Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Bo, “Come”, which actually in this case means “Go”, as in “Go before Pharaoh”. We’ll start with a brief recap:
The plagues continue with number 8, locusts, after Pharaoh refuses yet again to let the Israelites go free. Pharaoh’s aides are not in favor of Pharaoh’s stubbornness and tell him to give up already, so Pharaoh proposes a compromise where the adult Israelites can go but they have to leave their children behind, but obviously that’s a no go. Once again, the locusts cause mass destruction, Pharaoh says “Ok you can go if you make this stop!” so Moshe does, and once again Pharaoh changes his mind. Which brings us to plague 9- darkness- a darkness so complete no one could move or do anything. This time, Pharaoh says “Ok, Moshe and co, you can leave but you have to leave behind your cattle”, and obviously Moshe says “no thanks”. Pharaoh’s like “Get out of my sight and never come back!” And Moshe’s like “ok but on final message, plague 10 is coming and it’s a BAD one, at midnight God is going to sweep through the land and kill all first borns”, and also the Israelites take this opportunity to steal/borrow/take a bunch of gold and jewels from the Egyptians. The Israelites are also commanded to sacrifice a lamb, paint its blood on their doorposts, roast and eat it, and then God says “Oh cool yea you should do this every year on this date as a festival”. At midnight, just as God promised, every firstborn Egyptian dies, and there is a great cry in all of Egypt. Pharaoh finds Moshe and begs him to get out, ASAP, so the Israelites grab their stuff, including their unbaked dough, and hurry out. God then takes this opportunity to pass on some laws, including that they should eat matzah every year on the anniversary of this exodus, all firstborns are to be dedicated to God, the Israelites should tell this story every year when they sacrifice the lamb and eat the matzah, and they should wear tefillin.
Didn’t see that ending coming, eh? Every year, it comes at me like emotional whiplash. Like, I technically know what the torah is going to say because we read it every year and it doesn’t change… and yet somehow every year I feel taken aback by the shift from the death of the firstborns to the series of laws that ends the parsha. I’m never emotionally or intellectually ready to deal with the mass death of the final plague, and then not ready to move back into the laws of “how to live according to God’s will.” And I know next week we’re right back to the emotional intensity of the crossing of the Red Sea, which almost makes this week’s anticliffhanger ending even more jarring. Last year in the episode for parashat bo, I joked that maybe the ending of this parsha was an editorial mistake that somehow got stuck here even though it didn’t belong.
But this year, I don’t think so. As the saying goes, “As in art so in life” - in other words, the fact that this part of the Torah feels like a chaotic mishmosh of heavy emotions and banal laws is not literary failing of the Torah, but perhaps just a reflection of the way life works. The world is chaotic and intense and then very boring and then very intense again, in waves, in ways that shock us even when we see them coming. Think of a milestone moment in your life: a wedding, or welcoming a child, or graduating or getting a new job… even those things you see coming, that you look forward to and anticipate, can be emotionally overwhelming. And then there’s the regular emotional chaos and drain of living through a pandemic which alternates between feeling horrible and feeling like things might be getting less bad before quickly turning into a nightmare again.
Which is why, despite the emotional whiplash of this section of the Torah, I also am finding this week’s parsha kind of comforting. It’s a reminder to me that yes, we live in unprecedented times, but… all times are unprecedented. Any given moment can be on in which something major shifts, and also, any given moment is a good time to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to think about the little things that organize our time and our lives, to check out of the chaos of the moment and check into the rhythm of time and breath and bodily functions.
So, to all the Israelites who had to throw their possessions on their backs as they listened to their Egyptipian neighbors wail in grief, who probably heard the commandment to lay tefillin with a “WAIT WHAT NOW?”... to all of you trying to exist in a crisis and navigate a global pandemic, may you be blessed to find enough space to hear the little details amidst the noise, and to be able to accept the noise as it comes.