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Parashat Bo: Redemption is God's True Power

Of all the commentaries on the Torah, the one that Jews traditionally turn to first is the commentary of Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, who lived in France in the eleventh century.  Rashi’s very first comment on the Torah asks this question:

Rabbi Yitzchak said:  The Torah did not need to begin until chapter 12 of Exodus, “This month shall be for you the first of the months.”  He’s referring to the chapter that details the instructions for how to celebrate Pesach in Egypt and then for all time.  Rashi continues:  This is the first commadment that Israel was commanded.

In other words, Rashi asks:  Why do we really need the first sixty-one chapters of the Torah?  It’s a radical suggestion:  Maybe all of Genesis and some of Exodus aren’t really necessary.  Maybe this moment, at the edge of Egypt, is the real beginning.  The verse Rashi mentions says, "This month is for you the first of the months."  This is when time starts.  Not when the world was created.

Now of course Rashi is going to come back eventually with a reason why we need the book of Genesis, and there are actually a few commandments in Genesis.  But still, he entertains this question about when the Torah really begins, and it’s a good, juicy question.

What Rashi is onto is this:  There is something different in the way people experienced God’s presence before the redemption from Egypt, compared to that moment at the edge of leaving Egypt.  Rashi’s question suggests that God’s presence in the world, and for people, was not complete and not really understood until this moment of redemption.  Which was not just a moment for itself, something incredible that happened once, but also a gift that would be new each year, and each time we think back on it.

So what was missing at the beginning, at the start of Genesis?  On the sixth day -- late in the day -- God created the people, the man and the woman.  And God said to them, do you see all these things around you?  All the other animals, and the beautiful trees, and those stars and the sun and the moon up in the sky?  Well before you got here, I made them.  All of them, the whole cosmos.  I started up high in the sky, and I worked my way down here.  All of it, I made all of it -- and for you, in fact!

Isn’t that amazing?  So vast, so enormous.... And there is this one tree, among the many that you see here, over there growing out of the ground, and some fruit grows on it, and I want you not to eat that.

Well, they did eat it.  And things went downhill from there, to murder and violence and destruction, and God scaled back the plan.  Even though the people did multiply quite a lot from the first two, God through Genesis ends up speaking onto to one person at a time.

What happened at the start?  What was missing?  Why didn’t things really start with Adam and Chava?  Maybe it’s just that this idea of the God of the universe is so big that it was just too abstract.  It didn’t really do anything in their hearts, for Adam and Chava.  Maybe the command itself -- don’t eat this one thing -- maybe that didn’t seem big enough, didn’t sound like the kind of thing a great and mighty God would be asking for, as the basis of some kind of connection and relationship.

Elsewhere in his commentary, Rashi picks up on the fact that even for generations after Avraham there isn’t ever a complete sense of who God really is, or could be, beyond one person at a time.

But it’s different when we get to this part of the Torah.  To the end of four centuries of slavery, the very last few days in Egypt.

This isn’t abstract at all.  This isn’t:  Before you arrived I put those stars far out in the sky.  This isn’t:  All I have to do is speak, and a tree or a fish comes into being.

In Egypt, God comes down.  Down in every sense.  Down to the Nile, to the lowest spot in this low valley of Egypt.  Down from the sky into those waters of chaos and death that are carved, down, deep into the lowly Earth.  God comes down to the lowest people, who are beaten and dehumanized, whose hands are muddy and blistered and broken, who are detached from their souls to the point where they can hardly do anything but groan, who can’t think beyond the terrible things of now.

God has to fight for them, against a tyrant who everybody thinks is really the god.  God has to fight for their awareness, to be next to them down in the mud and in their slave-camps and next to the taskmasters, just to get these people even to notice God.  God has to frustrate the expectations of all those who think that gods only go with grandeur like Pharaoh has, the beauty and richness of his palace and his temple and his architecture, the hosts who do his bidding.

This is much harder work than creating the universe.  If you read the Torah, if you compare Bereshit and Shmot, Genesis and Exodus, the way Rashi does, it’s clear that redemption, rescuing these people, takes much longer, it is a much, more, difficult labor than making the world.

And by coming down, God shows us that more is involved than pure power -- than just the abililty to make things and do things.  The task of redemption requires commitment, and loyalty, and dedication.  Rabbi Heschel called it divine pathos:  God’s essence is that God hurts when people hurt.  And when people are enslaved, oppressed, suffering, the hurt is so large that God’s response to that is the largest thing that God does.

And that response is the only thing big enough to go with the notion that God is great.

So Rashi’s question -- why not start the Torah here in Egypt -- it comes from the idea that God’s true nature, the gadol-ness, the greatness that we associate with the notion of God -- it isn’t manifest until God comes down.  As far from Heaven, where you were taught to expect God to be; until God comes down to be there in Egypt, to be here.

And at the moment when the Jews are finally first awake to the fact that God is there for them, God says:  This moment is also going to be there, always, through this story.  So that every time you are oppressed by another Pharaoh, by armies of enemies, or by other kinds of suffering, by illusion or illness or depression, you will know that I come down, I come there, as low as you are or as low as things go.  No matter how much mud or blood or tears as there may be.  I can’t stop those things from happening, God says, but I can and will be there and fight for you to notice Me, to see me fighting there with you.  My colleague Rabbi Sharon Brous was teaching about Pesach and she mentioned a congregant who said that she never understood how it was possible to pray to a warrior God, because she was such a committed pacifist -- until she developed cancer, and needed God to be a warrior on her behalf.

That’s why making the liberation into the beginning of time is the first mitzvah in the Torah.  Time starts when we finally experience Adonai not in the starry heavens but close by.  Bringing back the reality of redemption, of God’s being with us when we most need it, requires action from us.  It’s not just the annual memory on Pesach, but also each Shabbat, when we say in the Kiddush zecher litziyat mitzrayim, that Shabbat is a reminder of going out from Egypt.  And we bring back this redemption each and every day in our prayers, when we say Mi Chamocha, the song our ancestors sang with their feet still wet, still sticky with the mud of the Yam-Suf, the Sea of Reeds.

If you are looking for God, it’s not just about Genesis or who made the world.  The Ten Commandments do not start, “I am the God Who created the universe.”  Instead, they begin, “I am Adonai your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt.”  The God in the middle of our prayers is the God of Exodus, the God whose name was revealed finally in Egypt, who rescues and liberates and redeems.  Bayamim ha-hem uvazman hazeh -- in ancient days, and still always.

Parashat Bo: A Hardened Heart

This Dvar Torah was created by the Zayin class at the Temple Beth Abraham Religious School for their class service this Shabbat -- I put the ideas into words.  Yishar kochachem!

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Parashat Bo begins with these words:

Adonai said to Moshe:  Come to Pharaoh, because I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, in order that I can place these signs of mine in their midst.  And so that you will tell in the ears of your children and your children’s children what I did in Egypt and the signs that I put there, and you will know that I am Adonai.

Our class wondered about a few things.  First, what does it mean that God hardened Pharoah’s heart?  Second, wouldn’t God want Pharaoh to let the people go sooner?  Third, isn’t it unfair for God to take away Pharaoh’s ability to make decisions, force him to do something wrong, and then punish him for doing that?  It seems like God is playing Pharaoh like a puppet and not letting him be a human being.

In the traditional Jewish commentaries, there are a few answers given to these questions.  Rambam, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, says that the expression “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” isn’t meant to be taken literally,  Rather, it is a metaphor that means “Pharoah became infinitely stubborn.”  So stubborn that eventually he lost his ability to change his mind.

When the plagues began, Pharaoh did have a choice to stop the enslavement of the Jews, but he kept deciding to oppress them.  Now after a few plagues, the Torah says that “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”  Rambam believes that connecting this to God is a way of saying just how powerful and extreme Pharaoh’s stubbornness was by that point.  Rambam doesn’t like the idea that God would manipulate Pharaoh and then punish him.  So he says that’s not really what the Torah means.  Rambam puts all the responsibility on Pharaoh himself for the consequences of his actions.

This reminded some of us of the way a bully behaves.  A bully is someone who is afraid to show his weakness.  Even though he could decide not to hurt other people, he gets stuck in a certain image and then even if deep down he doesn’t want to, he continues to bully other people.

So Pharaoh didn’t want people to think he was weak.  He was considered a god in Egypt, so he didn’t want anyone to think that anything else was more powerful than he was.

You could also compare this to way a lie can grow.  Once you start with a lie, you have to keep coming up with other lies so you keep up the first lie and not contradict yourself.  In that way, a lie becomes something you get stuck in and can’t get out of.

Resh Lakish, a rabbi in the Talmud, explains it a bit differently.  The first few times God did warn Pharaoh that if he didn’t let the Israelites go, more plagues would follow.  Once it was clear that Pharaoh wasn’t changing, God said:  Now you deserve the extra trouble from Me, on top of what you got as a result of your own decisions.

We can compare this to parents and children.  Our parents ask us to do things, and if we don’t listen after a certain number of times, then we lose the freedom to decide.  How many chances does a parent have to give to a child?  When the parent realizes that the child hasn’t learned the lesson and isn’t going to learn, then it may be all right to stop giving more chances.

A third explanation, from Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, is that God is making a unique example of Pharoah.  The Torah, in the verses that I read to you, does say that one of the reasons for hardening Pharaoh’s heart is to show the Egyptians and also future generations that God is supreme.  So Rabbi Hirsch says that in this one case, it is understandable for God to take someone’s free will away and punish him maybe in an unjust way.  The greater purpose is that in the future other kings or leaders faced with Pharaoh’s choice will not do what he did.

We didn’t think this is a very convincing interpretation. Pharaoh wasn’t the last tyrant to oppress the Jews -- what about Haman, Antiochus, or Hitler?  If God was making an example of Pharaoh, it doesn’t look like it was a very effective lesson.

We all have the power to make choices, but sometimes we lose that power for good reason -- our hearts get hardened.  So remember if someone is trying to teach you what to do, after four or five times of saying no or doing the opposite you’ll loose your choice or your freedom.  And be careful not to fall into bad habits or patterns that can harden your heart and make it impossible for you to choose the right thing.