Parashat Bo is one of my favourite Torah portions. For one thing, it’s the culmination of the whole drama of the Exodus, the last of the Ten Plagues and the moment when Pharaoh finally agrees to the famous request “Let my people go!” It contains the moment of liberation from slavery, and the beginning of an adventure that will take us through most of the rest of Torah on our journey to becoming the people of Israel. What I most love about Bo is not the almost cinematically thrilling plot, though, it’s that in the midst of this world-changing event, the Torah already starts discussing memory. How are the Israelites going to remember and commemorate this event? How are they going to teach their children about it and make sure that it is passed on to their descendants?
Even though the command reaches the children of Israel while they are still enslaved in Egypt, they are already looking to the far future, when they will be not only free but settled in their land and raising generations to come. They will make a pilgrimage – to where? They have probably never heard of Jerusalem. Even if they have traditions about where their ancestors lived before the time of Joseph, it wasn’t Jerusalem, and the city is certainly nowhere they or their grandparents or their great grandparents have ever seen. They have never had the freedom to carry out religious ceremonies, but they are told to make a sacrifice as part of the preparation for leaving Egypt, and to make this sacrifice an annual ritual on into the distant future. There is no reason for them to have any concept of the Temple, and yet they are going to use it to commemorate the event they are currently living through.
They are going to eat matzah, and avoid leaven, for seven days each year perpetually. And we know that this prophecy really is going to come true, because it’s something we still do today. The only way this is possible is because Parashat Bo contains instructions not only to remember and commemorate, but to teach. We are to set up a ceremony that encourages children to ask questions, and when they do, we must educate them all about our redemption from Egypt. This focus on education, right there at the heart of the Exodus itself, was key in establishing what later became Jewish identity. Through all the complex and often destructive turns of history, each generation continued to teach their children to regard themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt. Building a connection through education was still possible when the Temple was destroyed, when the people were in exile or living under oppressive regimes. Education became the core of Rabbinic Judaism, diaspora Judaism, Progressive Judaism.
The Pesach Seder we are used to today is visible in outline in the Mishnah, and was crystallized into a recognizable form in Mediaeval times. In some ways it has little in common with the celebration of Pesach envisaged in Parashat Bo. There is no sacrifice and, although some of us may be fortunate enough to be able to travel to Israel for the holiday, there is no pilgrimage. And yet we can see the connecting thread dating all the way back to that first Passover: children ask questions, and we tell them about our shared history, while eating matzah. And many of our other celebrations follow this model. We create multisensory experiences with food, music, and ritual set up to help people to learn, whether that is the Purimspiel, the Shavuot cheesecake competition, or contemporary shared educational rituals like a Tu BiShevat Seder or a Mitzvah day charity drive. Even a Shabbat meal has echoes of the Seder: we eat a meal together with our family or community, we use symbols and songs and delicious food to help each other to build a shared identity through learning about our history and values.
The example of Parashat Bo shows that even when we are in the middle of a crisis we are thinking about how we will remember and educate about it in the future. And that education is not simply repeating facts in a rigid way, but it’s making every member of the community part of a process of questioning and reinventing our tradition. A substantial proportion of a modern Seder is not directly about actually describing the story of the Exodus, it’s about discussing how best to tell the story and educate the next generation. We have a great focus on the questions of the children, and giving the appropriate answers that are suitable for different personalities, including those who, like the so-called ‘wicked’ child, want to challenge authority. The seeds of this are very much present in Parashat Bo with its format of answering a hypothetical future child’s questions. Not only this, but the descriptions of the plagues with their sometimes ridiculous excess are very engaging for young people; playing and elaborating on them has become a highlight of many Seders. The plagues are of course also serious and important to the overall historical arc. But just as the Torah gives us a hint about how to create and maintain a connection with future generations through ritual and creating space for questions, it also provides us with material to help make the educational experience memorable.
This week, many of us took part in civic and interfaith commemorations of secular Holocaust Memorial Day. Sometimes people criticize Jewish communities for continuing to talk about and educate about the Shoah now that there are very few people left who personally experienced Nazi persecution. But we know that it’s extremely important to continue to educate through the generations, for a whole range of reasons. One of them is that making our children, and all those who choose to join our communities, an active part of our shared heritage is critical for building our Jewish identity, even in the most terrible of circumstances.
Rachel Berkson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.