Bo

This week, in parshat Bo, the Jewish people leave Egypt. Besides the ten plagues, the last three of which occur in this week's portion, there is also a fairly long and involved process which much be gone through before the Jews can be free: the first Passover Seder. Moshe is commanded by God to tell the people to prepare for the big night by choosing sheep, and getting ready for a fairly complicated feast. The sheep are slaughtered, symbolizing, variously, the defeat of the Egyptians whom, we are told earlier in the Torah, worship sheep in some way, or the ascendancy of God over fate and the power of the stars, as the sign of the Zodiac at that time of the year is Aries, the ram. Its blood is put on the doorpost of each Israelite home, and then it is roasted and eaten in a highly ritualized way: "...with matzot and bitter herbs you shall eat it. Do not eat it undercooked or boiled in water...do not leave any of it over until the morning...and eat it thus: with your loins girded and your shoes on your feet and your staffs in your hands, and you shall eat it quickly, it is a Passover unto God." Now, the bit about the girded loins, staffs and shoes makes sense - they are in a hurry, about to dramatically leave Egypt as the Egyptian first born are dying, and they need to be ready. But the rest of it is strange. First of all, if you are in a hurry, why all the rigmarole with the sheep, the blood on the doorpost, the specificity of the roasting (which takes more time), and eating the matzo and marror (bitter herbs)? Get a move on! Get ready, if you're hungry eat something, and go! Furthermore, what purpose do these dishes serve at this time? The bitter herbs commemorate a bitter, oppressive time in Egypt. Surely that food will make sense as a side-dish at the Seder in a few generations, as a remembrance of our ancestors' experience; it is not necessary now, in Egypt. These people have been working as slaves and feeling the bitterness of that experience all their lives, up until the that very day. They don't need the herbs to commemorate what they are living through right now. Similarly, the matzo. Understood as both the bread of affliction - the cheap, filling, crummy food the Egyptians gave their slaves - and the culinary result of the speed in which the Israelites left Egypt, leaving no time for their dough to rise, this commemorative food also, surely, will be needed only in a few years, as an act of remembering and celebrating. The people experiencing the Exodus just had matzo for lunch, and breakfast, and will eat it tomorrow morning for breakfast again, as they hurry out of Egypt. Why, if they are in such a rush to leave, do they need to eat it, ritually, now? Would it not make more sense for them to leave all this unnecessary symbolism aside, just act naturally, eat their real matzo, rather than the symbolic matzo at the meal, experience the real bitterness of slavery, rather than the symbolic bitterness of the herbs, hurry up and leave Egypt? Let's worry about the symbolic commemoration of these events later, when they need to be recreated and remembered. Why do the people who are leaving Egypt need to symbolically ritualize what they are actually doing? To put the question a bit differently, I'd like borrow categories first introduced by Professor Yosef Chayim Yerushalmi, who passed away just over a month ago: history and memory. The Passover Seder and its rituals are acts which Jews do to create and pass on memory, the memory of an event, the Exodus from Egypt, whose historicity may be challenged, but whose conceptual, communal, and emotional reality are alive and well, thanks to these and other rememberances. But the generation of the Exodus needs no such observance. According the story told to us by the Torah, they are living the actual events, as they happen. They are in the actual historical moment of the Exodus. Why, then, do they need to ritualize these events, and experience them as symbolic as well as real? Surely only we, the rememberers, need to do that, to observe the rituals in order to make an ancient historical moment real for us. I think the answer lies in the nature, meaning, and purpose of symbolism. The later generations who want to remember the Exodus, along with its meanings, morals, and lessons, are not the only ones who need to explain to themselves what the Exodus is all about. The actors in that story, the people who lived through and experienced it, also need symbolic acts and objects, to help them more deeply and fully understand and articulate to themselves what they are experiencing. Simply living through a historical moment in no way guarantees that one will fully, or even partially, understand its import, its moral freight, its message and its implications. The first Passover Seder, celebrating events which were happening simultaneously with their being celebrated, was meant to give the participants an opportunity to think about and more fully understand what they were experiencing, to more profoundly appreciate what was happening to them. The first Seder enabled them to see and articulate, if only for themselves, the events occurring around them in a richer context, with a greater depth of understanding. Without the Passover Seder in Egypt, the Israelites may well have missed some or all of the points of the Exodus, may not have fully understood the implications of God's demand for His people's freedom from an oppressive, totalitarian empire, nor fully grasped the import of His intervention in history. Those Seder rituals underscored for them the deeper conceptual messages of that intervention, and of their freedom. This is the purpose of symbolic acts: to allow us to stop a moment, even (especially) when, like the Jews in Egypt, we are in a hurry, in the middle of sometimes tumultuous events, and think more clearly and deeply about who we are, what we are doing, what is happening to us, and what it all means. Living in a modern world (I refuse to live in the post-modern one; anyway, it's not a world at all, just a bad attitude), which, by and large, eschews the symbolic in favor of the functional, practical, and necessary, we need, more than ever, to create symbolic, ritualized ways with which to better understand the present, as well as observing the time honored rituals we have inherited to try and fathom our past. Shabbat Shalom, Shimon

