Sometimes birthing labor is short -- such women must beware lest they find themselves stuck at home or in a taxi. Sometimes, labor is uncomfortably long. Rarely, of course, does it take a week, and no responsible doctor would allow it to do so.
But that seems to be what is in fact happening during Pesach. In the Haggada, we quoted the verse in Devarim (4:34) that describes Hashem as taking a “nation from within a nation.” The Midrash compares this to a doctor using forceps to insure the birth of a fetus having difficulty making its way out of the birth canal.
This image is fitting in at least two ways. It conveys the sense in which the Exodus was an event imposed from above, with very little input from the Jewish people. The contribution from our side will change dramatically over time, but that’s not the way it was in the beginning. The gratitude at Pesach time is to focus our thanks on what could not have happened without Hashem. A baby that needs forceps is not emerging on its own and the doctor is the lone hero.
The other way it fits is by evoking the image of birth. The Exodus is about the emergence not merely of a new entity but of a new reality. It is no accident that the image of the new -- or of the first -- appears all over the story. The list includes:
- The first Mitzva given to the Jewish people.
- That Mitzva involves the sanctification of the new moon. In other words, the first was about the new.
- These sections of the Torah will go on to describe the Mitzva of the redemption of the first born.
- As Stan Sussman pointed out in the Siyum last week, the tractate Pesachim ends with the Mitzva of the redemption of the first born because of the status of the Jewish people as Hashem’s first-born. That status was announced in the first statement Hashem dictated to Moshe as his opening to Paro: “Israel is my child, my first born.”
- This section of the Torah also introduces the Mitzva of Tefillin, which are placed on the head and the upper arm, the seats of the beginning of thought and action. Appropriately, they are worn (at a minimum) at the start of each day.
The new reality heralded in this section of the Torah involves a new sense of time as well as a new entity, the Jewish people. Everything new needs a new space -- and the Seventh Day of Pesach provides a look at that.
One of the names of a Jews is “Hebrew.” A translation of “Ivri,” that name first appeared with Avraham Avinu. With him, the Midrash says, it meant that he lived on the other side of the river from everyone else, that he was the lone man of faith, the singular dissenter, the iconoclast. That name stuck with his family, and Yosef is called an Ivri. Rashi says that refers to his native language. As we also call “Hebrew” a language, that seems to be what the word has come to mean.
But the Midrash in Shemot says that the Jewish people are called “Hebrews” because of a collective event, and not just a common language. The word “Avar” means to cross over, and the Midrash says it refers to those who crossed the sea. This means that, like other names, it comes to them from birth.
But there is something further to point out. To name a child after the circumstances of its birth seems peculiar. It would be like calling this baby “forceps.” R’ Moshe Shapiro, ztz’l, pointed out that Moshe Rabbenu used the term “the G-d of the Hebrews” when speaking to Paro (5:3). So, to be precise, the name did not come at the time of the crossing of the sea even if it refers to this event connected to this crucial event during the birth of the nation. It is therefore a name that relates in some way to the essence of the child.
The important aspect of the crossing of the sea is not that the Jews did it. It is rather that they could do it. For the Jewish people, crossing the sea is not just a one-time event. It reveals part of their essence. That is, while other nations (like the Egyptians) perish in the sea, the Jews find their natural habitat there. The splitting of the sea, then, adds this final dimension to what is new. The Jewish people are 1) a new entity living in 2) a new framework of time in a 3) new habitat.
The steps just after this birthing are tentative and somewhat fraught, as is hinted in the end of the reading we do on Yom Tov. All beginnings are fraught. We know today that the re-starting of communal life is still fraught with decisions about timing and precautions. We're tantalizingly close but still not there. But the last days of Pesach are about the birth itself, and our thanks for all aspects of it -- in the birth of a new entity, a new space, and a new time. As a community, we are also coming through the birth canal again. Let the time of deprivation help us experience all of the aspects of communal life with renewed vigor in our sense of being, of soon to be unconfined place, and of our regained time together.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Feldman
