi to 2:5) and she takes the basket. וַתִּפְתַּח֙ וַתִּרְאֵ֣הוּ אֶת־הַיֶּ֔לֶד וְהִנֵּה־נַ֖עַר בֹּכֶ֑ה וַתַּחְמֹ֣ל עָלָ֔יו וַתֹּ֕אמֶר מִיַּלְדֵ֥י הָֽעִבְרִ֖ים זֶֽה, She opened it, and she saw him the child, and behold a lad was crying, and she had compassion on him, and she said, “From the child of the Hebrews this one is!” (Shemos 2:6). Choosing to the save the child, rather than drown him - as per her father’s decree - Bat Pharaoh becomes the first righteous gentile. 

When the baby’s sister, who the Sages identify as Miriam, bravely steps forth, and offers to find a wet nurse from the Hebrews, the Princess agrees. Miriam promptly runs to fetch the baby’s mother to care for him and raise him for the next twenty-four months (Medrash Shemos Rabbah 1:26). At the end of this period, he is brought back to the Princess, is her adopted son, and she names him Moshe (Shemos 2:10).

Of Bat Pharaoh, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z’l writes, “She was one of the most unexpected heroes of the Hebrew Bible. Without her, Moshe might not have lived. The whole story of the exodus would have been different. Yet she was not an Israelite. She had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by her courage. Yet she seemed to have had no doubt, experienced no misgivings, made no hesitation. If it was Pharaoh who afflicted the children of Israel, it was another member of his own family who saved the decisive vestige of hope: Pharaohs’ daughter…

“Instead of ‘Pharaoh’s daughter’ read ‘Hitler’s daughter’ or ‘Stalin’s daughter’ and we see what is at stake. Tyranny cannot destroy humanity. Moral courage can sometimes be found in the heart of darkness. That the Torah itself tells the story the way it does has enormous implications… Outside Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, is an avenue dedicated to righteous gentiles. Pharaoh’s daughter is a supreme symbol of what they did and what they were” (Covenant & Conversation, Exodus, p.25,28).

Regarding the Sages praise for Bat Pharaoh, when the pasuk tells us: “וַתָּ֤קָם בְּע֬וֹד לַ֗יְלָה, and she arose while it was still night” (Mishlei 31:15), this “alludes to Batyah, who arose when it was yet night - she arose early each morning and walked along the Nile. When Moses came to her hands, G-d had given her what she sought, and she rejoiced. As it is written, ‘She opened the basket and saw the child.’ During the plague of the firstborn, the female firstborn also died. Yet Batyah was spared, in the merit of having saved Moses. Thus: ‘She arose and endured when it was yet night’ - i.e., on the night of the plague.

“Batyah is also alluded to in the ninth verse of the Eishet Chayil: ‘She sees that her merchandise is good; her light does not go out at night.’ The reason that Batyah was spared was that her merchandise was ‘good’ - she had a good advocate, Moses, who is referred to as ‘good’ (Shemos 2:2). Thus her light was not extinguished on the night of the Exodus” (Woman of Valor, Compiled by Rabbi Yosef Marcus, Kehot Publication Society, 2025, p.61).

May the great women of our Torah, who were selfless and courageous to build our nation, inspire us to always rise higher for the good of Am Yisrael, Toras Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael.

בברכת בשורות טובות ושבת שלום