Or HaChaim on Exodus 3:8/אור החיים על שמות ג׳:ח׳

1 וארד להצילו… ולהעלותו מן הארץ ההיא, "I shall descend in order to save…and to bring them out of this land, etc." The reason G'd speaks about His "descent" is that it is not really in keeping with the dignity of the supreme G'd to convey His instructions to a vile human being such as the Pharaoh who now oppressed the Jewish people. This was all the more so seeing that Pharaoh had the effrontery to exclaim "who is G'd that I should heed His words?" (5,2) G'd explained that He waived some of the honour due to Him in order to expedite the redemption of Israel. It is worthwhile to study the comment in the introduction to Eycha Rabbah section 14 on Proverbs 29,9: איש חכם נשפט את איש אויל ורגז ושחק ואין נחת. "If a wise man goes to Court with a fool there is no peace whether the fool rages or laughs." It is remarkable that Solomon uses the form נשפט instead of שפט. He means that getting involved in litigation with a known fool can only result in the so-called wise man becoming convicted. G'd had to mention that He was going to "descend" to show that despite the fact that it was inappropriate for Him to deal with Pharaoh, He would do so for the sake of Israel. The meaning of להצילו refers to the near-term cessation from their slave labour, whereas the expression ולהעלותו refers to the longer term objective of G'd's intervention.

2Seeing the time for the redemption was not yet at hand, there had to be an interval of at least 12 months between the time G'd spoke to Moses and the actual Exodus. Shemot Rabbah 9,12 debates whether the plagues usually lasted one week with three weeks warning or vice versa. At any rate, our sages seem agreed that the plagues extended over a considerable period. Why would G'd have deliberately delayed the redemption once He had embarked on the process? He could have given Pharaoh a single day's warning before each plague something that is certainly legal when a Jew is warned not to commit a transgression. In fact, Gentiles do not need to be warned specifically at all not to commit acts which they know to be criminal. We must assume, therefore, that G'd waited for a certain date to be able to justify the Exodus although He wanted to relieve the burden of the Jewish people in the interval.

3In view of our premise that the principal purpose of the exile in Egypt was to salvage the souls which had been contaminated with the 50 levels of impurity at the time the forces of the קליפה "captured" some of the holy souls from Adam when the latter ate from the tree of knowledge (compare our comments on Genesis 49,9), we can understand that if G'd had redeemed the Israelites prematurely this would have aborted the plan to rescue all those lost souls. We have already explained that Moses himself was equated with the Jewish people inasmuch as Moses achieved the 49th level of בינה, intellectual insights, out of a possible total of 50 such levels. The reason that Moses never reached the ultimate level of בינה was that the achievement must parallel the effort expended on achieving the goal in question. Had the Israelites descended to the 50th level of impurity the effort at gaining the 50th level of insights would have been possible. Since Israel was never quite at the bottom of the spiritual levels, the effort to reach the top was of necessity a little less than total. Moses' achievements were directly related to the condition of the Jewish people whom he represented. We have been assured that in the future G'd Himself will influence us by means of the Torah so that we will be able to achieve the fiftieth level of בינה. We will be indebted to the cumulative exile experiences for that eventual achievement. The most important individual factor will be our present and final exile.

4One of the reasons the generation of the first exile was not able to attain that level of insight was that they had not yet had the benefit of Torah. Once we shall reach that level of insight we will be able to recapture any holy souls still under the control of the forces of the קליפה, i.e. Satan. At any rate, had G'd led the Jewish people out of Egypt even a single day sooner than He did, the number of souls which had not yet been rescued would have been commensurably greater.