Parashat Bo,
January 8, 2021, 6 Shvat 5782
Torah: Exodus 10:1-13:16; Triennial 12:29-13:16
Haftarah: Jeremiah 46:13-28
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In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "Restarting Time", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "What Does Telling Time Tell Us About the Teller?" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes about "Coming Home" in the Haftarah.
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Restarting Time
Ilana Kurshan
In this week’s parashah God tells Moshe and Aaron that the Exodus from Egypt will mark the start of the Jewish calendar: “This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you” (12:2). From this point forwards, the Israelites are to regard Nisan, the month of the Exodus, as the first month of the year. This may sound surprising, given that we are accustomed to thinking of the Jewish year as beginning not in the spring, but in the fall, with Rosh Hashanah. Does the Jewish year start in Tishrei, or in Nisan? The rabbis of the Talmud discuss this question, shedding light on the various ways we mark time as individuals, as a nation, and as human beings.
Tractate Rosh Hashanah begins with the assertion that there are in fact four different new years – Nisan is the new year for marking the cycle of festivals and for measuring the reign of Jewish kings; Elul marks the new year for tithing cattle; Tishrei is the new year for tithing grain and vegetables and for measuring the reign of foreign kings; and Shvat is the new year for the trees. Depending on what it is that we are marking or measuring, the start of the year is determined at different points. These four new years do not present a conflict until Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua break out in a fierce debate about when the world was created – because while we might start the year at different points, surely we all agree that the world was created only once. But was it on the first of Tishrei or the first of Nisan?
Each rabbi marshals extensive evidence in favor of his opinion as to the dating of creation. Rabbi Eliezer insists that the world was created in Tishrei because God said, on the third day of creation, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit” (Genesis 1:11). He argues that it is in the fall, not the spring, that the earth brings forth grass and the trees are full of ripe fruit; thus the world had to be created in Tishrei. He concedes that the Exodus from Egypt happened in Nisan, of course, but he argues that the future redemption will take place in Tishrei, on the anniversary of the world’s creation. But Rabbi Yehoshua insists that the month of the Exodus must be the time of year when the world was created, and the time of year when the future redemption will take place. Citing the next verse from Genesis— “The earth brought forth vegetation, seed-bearing plants, fruit trees of every kind” (1:12)—he contends that it is in the spring, not the fall, that the earth is full of grass and the trees bring forth fruit.
Each rabbi’s view on when the world was created reflects his broader sensibilities. For Rabbi Eliezer, who starts the new year at the time when kings the world over begin measuring their reigns, time depends on the creation of the world, a universal event that is irrespective of the particular events of Jewish history. But to Rabbi Yehoshua’s more particularist sensibility, time begins with the Exodus from Egypt, as God tells Moshe and Aaron in our parashah. Nisan is the first month of the Jewish year, and thus it must have been in Nisan that the world was created, and in Nisan that the world will someday be redeemed.
This tension between the universal and the particular is reflected in Rashi’s first comment on the Torah, which references God’s words to Moshe and Aaron in our parashah. Rashi quotes Rabbi Yitzchak (see Yalkut Shimoni Bo 187), who asks why the Torah begins with the book of Genesis. After all, says Rabbi Yitzchak, the Torah could have begun with God’s commandment in our parashah to mark the start of the year with the month of Nisan. Rabbi Yitzchak, like the more particularist Rabbi Yehoshua, regards the Torah as a book of laws given to the Jewish people. Why does the Torah have to bother to tell us about the creation of the entire world?
Rabbi Yitzchak’s question is answered by referencing a verse from Psalms (111:6): “He [God] reveals to His people His powerful works, in giving them the heritage of nations.” God revealed His powerful work of creating the world in order that He might someday give the people of Israel their heritage, namely the Promised Land. Rashi explains that since the Torah begins with Genesis, the Israelites can turn to the Torah to point out that God created the entire world, and thus it is God’s prerogative to choose whom to give the land of Canaan. According to this explanation, the universal serves to justify the particular; the Torah begins with the creation of all of humanity so as to justify God’s unique relationship with one particular nation.
As Rashi’s comment and the Talmudic debate reflect, our tradition has both universalist and particularist tendencies, which are reflected in the various ways we mark time. As universalists, we live in accordance with the secular calendar, scheduling appointments and dating documents in January, February, etc. But as Jews, we also live in accordance with the particular rhythms of the Hebrew calendar when it comes to marking holidays, determining when to feast and when to fast. And beyond the universal and the particular, we also have our own personal calendars – marking birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and important dates in the lives of our families. These multiple calendars all map onto one another, such that the first of January may be not just the secular new year, but also, say, the tenth of the Hebrew month of Tevet and the yahrzeit of a beloved grandmother. We live in accordance with the various rhythms of the affiliations that matter most to us – like the rabbis of the Talmud setting prayer times to correspond to the daily sacrifices, thereby continuing to measure time by the rituals of the Temple long after its destruction. They did so not because they “forgot” to change their proverbial clocks once the Temple was destroyed, and not because they were in denial that the Temple was no longer operational, but because the Temple was so significant that our religious impulses continue to be guided by its rhythms.
