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Rechavia, Sabba Moshe, and the Night Before Leaving Egypt: A Midrash

I wrote this midrash on the 5th of Sheva 5782 (January 8, 2022) as my Dvar Torah for Parashat Bo, and in particular chapters 11-12 of Exodus, which introduce and lead into and through the last of the ten plagues in Egypt. I was thinking about issues of collective accountability and responsibility, which are the ethical and spiritual dilemmas of the plague narrative. And I was thinking about how to tie this part of the Torah to everything going on right now, the pandemic and politics. This is what emerged. I could have written more and better, but was working on a deadline and also wanted to keep this particular version to less than 15 minutes (it's about 13m30s). It's a bit clunky in all kinds of ways, but it is certainly better than the expository Dvar Torah I had in mind. If anyone wants to take this and rework it, make it your own, you have my complete permission -- all I'd love is some reference to "from an idea by Rabbi Jon Spira-Savett."

Sabba and Savta are Hebrew/Aramaic for grandma and grandpa, which is a bit anachronistic. Rechavia is the name of one of Moshe's grandsons, reference once in the Torah as having many children. I had never known his name, much less thought about him, until I needed another character for this midrash.

Here's a video of me reading it (recorded not on Shabbat), and my text follows.

 

Sabba! Sabba!

Rechavia was standing in the doorway of his grandfather Moshe’s home. It was night time in Goshen, and quiet -- more quiet than usual for a night with a moon that was almost full. Even in the worst of slavery, bright spring nights were when children wandered the alleys of Goshen with their littlest lambs and sang songs -- Peh Peh, Hashem Ayeh? Poh, Poh, Hayom Yavo. Rechavia was forty when he had to learn these songs for the first time for his grandchildren, starting a year ago when Sabba Moshe announced that the whole family was leaving Midyan and going to Goshen to rescue their people. Peh Peh, Hashem Ayeh -- it was a kids’ song about Yosef’s bones and the secret code that would lead back to them, on the day Hashem would come out of hiding and lead them out of Egypt -- Poh Poh Yavo Hayom; here, here, it’s coming today.

But no singing tonight. Going out was not safe, not a day before everyone would be slaughtering the sheep or goat they were keeping, and every home would be in danger, Egyptian and Israelite, from the plague of death that Sabba had announced two weeks before. Rechavia was full of thoughts, but his house was full of kids, twelve of them! So he snuck out to go see the one person who was always willing to talk with him. Or, brood with him.

Sabba? Rechavia called out again, quietly on this quiet night, but in his firm voice. For a few seconds Rechavia stood by himself in the entrance, a hand on each doorpost. His right hand could feel a spot that was smoother than the rest, it was about a third of the way down from the lintel. He knew his Sabba had smoothed it, probably stood there for an hour each day since the new moon, contemplating this spot where the blood would be tomorrow, which later they would all remember by putting a scroll of Torah in such a place in their desert tents and their eventual homes.

Savta Tzippora saw him standing there. Rechavia, what are you doing here?

I’m looking for Sabba. I wanted to ta.... I think he wants to talk.

You think he wants to talk? No, Sabba is all talked out. To me, to you, to Pharaoh. He just wants to be out of here. He’s hardly said a word the past week. That’s not true, I heard him the other day muttering -- keep the lamb from the tenth day until the fourteenth day and then slaughter it, why five days’ waiting inside? Wouldn’t two or three have been enough? Oh well, once a shepherd, always a shepherd, your Sabba. And me too, I’m named for the birds after all. And you Rechavia -- your name means wide open space. Look at you, standing in that cramped doorway of all places, what kind of a place for a man with such a name?

Rechavia tapped his hand. I like the doorway. I like to look in, and out. It’s important what we do in here, what we say inside. It’s all perfectly clear when we can talk ,and ask all our questions, and address all points of view. Everything makes sense. Everyone knows what they’re accountable for. If only that were good enough, to get it right in here. But we’re connected to what’s going on out there. The other families in Goshen, the homes in the rest of Egypt. I wish I could be in all of their conversations and not have to wonder what they’re thinking and planning.... When I’m out I need to come in and when I’m in I need to go out. So, I like standing in the doorway.

