Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a special Passover recap episode. Because Passover falls on two Saturdays (in the diaspora), we don’t have a new parsha last week or this week, but we didn’t want to leave you episode-less for two whole weeks… so welcome to your special, Passover edition of the Morning Scroll! I am going to do what I usually do, which is recap the story quickly, and then pull out one thing to hold onto.
So prologue is that four hundred years before our story, there was a guy named Abraham who didn’t have any children, which stressed him out, so he kvetched to his bff God, who told him “Don’t worry, bud, good news, you’re going to have SO many descendants, but bad news, they’re going to be enslaved in Egypt for 400 years… but good news, I’m going to get them out of there and bring them back here.”
Fast forward four hundred years, and God does exactly what God promised. The Israelites have indeed become a huge nation, which scared Pharaoh, so he says “let’s kill babies, specifically Israelite babies”, and one woman is like “No I love my baby, he’s so special”, so she puts him in a box and floats him down the river, asking Miriam, her daughter, to watch him. Baby in the box gets lucky, floats into Pharaoh’s daughter, and ends up getting adopted into her household. He grows up in the palace, but he’s still a pretty good guy, so when he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite slave, he flies into a rage, kills the Egyptian, and then has to flee before Grandpa Pharaoh gets mad. He winds up in a place called Midian, where he gets a great father in law and a wife, and one day he’s out with his sheep and sees this bush on fire, so he does the unpredictable thing of walking closer to the mini forest fire to check it out. Well, the bush starts talking to him and says “Hi Moses, I’m God, I have a mission for you” and Moses internally is like “Wow really shoulda stayed home today” but outwardly is like “Sorry God-bush thing, I’m not really the right guy”. But God is like “No actually you are, the Israelites are suffering, I want to redeem them but I need a human helper so... I choose you”.
Back in Egypt-land, God tells Moses to go visit Pharaoh and tell him to let the Israelites go. But Pharaoh isn’t thrilled by this idea, so God is like “Ah you wanna play hard to get? Take this, buddy”, and directs Moses to wave his staff around, and suddenly weird things are happening, like all the water turns to blood, then there’s frogs everywhere, then the Egyptians all get lice, and it rains fiery balls of ice, and everything goes dark yada yada… and through all this, Pharaoh is being super stubborn and messing with Moses like “you can leave just kidding no you can leave jk again”. Finally God is like “ok enough already… Moses, go tell the Israelites to pack their stuff, then kill a lamb and smear its blood on the door so my death angel knows not to bother them”, and the Angel of Death comes around and kills every firstborn Egyptian in houses with no blood on the doors.
This kind of breaks Pharaoh, so he orders the Israelites out, and they scurry to leave, for some reason deciding to take their raw bread dough with them, as well as a bunch of gold, silver and other stuff from their Egyptian neighbors, and an “Erev rav”, a bunch of other people who decide to ride out with them. Problem is, they scurry right into the sea just as Pharaoh decides actually he DOES want them. At the last minute, God comes through and the sea splits, and the Israelites are able to rush through it to safety on the other side. Doesn’t go so well for the Egyptians, who all drown when the sea goes back to normal, the end.
Well, not the end, there’s still most of a Torah to go in which the Israelites learn to have a relationship with God and live as a nation etc, but for Passover, this is where our story ends. Now, if you read this story in the Haggadah, it comes out looking pretty different. In the Torah, the “main character” of the story looks like it’s Moshe, but in the Haggadah, Moshe isn’t even mentioned! I find this rather odd. Throughout the story of the exodus in the Torah, I keep wondering “why does this apparently all knowing and all powerful God need a human messenger like Moshe? Why can’t God just do the dang thing Godself?” So for me, the plot twist is that the way we ritually re-tell this story makes it seem like God did just POOF make this happen, which feels… irritating? Like why wipe out the human who was God’s channel? So here’s my take: each version of the story teaches us something about how to bring a better world. The Torah version, where Moshe, a flawed human, is the agent of liberation, teaches us that even in the face of what seems like mythic, intractable oppression, humans are the ones who make change in the world, who act as God’s agents because we, the ones who live in it, have to be the ones to fix it. And the other version of the story, the one we tell at the seder, where God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm just appear one day to pluck us from slavery, remindes us that miracles are possible if we have faith. That we should never despair because our suffering is always seen and matters, and one day it can and will change for the better.
Chag sameach, may you be blessed to make change in the world, and to experience miracles.