The Covenant of the Groaning

by puck glass

Printer-frienldy version of the text

A long distance from Gan Eden, the Israelites have been enslaved in Egypt for generations. 
This portion brings us many main characters that will carry us from bondage to freedom and introduces even many characters who set the stage for liberation to be possible, many of them women - Shifra, Puah, and the many handmaidens, along with Miriam and Pharoah's daughter. This portion also brings us the famous scene of Moses noticing the Burning Bush and encountering God. And this portion is the backdrop for Moses, his origin story.  But it is also where God notices us, the ones who call out, longing for liberation.

God heard the groaning of the Israelites.
וַיִּשְׁמַ֥ע אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶת־נַאֲקָתָ֑ם
God heard their groaning.  Groaning is what bodies do when they are constrained.  Groaning is what happens when there is no language adequate to describe what it feels like to be trapped inside a system that denies your dignity.  Groaning is not metaphor.  It is embodied sound.

It is the sound of groaning that begins our redemption.

“God heard their moaning, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.” (Shemot 2:24-25)

And we hear, here, the beginning of redemption not as an act of divine power, but as an act of divine attention. God hears, remembers, sees, and knows. The verbs accumulate slowly, deliberately, and bodily. What God hears is not speech or prayer, but na’akah, the groaning that only ever occurs by those who are oppressed. This embodied sound is the sound that is produced when bodies are made to carry injustice time after time; it is the sound of suffering that lives within bodies. 

Shemot Rabbah notices something subtle and devastating about this moment. “These were called many days,” the midrash says, “because they were days of sorrow.”  Time itself stretches when oppression becomes routine.  Time is measured by the weight of their oppression.  These are not isolated moments of pain but prolonged conditions in which bodies are used beyond their capacity; when suffering is not an interruption, but a condition.  The midrash states this is a story about prolonged, structural oppression. The Israelites are enslaved not only by violence, but by systems that use bodies, exhausts them, discards them, regulates them, and decides which lives are expendable. That is why they groan.

The midrash then goes further to tell a disturbing story about Pharaoh himself becoming ill and his about his body being marked and isolated. It is not a story we should romanticize. Illness is not justice. Disability is not punishment. But the midrash is doing something else here to insist that power is exercised on bodies and that liberation must begin by paying attention to what bodies are forced to endure. Bodies are where domination and liberation occur.  We must not rush past embodiment.  Our redemption depends on it.  

And notice how God responds when bodies are oppressed?
God hears.
God remembers.
God sees.
God knows.

Thirteenth Century, Spanish commentator, Rabbeinu Bachya explains that God sees the suffering that is visible, the labor, the beatings, the cruelty that anyone could witness.
And God knows the suffering that is hidden, the fear, the exhaustion, the harm done quietly, bureaucratically, invisibly.
This is structural awareness.
God does not only validate what the world already recognizes as pain. God knows what systems are designed to ignore.

For disabled people, this distinction matters deeply. Because we are not only people whose bodies may hurt, or function as they do, or whose bodies may, in their own way, literally suffer. We are people whose bodies are policed, restricted, excluded, and managed. We are denied access to public spaces. We are told that autonomy is a luxury. We are forced to choose between benefits and marriage. We are not waiting to be healed. We are waiting to be free.

But liberation does not begin when bodies are fixed.

Liberation begins when embodied groaning is taken seriously as a political and covenantal claim.

Italian, Renaissance, biblical commentator, Sforno teaches about this verse that God remembers the covenant and that covenant is not conditional.  It is not dependent on our productivity or our independence.  The covenant does not require us to transcend our bodies.  It requires God to meet us inside them.  A covenant that only applies to bodies that move easily, work endlessly, or cost nothing is not the covenant God remembers.  We are bound more deeply than that.

Ibn Ezra, a Spanish philosopher, adds something even more bracing regarding the second verb in our verse – remembering.   God remembers because the time has come.  Not because the people are ready, and not because the suffering has resolved, and certainly not because the system has softened. The time itself demands change. Waiting for justice to feel comfortable is already too late.  The time for groaning is now. 

Taken together, these readings refuse a theology in which liberation begins with cure. The Exodus does not start when bodies change. It begins when embodied oppression is acknowledged as intolerable.  Groaning functions here as a form of covenantal speech precisely because it emerges from bodies that have been denied access, autonomy, and equal standing.

The Israelites groan.  They do not explain themselves; they do not justify their need; they do not apologize for being inconvenient.  And God listens, not because groaning is some kind of holy poetry but because it is the sound of oppression lived in the body.

The covenant is not only for the articulate; it is not only for the mobile; it is not only for the easy-to-accommodate.

The covenant is for the groaning.  The ones who dare to cry out from deep within their whole selves; the ones who look the system in the face and demand equity; the ones who know the time is now.  

And a world that cannot hear disabled groaning is not yet redeemed.

We are still groaning and not because our bodies are broken, but because the world is structured to exclude us; because we are barred from spaces, from full participation, from intimacy without penalty; because we are present but not treated as equals.  Until our groaning is heard, remembered, seen, and known, this covenant remains unfinished. 

Liberation begins with attention to embodiment.  Anything less is not redemption.

It is time we take our groaning seriously, directed at God just as much as society.  

Our liberation depends on it.

puck glass is co-founder of Makom Shelanu Congregation in Fort Worth Texas and a full-time rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.  they love creating interesting and engaging worship spaces, teaching at all levels, and are passionate about social justice issues.  puck's rabbinic interests include modern day midrash, the language and rhetoric of disability in the book of Psalms, and translation as a theological tool.  they also serve as a facilitator for conversations around LGBTQIA+ inclusion, disability, and racial equity, especially in interfaith worship spaces.  puck has a background in music and loves to play both in worship and in their spare time.  puck also loves drinking tea, reading books, and playing with their cat, qatsi.