With the Book of Exodus we encounter the people of Israel -- not individuals like the Patriarchs, unique if not lonely in their faith, but an entire community, a nation.  Throughout the rest of the Pentateuch, the dominant figure is Moses, who in today's Torah portion is charged with taking his people from slavery to G-d's service.

G-d's first revelation to Moses was at the burning bush.  "An angel of G-d appeared to him in a flame of fire from a thorn-bush; the thorn-bush was burning with fire but was not consumed."  The details of this revelation are an intriguing and inexhaustible source of interpretations.  There is obviously a symbolic besides a literal significance to the account.

The first verse of this week's Torah portion tells us that Jacob lived his last seventeen years in Egypt.  The Biblical commentator Baal Haturim notes that the number seventeen has the numerical value equivalent to the Hebrew word "tov" (good).  He, therefore, infers that Jacob's finest years were those spent in Egypt, reunited with Joseph and surrounded by his entire family.

These seventeen years were not lived in the Holy Land.  They were spent in Egypt, a land renowned for its decadent and immoral population.  Yet Jacob thoroughly enjoyed his stay there, because of the Yeshiva which had been established in the land.  According to the Talmud, before Jacob agreed to travel to Egypt he sent his son Judah ahead to establish a Yeshiva in Goshen, the Egyptian territory where Jacob and his children settled.

Fully aware that his descendents would face difficult and harrowing times in Egypt, Jacob realized that only the Yeshivas could give them a strong Jewish identity, enable them to withstand all the difficulties and persecutions, and insulate them against the threat of assimilation.