"Let's hit them with bricks!"
"No, we should beat them with flask a few times."
"I think we should try to talk this out with one of Paroah's advisors."
Throughout their stay in Egypt the Jews, or more precisely, the Children of Israel, do not rebel or take any actions against their oppressors. The miyaldot take precautions for saving the children, and while their inaction is praiseworthy, it is nevertheless a passive form of disobedience. Even Moses, when he does take action by killing the Egyptian who beat the Jew, runs away and recognizes that his actions were taboo, to say the least. The only sign of the positive effort on behalf of the Jews is in their calling to Hashem:
It was so in those many days, and the king of Egypt died, and the children of Israel sighed because of the bondage, and they yelled, and their cry went up to God because of the bondage. (Exodus 3:23)
At this point, the Children of Israel recognize that they must take action in order to get themselves out of slavery. The action that they take, however, is purely spiritual.
There is a famous story of the man who is drowning in a flood and assumes that God will save him. A boat comes over and he declines the ride, claiming that he is counting on God to save him. A helicopter (depending on the age of the person telling the story it differs slightly but the point remains the same) spots him and lets down a rope, but he refuses to grab on, again saying that God will save him. This goes on for a while until the man dies. When he gets to Shamayim, he asks God why He didn't save him. God replies that he did save him, through the boat and the helicopter and all the other "natural" acts.
Did Bnei Yisrael, in the one and only action they took during slavery, fall into the same "trap" as the man in this story? And yet the Torah tells us:
God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. (Exodus 3:24)
Why did God listen to the cries of the Jews here if they weren't taking any other actions to help themselves?
The first answer is simply that there was no reasonable way for them, as slaves, to help themselves; thus, they had not taken any action up to this point, and were not expected to. The other answered offered is that, at this point, the reason for redemption was not the action that the people had taken, rather Bnei Yisrael were redeemed only because of the covenant with the forefathers.
There is another explanation. In order to fight a rebellion, or any sort of uprising, the rebels need to be united. As the aforementioned story with Moses clearly demonstrates, the Jews at that time had no areivut. In fact, their apathy towards one another was so great that were unwilling to allow the killing of an Egyptian for the protection of a Jew. Even after 210 years of enslavement together, they had not managed to develop into a nation. How could they possibly take any communal action when they had not formed a community?
The only option was to become a nation first. The miracles of yetziat mitzrayim, including the splitting of the sea, the man, and all the other incredible things that God did, served as bonding experiences for Bnei Yisrael. The set-up of the camps in the desert forced different tribes to live in proximity to each other. And of course, the ultimate bonding was done with the acceptance of the Torah, which truly molded the Jews into a cohesive nation. And forty years later, after recognizing through the sin of the spies that they all affect each other, the Jews were able to fight for and win Eretz Yisrael.
Livia Levine is a senior at Ma'ayanot