Rechavia closed his lips and bobbed his head, down once and back. End of speech. Then he tilted his head, gave a little shrug. Tzippora smiled at him.

Ah, this is why you are such a blessing to us, Rechavia, she said. Sometimes I think your Sabba is still trapped in that little box his mother saved him in, even when we was roaming the hills in Midian with my father’s sheep for all those years.

I can see you need to talk and so does your Sabba. Go out and find him. He also couldn’t stay inside tonight. I’d have gone out with him, but someone had to watch this lamb, Hashem forbid she escapes! How would it look if this was the one house without blood on our doorpost and lintel tomorrow. I saw him go out and head left, just after sunset. Stay safe, Rechavia. See you when we’re free.

Rechavia blew her a kiss, turned around, held his hand one more second on the smooth of the doorpost -- then out and to the left. It wasn’t hard to find Sabba Moshe, at the end of their alley on a small hill looking out toward the Nile.

Sabba...

Oh, Rechavia! You shouldn’t be out. I shouldn’t be out. Ha -- of course we all should be out! I can’t wait until we are out, tomorrow night finally.

But something tells me Sabba you’re not quite ready.

.... No, I’m ready. But I just keep asking myself: Does it have to be like this? Is this how we get our freedom -- someone in every one of their homes dies? Someone in Goshen forgets and maybe one of us dies too?

I know Sabba. I’ve been thinking about that too. I don’t know many Egyptians -- we’ve only been here the year. I know the taskmasters but it’s hard to believe that’s all they are.

Moshe gestured toward the Nile -- the shimmer of the moon over the wide waters. See Rechavia, right below the hill here, that’s where my Imma put me in the water, in a basket. And just over there is where Pharaoh’s daughter found me, and it wasn’t just her but the girls with her. You’ve heard the story. They decided together to save me. They knew it was right. They knew it together.

And Rechavia, so many  hated us, or went along. I never knew until I turned thirteen. But from the start I always judged them one by one. You know this, I taught you about this when you were little.

That’s right Sabba. When you killed the Egyptian it was one man, threatening the life of another. You made me repeat it: No one shall die for the sins of his father, but only for his own sin.

Yes Rechavia. So why not that way tomorrow? Why can’t Hashem just punish the homes of the taskmasters, or the magicians advising Pharoah, and the king himself? I ask Hashem. I ask the one known to Avraham, and I get no answer.

Sabba, do you remember the day I turned thirteen? You said: Today you come out to the sheep with me, just like your father and uncle when they were your age. You said: I want you to watch carefully and understand. Sometimes a sheep runs away, and even if you can’t remember ever noticing a special streak of color in their wool, you know it is this one sheep, this particular sheep, whom you love and you do anything to bring it back. Then there are other times, when the sheep move together to water or pasture, it’s so miraculous-- how they change the shape  of the flock to grip the hills so no one falls, protecting and nurturing each other, and in those moments there is no such thing as a single sheep, there is only a flock. In those moments no one sheep would ever consider running away. And a shepherd learns to know ahead of time the moment just before a flock becomes sheep or sheep become a flock again.

That is what you taught me Sabba. I think this is why Hashem chose you. You always knew long before the moment a flock turns into sheep and long before the moment sheep become a flock. All I ever wanted was to know this as you do.

But Rechavia, tonight I am having trouble with the difference. I know the Egyptians are like a flock of evil sheep -- they lose themselves as they oppress us, they are responsible together. They won’t save each other’s lives let alone ours. We gave them so many chances to run away and I, I myself would have taken any of them in, even if I couldn’t have recognized a single streak in them from before. None of them did. They are responsible, every one of them. So why am I still troubled? Why do I sit like a shepherd on a hill under the moon and look at them still?

The other night, Rechavia, I dreamed of a day I am even older, and we are far along out of this place, and our people are thirsty and I help them find water. And all of a sudden I am sitting right here looking down at this Nile and I am seeing the girls lifting a baby up out of a basket -- and then I hear their cries at the death of their firstborn. In the dream it is too much for me, and I shriek and lash out with this staff and then everything disappears.

Rechavia looked out toward the Nile for a long moment. Then he gestured with his head back, toward the houses, and said: Come on. I have something to show you. They stood up and Rechavia led them back to Moshe’s home.

