TORAH PORTION: FIRST DAY OF PESAH |
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Shabbat First Day of Pesah
April 15, 2022 | 14 Nisan 5782
Torah: Exodus 12:21-51; Numbers 28:16-25
Haftarah: Joshua 5:2-6:1
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In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "Pesah: History begins at Home", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "On this very day" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes a dvar haftara called "Rock and Roll at Gilgal".
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Pesah: History begins at Home
Ilana Kurshan
Moshe and Miriam, two of the three siblings who play a key role in the drama of the Exodus, are a study in contrasts. Though he is hardly mentioned in the Haggadah, Moshe is the clear hero of the Exodus story. He conveys God’s words to Pharaoh and to the Israelites, brings the plagues upon Egypt, and leads the people in their departure from Egypt. But Moshe’s starring role on the national stage comes at the expense of his personal life, as several biblical stories suggest. Miriam, on the other hand, is deeply involved in family dynamics, where she effects change in the most personal realms. In this sense, brother and sister are counterparts to one another – he is a leader on the national level, and she on the familial level. Their intertwined stories shed light on the types of leadership required to ensure the survival and continuity of the Jewish people.
Moshe’s personal family drama plays out on the sidelines of the Exodus story. Born to Jewish parents in Egypt and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he has a complicated identity, though it is clear from the first time he leaves the palace that his sympathies lie with the oppressed Israelites: When he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite, he instinctively strikes the Egyptian overlord. On account of this crime, he flees to Midian, and it is only there—while hiding out as a fugitive from Egypt—that he gets married and has a child. Moshe’s marriage to his wife takes place during the brief interlude when he leaves Egypt, as if it is a digression from the main story. Although Moshe departs Midian for Egypt with Tziporah and his sons, he keeps his family at a distance so that he can concern himself with the fate of his nation. The midrash teaches that Aharon intercepts Moshe on his way back to Egypt, and instructs him to send his wife and children back to Midian; Egypt is no place to raise a Jewish family (Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael 18:2). And so Moshe is living on his own in Egypt when he enters the high echelons of Pharaoh’s court to plead on behalf of the people’s liberation. Moshe’s family rejoins him only in the wilderness, when his father-in-law brings Tziporah to him “after she had been sent away” (18:2) along with their children.
Unlike Moshe, who seems to regard his family as a distraction from his national mission, Miriam is intimately bound up in the life of her family, and single-handedly keeps her family together. The midrash teaches that Miriam’s father, Amram, tried to separate from his wife when he learned about Pharaoh’s decree that every son must be cast into the Nile. He said, “We are laboring for nothing!” What was the point of bringing children into the world if they would only be killed? He thus divorced his wife, and his fellow Israelites followed his example. But Miriam would not stand for it. “Father, your decree is harsher than Pharaoh’s,” she said (Sotah 12a). Pharaoh decreed that all the males would die; her father was preventing even the females from being born. Miriam’s father heeded her, and reunited with his wife; then Moshe was conceived. Unlike Moshe, who separated from his wife so as to play a leadership role, Miriam’s leadership was about bringing a husband and wife back together.
Indeed, this is not the only time Moshe separates from his wife, and it is not the only time Miriam tries to bring a husband and wife back together. Later on in the Israelites’ wilderness journey, Miriam and Aaron speak ill of Moshe “on account of the Cushite woman he took” (Numbers 12:1). The midrash identifies this woman as Tziporah, recounting an intimate exchange between the two women. When Moshe appointed seventy leaders to assist him in judging the people, Miriam declared, “Happy are these men and happy are their wives!” Tziporah objected, insisting that being married to a national leader was no occasion for happiness. “Do not say “‘happy are their wives’ but rather ‘woe to their wives,’” she tells Miriam, “For from the day that God spoke with your brother Moshe, he has not had relations with me” (Sifrei Zutah 12:1). Tziporah reveals that not only did Moshe send her away throughout the entire drama of the Exodus, but he has also not been intimate with her throughout the wilderness wanderings. It is at this point that Miriam “speaks ill” to Aaron about Moshe. She insists that she and Aaron have also received prophecy from God, and yet they never felt the need to separate from their respective spouses; why, then, has Moshe left his wife? Miriam is a leader on the familial level; she cannot conceive of a leader who would sacrifice his family life for the sake of his mission.
Moshe, who was hardly ever intimate with his wife, does not seem to have much of a relationship with his children either. The Torah is surprisingly silent about the fate of Moshe’s two sons; Moshe seems closer with his nephews than with his own children, as per a midrash on a verse from the book of Numbers. The Torah states, “These are the children of Aaron and Moshe on the day that God spoke to Moshe on Mount Sinai” (3:1), and then proceeds to list only the names of Aaron’s sons. The Talmud teaches that Aaron’s sons were like sons to Moshe, because Moshe taught them Torah (Sanhedrin 19b). Moshe, perhaps having created a rupture too painful to redress in his own family, taught Torah to his nephews instead. He was unable to be a parent to his own sons so that they might lead the nation after him. When it comes time for Moshe to choose a successor, there is no mention of the possibility of one of his sons taking over. In contrast, Miriam had illustrious progeny. The Torah teaches that the midwives who spared the Israelite babies were rewarded by God and granted “houses” (Exodus 1:21). The Talmud identifies these midwives with Yocheved and Miriam, and teaches that the “house” Miriam was granted was the “house of royalty”: She married Caleb, and they became the progenitors of King David (Sotah 11b). We know nothing of the ultimate fate of Moshe’s descendants, whereas Miriam’s descendants include David, and, by extension, the Messiah.
