Why did the cry of the Hebrews finally pierce heaven? Because Pharaoh had stopped being a tyrant and become a monster.
"And it was after many of those days that the king of Mizraim was struck with disease, and he commanded to kill the firstborn of the sons of Israel, that he might bathe himself in their blood. And the sons of Israel groaned with the labour that was hard upon them; and they cried, and their cry ascended to the high heavens of the Lord. And He spake in His Memra to deliver them from the travail."
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (2:23) is unflinching. Pharaoh has contracted a disease — tradition calls it leprosy — and his physicians, or perhaps his magicians, have told him the cure: bathe in Hebrew blood. He has therefore issued a new decree. Not drown the male babies any longer. Now: slaughter the firstborn so the king can soak in them.
This is the moral bottom. The tyrant who once feared the babies now wants to use them as medicine. The system that once wanted to prevent births now wants to harvest bodies. When a society starts using the weak as raw material for the powerful, heaven stops whispering and starts listening.
The verse pivots on this exact point. Their cry ascended. Not just a cry of pain. A cry that finally reached a threshold the Holy One had been waiting for. And He spake in His Memra — His Word — to deliver them. The Targum's preferred term for God's active presence is moving here. Redemption is not coming as an abstraction. It is coming as a decision.
Beloved, when tyrants begin treating people as medicine, heaven becomes a physician.