Rechavia stood in the door frame, felt the smooth part of the post on his right, then moved inside and said: Sabba, stand here. Stand here, and feel this right here.

Moshe took his spot, and Rechavia held his hand and placed it so it touched the part that Moshe had made smooth.

I like the doorway, Rechavia said. What happens inside is important. We talk in here about all the things you asked outside. Who is responsible, for their own actions and for the actions of their nation or their friends, when are you responsible for your own sins and when for the sins of your fathers, and we address all points of view. We decide in here how we will act if this is the truth or if that is the truth. In here, we figure out how to hold each other accountable.

Now Sabba, keep your hand where it is, and turn around. Moshe turned carefully, holding his hand against the doorpost and looking out.

We look outside, Rechavia said, and we hope that inside other doorways it’s the same as in here. But we know it’s not. Not in too many Egyptians homes, and not even in all Israelite homes. It’s all right to wish that other homes would be like ours. When they aren’t, people die. The wrong people are punished. 

If we only look out, all we will see is that the wrong people die, how they are all responsible and they are never accountable. We’ll think that is all there is. So each time we look out, we have to look back in here.  

Sabba, we have to stand right here, and look both ways. How did you tell it to me once -- when you are sitting in your home and when you are out on your way. A doorpost that shows blood, a doorpost with Hashem.

It was midnight now. Moshe held his arms against the posts. How did you know, Rechavia, that I have been standing here an hour every day since the new moon, feeling this spot over and over, trying to smooth what won’t ever be smooth enough.

He looked at Tzippora, with her hand on the lamb. Moshe thought: Today each of us is a precious lamb, and I do know the moment in twenty-four hours exactly when we will become a flock, losing ourselves as we protect each other on the way out of here.

You know, said Sabba Moshe, I still have my sources still down the Nile. There are Egyptians who today want to come with us, and I have heard that on their doorposts they put up a sign, in our own language as a code to find each other: V’erev rav alah itam. I sent them a message today -- take down the note and put up blood instead and meet us tomorrow after midnight.

Maybe it’s the grandchildren of the women who fished you out, Sabba.

Maybe so.

Do you think their homes will be spared from the plague?

I hope they will, Rechavia. When we talk of these things in the future, to your grandchildren -- that’s how we should want them to remember it. It was good to talk, Rechavia. I needed to talk before we left.

Not talk, said Rechavia. Teach. You just needed to teach. See you when we’re free.

Rechavia walked out, under the almost full moon. And without realizing it, he was humming a child’s song, peh peh Hashem ayeh, about the secret hiding place of Yosef’s bones and the day coming when Hashem would no longer hide but redeem them, and if not everyone in Egypt at least many more would be free tomorrow -- poh poh, yavo hayom.

 

 

E-Maggid: What Is Freedom?

"Tell old Pharaoh: Let My people go." Everyone knows the words of the old spiritual. But in the Torah, the words are a bit different. Say to him: Adonai, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to you to say: Let My people go so they may serve Me in the wilderness (Exodus 7:16).

In American history, freedom has always seemed to be freedom from something. From the British crown, from the masters of Southern slavery. In our classic American literature, freedom means liberation from unreasonable social norms, or even from adulthood itself (think Huckleberry Finn or The Catcher in the Rye).

But in the Torah, freedom is always freedom toward something. Moshe reminds Pharaoh and the people that they seek freedom to go to Mount Sinai -- where they will be free to hear God and to take on new responsibilities.

In Judaism, freedom leads necessarily to obligation. What responsibilities do you choose? Who do you choose to be bound to, not just today but for the long term? On a simple level, commitments make you less free. But on a higher level, commitment to Torah adds to freedom. Without some higher purpose to strive for, we can be awash in so many choices every day that we could hardly move. Moving freely toward Torah, we move away from the unreasonable masters that can control our lives.

Then, we can face the choices of the truly free. How do I make time today for the people in my life and for my important work? Of the many unheard voices in the world, whose will I try to respond to? What will I do to nourish and protect my soul, so that I do not wear out or fall into cynicism? This is the freedom we are working toward, even after we are freed of the Pharaoh of Egypt.

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!

* * * * *

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.