Living With Meaning

Pharaoh's answer to Moshe's first request was to keep the same quota but make the Jews find their own straw. Why not simply double the quota? The Rambam's ruling on what a master may never give a Jewish slave holds the key. A prisoner in a Soviet labor camp, ten years into his sentence, makes a discovery that hits him harder than the years themselves. Along the way, the Midrash about Moshe and the word "az" shows what he saw too narrowly. For anyone who has asked what the point of all this effort is, the question cuts close.