In one of my first Divrei Torah, I
speculated on the timing and what seemed like poor planning of the Israelites
in Parashat Bo. They leave in haste, yet they had all this warning that the
time to flee would be imminent. Why didn’t they prepare better, make tastier
snacks for the road? Why does our festive meal every year have to be
commemorated by tasteless matzah to commemorate the haste of the exodus, when
really, they should have had breads and cakes already ready to go with them
when the time came. In 2012, I likened this to the time a family friend, then
about thirteen years old, was the last one to be ready for a multi-family
excursion to a Yankee game, and ran into the car dressed with great intention –
full fan attire, including Yankees pants over her shorts, hat over perfectly
brushed hair, the whole deal. But no shoes. And she will never in her life be
able to live down the tale of “Two pants, no shoes,” when she spent a day
walking around Yankee stadium barefoot. In 2012, I used this story and the
story of the Israelites to caution a sanctuary full of kids and parents to
think ahead in their day’s preparations, and be certain to have all the
necessary, useful things for their sojournings.
This year, however, I have read
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s commentary on Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture
and was struck by her observation on this very problem, which she calls the
“ungainly haste.” In her typical fashion, dense with esoteric references, she
spends considerable time on the concepts of day and night in the Exodus narrative.
In some places, both in this parasha and in later references to the Exodus, it
seems God led the people Israel out of Egypt by day. In other places, it says
night. What is the meaning of this? And how does it relate to the ungainly
haste?
Zornberg argues,
with the help of traditional midrash, of course, that the Israelite slaves of
Egypt were free at night. But their first act of freedom is to ignore the plea
of Pharaoh to hurry up and leave so that his suffering at the hands of our God
might end. Even as liberation comes at night, Exodus only comes in the day. As
the tenth plague draws near, God tells the people Israel to sacrifice the
paschal lamb, to put the blood on their doorposts so that God knows to pass
over those homes as the Angel of Death goes through the land slaughtering the
first born. Then, God tells the people to eat the roasted meat, along with the
unleavened bread and the bitter herbs, and to do so in haste. Before night has
even fallen, let alone before day has broken and the moment for hasty leave has
arrived, God is commanding that these actions be done in haste. Matzah is not
an accidental symbol of haste, a mistaken food created because the people left
so quickly they did not have time to make leavened snacks for the road. Matzah
is intentional, the haste is intentional. Rashi adds connotations of panic to
his translation of the word “בחפזון” (haste).
With this explanation of the day/night divide, and a vivid image of
what the night entails, Zornberg establishes for us the “tableau of leaving,
exodus,” a “tableau of release,” and a “tableau of readiness-to-leave.” In
short, she paints a picture of the Israelite people biding their panicked time
through the night, poised to leave at first light, quivering in darkness and their
own silence as their hear the cries of anguish from the Egyptian households.
They are ready to go all along, but wait in anticipation of this pre-planned
panicked haste.
According to Zornberg, there are three moments in the narrative
“when panic haste was central: one was at night – referred to as chipazon
deMitzrayim [the haste of Egypt] – and was informed by the terrified pressure
of the Egyptians on the Israelites to leave the country; while [another] was
the following day – referred to as chipazon deYisrael [the haste of Israel] –
the urgent flight of the Israelites by day.” The third is the “chipazon of
God’s Presence.” In the narrative itself, it is visualized in the “leaping”
(“bechipazon/ufasachti”- “in panic haste/I shall leap”) of the Passover story.
Zornberg translates the verb pesicha (notice the connection to the noun pesach)
to leap, adding a frenetic energy, a panic haste already to the movement of
God, as distinct from our usual interpretation of “to pass over”. Combined with
God’s own admission of “bechipazon”, we have a very strong illustration of
God’s own wait and hurry narrative.
Zornberg says the
effect of all these strands of the intentional panic haste narrative is to
“postpone, till after the Splitting of the Sea, any sense of complete freedom.”
I would argue a slightly more nuanced rephrasing. Although it does delay the
sense of complete freedom until after the deaths of the Egyptians, I don’t see
it as the holding back of freedom, as I read her commentary as suggesting. I
read more of a sense of stages of freedom. A people oppressed for generations,
they find themselves freed from one master, paradoxically, as Zornberg points
out, only at the commandment of a new master. This new master has told them to
remain until morning, so that even as the old master urges them out of his
land, they timidly test the waters of their new affiliation to God rather than
Pharaoh by staying put. One act of liberation against their old, cruel
enslaver. As morning breaks, they burst forth, gather the spoils of Egypt and
march out of the land of their oppression. A second act of liberation from
their wretched lives as slaves. After the Israelites have safely made it across
the sea, the waters rush in on the Egyptians, washing away any concern that the
Israelites might face repercussions for their acts of defiance to Pharaoh or
for their “borrowing” of the jewels and precious metals of Egypt. A final act
of liberation. At which point, of course, the people are fully free to start
whining about wanting to go back to Egypt and fear that God will be an even
more hateful master than Pharaoh was.
“And when your children ask, What do you mean by this rite? You
shall say, It is the Passover sacrifice to God, because he passed over the
houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he smote the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:26).
The commemoration of the Passover is to remember the paschal lamb that offered
protection from the Angel of Death. But the Passover as a whole is also a
reminder about the stages of freedom and our responsibility to uphold them.
Rather than the narrative of the seemingly unnecessary panic-haste being a
cautionary tale against poor planning, as I once drashed, I would now posit
that it is a story about the forced patience we must endure when fighting for
justice in our unjust world. When the African slaves were freed in the United
States, it took another hundred years to desegregate and at least pretend to do
away with Jim Crow. Fifty years after that, we are still fighting for equality
for all races. It is an unacceptably slow process that comes in stages. When
the time comes that the nation, government, society as a whole is ready for
change, those who are interested in fighting for it charge forward, with a
panic haste, despite having been ready for this change all along. When the
strong hand of forces unseen come down, they are forced to pause, hold back,
tip toe slowly toward the next step, until another flash point flares up so
that they can charge forward again. It’s really a bad system, but apparently
one that humanity has been working with for thousands of years. The purpose of
retelling our own people’s liberation stories year after year is to remind
ourselves of the importance of our freedom. What the cost is for liberation.
And how we must help others achieve theirs.