When God tells Moshe, in our parashah, that “this month shall mark for you the beginning of the months,” God is essentially saying that the Exodus is an event so powerful and momentous that it is as if time starts all over again. But it is not the only such event. As individuals, we all experience moments when time seems to start anew – when we get married, or become parents, or experience the world for the first time without parents of our own. These occasions mark, for us, the beginning of the months: We think in terms of how long we’ve been married, or how old our child has grown, or how old our parents would have been. As the rabbis of the Talmud knew, time does not just start anew for us in Nisan; our lives are punctuated by significant new beginnings, and the various ways we chart our time infuse our lives with meaning.
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What Does Telling Time Tell Us About the Teller?
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Text: Shemot 11:4-8
4And Moshe said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘About midnight I will go out into the midst of Egypt; 5and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die… 8…Then he went out from Pharaoh in great anger.
Text: Shemot 12:12-13
12And I will go through the land of Egypt on that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt… I am the Lord. 13Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.
Text: Shemot 12:29
29And it came to pass at midnight that the Lord struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt…
· Pay attention to who is addressed in each of these discussions of the event.
· In chapter 11 Moshe is speaking to Pharaoh. He does not reveal to him on which night the plague of smiting the first-born will take place. What might be the reason?
· In 12:12 Moshe is speaking to the Israelites. They are told that it will take place while they are eating the [paschal] lamb that they were told to prepare. How does that impact their experience?
· Compare the time of the plague according to the three sources. Why is the time, if given, not consistent? Who is told the time of night and who is not? Why?
Talmud Tractate Berachot 4a
Moshe knew, [so] why did he say: About midnight, [instead of: At midnight]? he maintained: Lest Pharaoh’s astrologers err [in telling the exact time] and they would say: Moshe is a liar.
· According to the Talmud, why did Moshe not give the specific time when speaking to Pharaoh? (Especially considering that he is interested in demonstrating the LORD’s power to Pharaoh!). What would be the problem with Pharaoh’s people believing Moshe is lying?
· How might the Talmud explain the discrepancy between what is said to Pharaoh and what is said to the Israelites?
· What in the reality of the Israelite existence in Egypt would render exact telling of time worthless? What might the Egyptian preoccupation with telling time indicate about their social and economic reality?
· The first mitzvah given to the Israelites, still in the land of Egypt, is time oriented – how to establish a calendar (12:1-2). What might be the reason for that?
· Why do you think that when the plague takes place, the Torah records the exact time at which God strikes?
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Coming Home
Bex Stern Rosenblatt
The story the Torah tells us the story of how we came to have a right to the land of Israel - our claim to it starting with the promise to Abraham and the sojourning of the patriarchs of Genesis and then the laws given to us in the following books to help us keep the land once we got to it. We come to the land in Genesis but it is not yet ours. It is only after 430 years of slavery in Egypt that we are able to proceed to the promised land. The Torah ends just as we are about to cross over into it. The story of the rest of the Tanakh is how we lost the land of Israel and then tried to regain it. We are stuck in a cycle of entering, losing, and regaining the land of Israel.
This week’s torah portion provides a high point in that cycle. Not only are we finally leaving Egypt, we are also purposely being gifted with a national narrative, a story to help us remember exile so that we might not have to experience it again. This week’s haftarah, Jeremiah 46, compliments this nicely. It is the low point of their cycle. We read a threat, a promise of doom, to the nation of Egypt. In the Torah portion, we are promised our land and in the haftarah portion the Egyptians are promised to lose their land.
The language put in the mouths of the Egyptians is interesting. We recount them saying,
“Let us rise up and let us return
To our people and to the land of our birthplace.”
It sounds an awful lot like the way we talk about our own national return. This combination of “rise up” and “return” is found describing Abraham returning to Beersheba, Jacob returning to his land, Nehemiah talking to the returning exiles, and Ruth deciding to go back to Naomi’s homeland, to name a few of the occurrences.
Seemingly, both us and the Egyptians function the same way. We make mistakes, we lose ourselves, and then we want to return, to start over. It’s an empowering thing to imagine that the Egyptians are like us. We know, in the Torah, that the land of Israel was not always ours. That it had belonged to other people before it belonged to us. Our national identity was formed more by the story we told and the active choosing of God to plant us in a place rather than by an unchanging link between people and place. We did not arise from the land. For all intents and purposes, it seemed to us as if the Egyptians had. They had been in Egypt forever, linked to it by the Nile. They had no story of entering the land from elsewhere and they had never experienced exile. To imagine them as impermanent as we knew ourselves to be helped us to understand ourselves as a stronger people.
Moreover, we have something the Egyptians do not. We might both use the same language, we might both long for the ability to return. But God will deny this to the Egyptians and grant it to us. Our history is cyclic - we will always be banished but also always be granted the ability to come home. Ancient Egypt, however, will disappear once it is finally conquered. They are not given a chance to return.
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