This week's parsha brings us the final three plagues inflicted upon the Egyptians. After the penultimate plague - darkness - God, Moshe, and Pharaoh all get ready for the final, catastrophic blow of the killing of the first-born. The verses which describe the events leading up to this horrible, definitive plague, contain an interesting theme, one upon which I would like to focus; that of the house or home. The first information we get of this plague comes when Pharaoh, after the ninth plague's darkness is lifted from the Egyptians, again refuses to allow the Jewish people to leave their work in Egypt and go to the desert to worship God. God then says to Moshe, "One more affliction shall I bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt, and after that he will send you out of here...And every first-born in the land of Egypt will die, from the first-born of Pharaoh sitting on his throne to the first-born of the maidservant who is behind the mill-stone, and the first-born of every animal." Later on, when the plague actually occurs as promised, the Torah changes the description somewhat - "And it was at midnight that God smote every first-born in Egypt, from the first- born of Pharaoh sitting on his throne to the first born in prison, who is in the house of detention, and all the first-born animals." A simple answer to why the Torah switches from maidservant to prisoner is that they are synonymous; as the Ibn Ezra says, the maidservant is essentially a prisoner of her master, she is also in a 'house of detention'.  READ MORE »

This week we read about the last of the plagues in Egypt. The ultimate plague, the one which finally convinces Pharaoh and the Egyptians to let the Israelites go, is the death of the firstborn sons. This plague stands out, in contrast to the first nine, as especially tragic. Whereas the earlier plagues certainly hurt, and may well have caused fatalities, they also had something humorous about them - the frogs swarming all over Egypt, Pharaoh and his advisors itching with lice and then boils - it seemed as if the Egyptians were being toyed with by God, for our sake. With the plague of the firstborn sons, however, everything changes. We are presented with a situation almost too horrible to imagine. The entire population was effected - "from the first born son of Pharaoh, who sits on his throne, to the first born son of the captive in the dungeon, and every firstborn of beast...there was no house in which there was not a dead person." It is this horror which moved the Egyptians to finally free the Israelites, but whose ferocity is hard, I think, for us to readily accept. I would like to take a look at the message implied by the choice of this last, horrible plague, and try to see if we can understand what is communicated to us by the killing of the firstborn sons. After all, God certainly could have killed in a more just fashion - all those who had actually thrown Jewish babies into the Nile, or Pharaoh and his fellow members of the ruling class, or those task masters who were particularly oppressive to the Jewish people. Why the choice of the firstborn son of every family?  READ MORE »

This week's parsha contains one of my all-time favorite conversations, one of the occasions where two opposing world views are really beautifully, succinctly and clearly articulated. As the parsha begins, the Egyptians have been through seven plagues, but will still not let the Israelites go. Moshe now warns them of the next plague, the locust. Pharaoh's people have had it, they are ready to give in. "And the servants of Pharaoh said to him: 'until when will this one be a stumbling block to us? Send out these people that they may worship the Lord their God. Don't you know yet that Egypt is lost?'" Pharaoh capitulates, sends for Moshe and Aharon and says to them: "Go, and worship the Lord your God." But Pharaoh also has a question: "Who will be going?" And now, with his response to Pharaoh, Moshe lays the groundwork for universal suffrage, the French and American Revolutions, and the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel: "With our young people and our old people we will go, with our sons and our daughters...we will go, for it is a holiday to God for us." Pharaoh's response is swift: "...Not so, let the male adults go and worship the Lord, for this is what you ask." Angrily, Pharaoh brings the meeting to an end: "And he drove them out from before him". The interview is over, the deal is off, and the locust arrive the next day.  READ MORE »