Dvar Torah on Parshat 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 borns 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, 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 a symbol of freedom - 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 living through?

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 by some, 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 to 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, initially 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 most important 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,

Rabbi Shimon Felix