Dvar Torah on Parshat Bo

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 about this plague comes when Pharaoh, after the darkness of the ninth plague is lifted, 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'. However, even if, as the Ibn Ezra says, these two positions may be synonymous, why the Torah makes the change from first-born son of maidservant to first-born prisoner is still interesting. 

We have seen the use of the word "house" (as in "house of detention") earlier in the Egypt narrative, and will see it used again, extensively, in the instructions for the Passover sacrifice. In the story of the Jewish people in Egypt, the word house (bayit) is used very often. Almost invariably, however, the "house" is not a home. We are told about the "house of Pharaoh", meaning his palace and court, the "house of detention" and the "house of the master of the butchers (or executioners)" which is the jail into which Joseph was thrown. Most of the times that the word is used in an Egyptian context it is, in fact, referring either to jail or to Pharaoh's court. Interestingly, both God and Moshe refer, in our parsha, to the entire land of Egypt as a bet avadim - a house of slaves.

The only private Egyptian home we are told about is the one in which Joseph, when he first arrived in Egypt, worked as a slave - the house of Potiphar, an official of Pharaoh, the captain of his guard. It is there that Potiphar's wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce Joseph, revengefully frames him, and has him sent to the house of detention. However, if we look ahead in the story, to the preparations that the Israelites make for the night of the plague of the first-born and the ensuing Exodus, we see the word house - bayit - used a good deal, referring to private homes. In anticipation of the exodus, the Israelites are instructed to celebrate, on the night of the tenth plague, the first Passover Seder: "And God said to Moshe and Aharon... On the tenth day of this month they shall take for themselves, each man, a lamb, according to the house of their father, a lamb per household. And if there are too few [people] in the house for a lamb, he is to take it with his neighbor who is near his house." Then, four days later, on the 14th day of the month, they are to slay the lamb and "they are to take some of the blood and put it onto the two posts and onto the lintel, onto the houses in which they eat it." The instructions for this, the first Seder in history, which took place in conjunction with the killing of the first-born Egyptians, continue, including the matzo and bitter herbs which must be eaten with the Paschal lamb, and how leaven must be removed from the home.

The striking thing here is that this seminal ritual, which takes place both in the 'real time' of the night of the plague of the first-born, and also as a commemorative ritual to be practiced by the Jewish nation yearly through the ages, takes place at home. Again and again the Torah stresses that the lamb and other festival foods must be eaten at home, in a family setting. The halacha, in fact, demands that one eat the paschal lamb in a group which has gathered together to do so, and that one may not go from one group to another, from one house to another. The ritual of putting the blood of the lamb on the doorposts, which is unique to the Passover celebrated in Egypt in preparation for the exodus and is not done today at our Passover Seder, also, very dramatically, sets the Jewish home apart as a sacred place, in which a momentous, defining, protective ritual is taking place: God will see the markings and pass over the Jewish houses, identified as such by the blood markings, as he smites the first-born in all the unmarked Egyptian homes.

It is at home, eating dinner with his or her family, that the individual Jew joins the Jewish nation, and prepares to leave Egypt for the land of Israel. These Jewish houses, in which the Passover ritual takes place, are the first private homes mentioned to us in Egypt. [The house of Potiphar is an exception, but the identification of Potiphar as an officer of the king, as well as the behavior of his wife, make it both semi-official and very problematic as a home.] The Egyptian "houses" that have been mentioned in the narrative are, in fact, all official buildings - Pharaoh's house, the house of detention, the house of the butchers. In the plagues of frogs and locust, the word 'house' is used to refer to the stricken Egyptian homes, but essentially only in terms of Pharaoh's houses and the houses of his servants; when mentioned, Egyptian houses are always part of a hierarchal system which invariably begins with Pharaoh and his servants, under whom is placed the rest of Egyptian society. The houses, and the people in them, would seem to have no existence outside of their relationship to Pharaoh.

This is echoed in the way in which God describes how the first-born of Egypt will all die - from the first-born of Pharaoh on his throne to the maidservant behind the millstone and the first-born who is imprisoned in the house of detention, all of Egypt is defined by roles which are part of a vast hierarchy, a veritable bet avadim - house of slaves - where everyone is defined by where they are - spatially, physically, as well as socially - in relation to Pharaoh and his society. No one has a place which is private; not one of the Egyptian victims described by the Torah is at home. Rather, all of them are placed in relationship to the work they do for Pharaoh and the status they have in his kingdom.

It is therefore remarkable and revolutionary that the Torah makes the basic site of the Exodus, the unit in which the Exodus first and essentially takes place, the private home, and that this place, the private home, is the scene of the central act of the Exodus story. Whereas no Egyptian house exists outside of its, and its owner's, relationship to Pharaoh and the system which supports and expresses his power, the homes of the Israelites are their own. They are the arena in which the head of each household can close the door (both literally as well as symbolically, with the lamb's blood) and be free. The unit in which freedom is achieved and expressed is the family, and its appropriate place is the home.

In Pharaoh's Egypt, no home exists outside of the orbit of Pharaoh and his system. No one has a place outside of that tyrannical, totalitarian system. It is on the night of Passover that the Jewish people, in a radical and revolutionary act of freedom, declare that the first thing a free person has, the first thing a free person must have, is his or her own place; a home and a family. These Jewish homes, marked by the blood of the lamb, even keep God out (!) as he goes from place to place, killing first-born Egyptians. Granting a person the freedom to be in a household, with his or her family, which exists as a safe space outside the reach of the government, and which is defined by those who live in it and not by the government, is the first step to freedom.

The law that stipulates that, if one's family is small and unable to eat a whole lamb, they should join together with another family to do so, acts as a corrective against the kind of thinking that would make the family unit an insular, xenophobic one, unable to interact with others. Nonetheless, it is that unit, and the home in which it lives, that is the basic building block of a free society. That is why our Passover Seder, the reenactment of our Exodus to freedom, takes place not in a synagogue or Temple, not in a congregation, but in the family circle, at home, emphasizing the first step that every society must take to be a free one: allowing its members the freedom to be part of this most natural and basic of units, and act autonomously within it.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix