Blogging the Exodus

I'll be joining Phyllis Sommer (@imabima) and many other colleagues to blog the Exodus, starting tomorrow (Rosh Chodesh Nisan), to anticipate Pesach. We start with the 'narrow places'/Mitzrayim (which is as good a place to start as any) but I think it's worth anticipating that with a little discussion of how we get to those narrow places in the first place. After all Egypt didn't start out as a 'narrow place' for Israel: it was a place of bounty, of refuge from food scarcity, a place of yichus as his son Joseph led the country, a place of reconciliation for his family, a place of growth (that whole 'going down as a small people and departing as a mixed multitude' thing). It was also a place of exile and alienation, with the expectation even at the end of Genesis that Israel's descendants would leave (so says Joseph as he asks the next generation to promise to take his bones out of Egypt).

So, before we discuss Narrow Places, our own personal "Mitzri'im", When have you found yourself in a place of seeming growth and health, that turned out to be a place of exile and 'bondage'?

Schedule for the blog is below, and thanks again to Phyllis for promoting it.