In a moment of frustration with the Israelites’ stubbornness and querulousness, Moshe cries out to God, “Was I pregnant with this people, did I give birth to them, that You should say to me: ‘Carry them in your bosom as a caregiver carries an infant’?” (Numbers 11:12). Moshe has no interest in bearing, birthing, or nursing. He is not a family man. In contrast, Miriam—who convinces her parents to bear and birth another child, and then finds a nursemaid for that child—believes that public life begins at home, with the fostering of relationships that give rise to great leaders. As we sit around the table with our families for the Pesah seder, we remember that what takes place in our homes may ultimately be just as consequential as what takes place in the public square.
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On this very day
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Text: Shemot 12:41 (Torah reading for the first day of Pesah)
And it came to pass at the end of thirty years and four hundred years, and it came to pass on this very day, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.
- Why is there stress on both the length of time and the specific day?
- Who left Egypt on that day? What do you understand that to mean?
Midrash Tanhuma Shemot 12:41
When the [predetermined] end arrived, He did not delay them even for a blink of an eye: On the fifteenth of Nissan the decree was made, and He spoke to Avraham our father [in the covenant] between the cuts. On the fifteenth of Nissan, the angels came to tell him about (the upcoming birth of) Yitzhak. On the fifteenth of Nissan Yitzchak was born. On the fifteenth of Nissan, they were redeemed from Egypt. On the fifteenth of Nissan, they will be redeemed from the enslavement of exile.
- While we associate the fifteenth of Nissan as being Pesach, the day of the Exodus, how might the Midrash define this day?
- What day on the Jewish calendar stands in contrast to this day?
Commentary: Rashbam Shemot 12:41
At the end of thirty years – since the "covenant between the cuts" – and four hundred years – since the birth of Yitzhak – on this very day - Still they lived in Egypt only for the last two hundred and ten years of the [total of] four hundred and thirty years.
- Rashbam assumes that we can't have been enslaved for 400 years (as Levi went down to Egypt and his great-grandson, Moshe, left Egypt.) How does he resolve the apparent conflict?
- Avraham was told, in the covenant between the cuts, that his offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs for 400 years. Where do the last 30 come from? Why are the 400 counted from the birth of Yitzhak?
Commentary: Malbim Shemot 12:41
And it came to pass at the end of thirty years etc. meaning that by law and divine decree, the redemption was properly meant to occur at the end of four hundred and thirty years. Instead, it took place on this very day. And the reason the redemption was on this day, halfway in the reckoning, is that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. These were the celestial hosts, as the Mekhilta wrote earlier, and they completed the full reckoning. Furthermore, …God also tallied the nights… since the Egyptians worked the Israelites day and night.
- What, in the structure of the verse, led Malbim to this reading?
- How does Malbim resolve the difficulty that troubled Rashbam?
- How would you resolve it?
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Rock and Roll at Gilgal
Bex Stern Rosenblat
The year has come around such that we find ourselves at Pesah once again, reading the haftarah of Joshua’s commemoration of Pesah when the Israelites first enter the land of Israel. The commemoration happens at Gilgal, which is a most curious place, a place of opposites. It is here that we encounter God but it is also here that we worship God blasphemously. It is Gilgal that is mentioned as a place of great height but it is also mentioned as a place that is lower than fairly low places. Gilgal may refer to a specific place or places or it may just be a word meaning a flat expanse of land. Gilgal may specifically be the name for any cluster of stones put together to access God, which may or may not be permitted.
In our haftarah, there is an etiological note, explaining how Gilgal got its name. Now that we have entered the land, God commanded us to circumcise our males as no one had been circumcised during the forty years we were in the desert. Having done this, we hear from God again. God says, “This day I have rolled away, galloti, the shame of Egypt from upon you.” The narrator adds that for this reason the place received the name Gilgal. The narrator is parsing Gilgal as coming from the root gimel-lamed-lamed, just as galloti does, meaning to roll. Elsewhere in the Tanakh, the narrator plays with the word Gilgal differently. In Amos and Hosea, which condemn the practices at a place called Gilgal, the word is put in conversation with galeh, gimel-lamed-heh, meaning to expose or exile. Gilgal, which was the first place we entered the land after the Exodus, the location at which we became a rooted people, becomes the place which causes our exile. Our homecoming contains the roots of our exile.
So why does this first Pesah post-Moses happen at Gilgal? What are we to make of the retelling of our national story in a place of such contradictions? It is a unique retelling of our story. We are, after all, not quite done living it. As Joshua tells the story, he also recreates many of Moshe’s finest moments. For example, Joshua parts the Jordan as Moshe did the Sea and he takes off his shoes on holy ground. The retelling is more than a story, it is an experience rooted in the cyclic nature of our narratives. While it may seem that Joshua entering the land is the end of the Moshe story and the beginning of the story of the nation of Israel in the land of Israel, our narratives do not work so linearly. Rather, we have come round full circle, reentering the land Abraham once entered to dwell in it for a time before we experience exile again. Gilgal is literally this circle, this rolling, this connecting an end to a beginning. The story is retold but the story is also uniquely Joshua’s and not Moshe’s. And now the mantel has been passed down to us. Let’s hope we can roll with it.
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