A Pesach Pedagogy: Parashat Bo 5772

The moment of Exodus is about to begin. Locusts have devoured the crops of Egypt, a penetrating darkness, so thick you could touch it covered the entirety of the land for three days, and the terrible final plague, makkat b’chorot, the killing of the first born has been announced. It is in this anxious moment that Moses gathers the children of Israel to deliver an important message. For the first time, Moses, a prophet without equal is about to address the Children of Israel, sharing with them his first words as a leader. The crowd gathers in excited silence. ‘What will he say?’ They ask. ‘What will be the first words that Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher will share with us?’ ‘What piece of divine everlasting wisdom, what nugget of morality, what essential insight of God will he teach us?’

Moses rises to his feet; he opens his mouth with the words that God had given him:

החודש הזה לכם ראש חדשים, ראשון הוא לכם לחדשי השנה.

“This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.”

‘What?’ They said. ‘Is he talking about the calendar?’ ‘Well, let’s just wait and see where he goes with this one.’

Moses continued: Everyone needs to get a lamb, a lamb for each household, unless of course that household is too small, in which case you can share with a neighbor. A really nice lamb, a yearling, no blemishes whatsoever. And on the night of the 14th of the month you shall slaughter it, taking some of the blood and placing it on your doorposts, then roast it and eat it. Make sure you eat it all, roasted over the fire, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Oh, and as for dress code for this meal, make sure your belt is on tight, your sandals are on your feet and your staff is in your hand, because as soon as we are finished with this meal of ours, we are out of here. And just in case you are wondering, this isn’t a one-shot-deal either; this meal of ours, is going to happen every single year on this date, for all time. Seven days of unleavened bread, you got that? Make sure you have cleaned your house really well - no leaven at all - even under the couch in the living room, because if I catch any of you eating leavened bread, you are cut off! And this is going to be a sacred institution of ours for all time, for you and all your descendants. And when you enter the land that the Lord has promised to you, (by the way, I hear it’s only a short walk from here), when you enter that land, you shall observe this rite. And when your children ask you, מה העבודה הזאת לכם?
What does all this mean to you? You shall say, “It is the Pesach sacrifice to the Lord, because God passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt.”

“And the people then bowed low in homage. And the Israelites went and did so, just as the Lord had commanded.”

So that’s it. That is the account of the first speech that Moses ever gives the Jewish people. It is not about morality, it is not about complicated family dynamics, it is about halachah, Jewish law, and in particular it is about the pedagogic purposes of Pesach. It also marks the first time we as a Jewish people had a collective ‘freak-out’ about all the Passover cleaning we have left to do.

Now for while we modern Jews might think this is a strange way to start off your first day as the leader of the Jewish people, the traditional commentators think it is the perfect place to start, in fact, they wonder why the whole Torah doesn’t just start right here!
In fact, in his famous first words of commentary on the entire bible, the very opening comment that our teacher Rashi, Rabbeinu Shlomo ben Yitzhak offers us, quoting the midrash he asks:

לא היה צריך להתחיל את התורה אלא מ"החודש הזה לכם" שהיה מצוה ראשונה שנצטוו ישראל

“The Torah should not have started here with B’reishit, with Genesis, no, the Torah should have started with “HaHodesh HaZeh Lakhem,” This month shall be for you”; for after all, this is the first commandment which Israel received.”

Rashi and others like him have always wondered, if the Torah is meant to be a book of law, then why not start with the law? Why do we have to slog through 61 chapters of narrative spread out over a book and a half of the Torah just to get to the first time our nation is commanded about a d’var halakhah?

But Rashi does not stop by simply asking the question, of course he offers us an answer as well. He explains that the narrative is important. It forms the core of who we are as a people, who our ancestors were; what they valued, and what they rejected. It tells us how they built their relationships and covenants with God, and what God, in turn, promised us, their descendants. In other words nomos and narrative need each other to survive. Law and lore are necessary partners; the ‘how’ always needs an accompanying ‘why.’

And that is precisely what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, points out about the unique character of Moses’ first speech to the Children of Israel, he writes:

“About to gain their freedom, the Israelites were told that they had to become a nation of educators. That is what made Moses not just a great leader, but a unique one. . . . To defend a country you need an army. But to defend a free society you need schools. You need families and an educational system in which ideals are passed on from one generation to the next, and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured. There has never been a more profound understanding of freedom. It is not difficult, Moses was saying, to gain liberty, but to sustain it is the work of a hundred generations.”

What Rabbi Sacks is pointing out to us is that in each of us, in every last one of us, there is a duty to be an educator of the Jewish tradition. It is the very first commandment we ever received as a people. Before God uttered the first word of the Ten Commandments there was “And you shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants. . . and when your children ask you, “מה העבודה הזאת לכם?” What do you mean by this rite? You shall say, “This is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord.” We are teachers. It is our most sacred job.

Now this phrase from this morning’s parasha, מה העבודה הזאת
לכם?Is familiar to many of us. We recognize it as the question that the wicked son asks in our Haggadah. But the truth is, the authors of the Haggadah took it out of context, added their own emphasis and thus turned a question into a sarcastic attack: What is this rite to YOU? And our Haggadah famously suggests that we should set his teeth on edge and explain to him, “This is because of what the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt,” that is why I do this. For me and not for him; for had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.

As an educator, this passage has always greatly troubled me. What is so wrong with the question? מה העבודה הזאת לכם?
Even if we read it as a sarcastic challenge
I get asked this question ten times a day. Rabbi, why do you do this? Why this law, why that law? Why do you say this? In fact, my daughter Ayelet, now two and a half and profoundly aware of everything we say, is fond of asking – “Why Abba say dat?” when she hears something I didn’t mean for her to hear. The fact is, there is nothing wrong with the question, the trouble lies with the answer, not necessarily with its content, but rather, with its tone.

Instead of smacking him in the teeth, instead of responding with defensiveness, why not start by encouraging the question? After all, is not the question of the wicked child preferable to the silence of the child “Sh’eino Yodea Lishol?” The Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask? I, for one, will take heresy over indifference every day of the week.

And so, let us learn from this morning’s Torah portion about our role as Jewish educators. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that “freedom needs three institutions: parenthood, education and memory.” To start with, we need parenthood. Our role as parents and grandparents is indispensable in keeping our Jewish traditions alive. Our children look to us to be role models, to be exemplars for their own religious identities. We must encourage their questions, entertain their suspicions, and support their desires to understand the ‘why’ and not simply the ‘how’. We must not set their teeth on edge when they disagree, but instead make sure they know that questions have always been a part of our pedagogic traditions; and then we must try to articulate what it is that we believe, why it matters to us, and why it matters to us that it matters to them. But, we must also recognize that every mixed-message, every equivocation, every bet that we hedge with regard to our own Judaism is seen and heard and internalized by our children. ‘Why Abba say dat?’ So be careful, make sure your actions correspond with your convictions.

And if we as parents lack the tools to be the primary Jewish educators of the home, then it is our duty, as it has always been to seek out help. To send our child to day school, and if day school is not an option, then religious school is a must - but it should be supplemented with educational programs like USY and with summers spent at immersive Jewish camps such as Ramah.

And finally, and most importantly, there is the memory. Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch once said “The power of a good story is irresistible.” And we have one. We have a story of degradation leading to glory. We have a story of an undying faith in One God, and the miracle of an eternal language being reborn in the land of our ancestors. We have a story of ethics and morality in the face of hardship and discrimination. And we have a story which encourages every doubt, lauds every question, and sees every single individual as a story-teller, an educator, and the most-important link in the never-ending chain of the Jewish people.
Now צא וללמד! Now go and teach.