“You drew me from the womb, made me secure at my mother’s breast. I became your charge at birth; from my mother’s womb You have been my God”
(Psalm 22:10-11)
The very beginning of the book of Exodus is literally “teeming” with fertility, birth and abundance. In the book’s opening verses, curiously, images of inexplicable procreation go hand in hand with extreme suffering. The Passover Haggadah tells us that the story of the exodus is one that begins in “disgrace” and ends in “praise.” Yet in the beginning of Exodus we see a kind of dialectical back-and-forth between blessing and oppression that is a challenge to comprehend.
The Book of Books 