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Shabbat Shalom: Parshat Bo Exodus 10:1-13:16
By Shlomo Riskin
Efrat Israel - “And Moses said to the nation, Remember (Zakhor) this day
when you went out from Egypt, from the house of slavery, since with the
force of power did the Lord take you out from that place; leavening (Hametz)
may not be eaten... Matzot shall be eaten for seven days... And you shall
tell (Vehigadeta, Haggadeh, a retelling) your child on that day (the yearly
anniversary of the exodus, the evening of the 15th day of Nisan, the first
of the seven day festival), saying ‘It was because of this (these ritual
acts surrounding the festival of Passover) that God wrought (miracles) for
me when I went out of Egypt’” (Exodus 13:3,7,8).
It is with this stirring commandment to remember that the Bible concludes
the first phase of the historical, seminal experience of Hebrew enslavement
in and exodus from Egypt: Zakhor, Remember. Indeed there are seven
commandments to remember significant incidents in our history, two of which
refer to the Egyptian event (“And you shall remember - Tizkor - the day in
which you went out from the land of Egypt all the days of your life”
Deuteronomy 16:3); and many Prayer Books (Siddurim) even publish these seven
“remembrances” at the conclusion of the Daily Morning Prayer Service,
since the Kabbalistic Sages ordain that those verses of remembrance be
repeated every day.
Apparently, our Bible deems it significant - even crucial - that we
remember. And the Bible is right, for, after all, it is memory which forms
identity. The fundamental response to the existential question “Who am I”
is that “I am the sum total of my past memories and future aspirations.”
Very few individuals are as tragic as an Alzheimers patient; an individual
devoid of memory is an individual devoid of self. Just as a house cannot
stand without a foundation, so a person who has lost his past cannot even
begin to contemplate a meaningful future.
Hence, it becomes so very important for individuals - and nations - to
continue to record and remember significant moments of personal and national
history, in writing, in photographing and in video taping. Any event which
is not recorded and not remembered, did not really happen - so that
forgetting becomes tantamount to destroying, even to murdering. No wonder
that the national outcry which emerged from Auschwitz and Treblinka was “not
to be forgotten and not to be forgiven,” and the Hebrew letters of Zakhor
figure most prominently in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.
But our Bible and our religious texts do not merely command remembrance;
they teach us how to remember and what to remember. Mark how our great
philosopher - legalist Maimonides defines our Biblical portion’s command
to remember the day of our exodus from Egypt: “It is a positive
commandment of the Bible to recount the miracles and wonders that were
wrought to our ancestors in Egypt on the night of the fifteenth day of
Nissan, as it is stated, ‘Remember (Zakhor) this day when you went out
from Egypt’ (Exodus 13:3), just like it is stated ‘Remember (Zakhor) the
Sabbath day’ (Exodus 20:7). And how do we know that this (remembrance) is
to be on the night of the fifteenth? The Bible teaches us so by saying , ‘And
you shall tell your child on that day saying “It was because of this
(these ritual acts)’ - that is, at the time when the Matzah and Maror
(bitter herbs) are placed before you”“ (Maimonides, Laws of Hametz and
Matzah, 7,1).
The Rambam is explaining that the command to remember what happened in Egypt
is not merely cognitive; it is also cognitive, which is the intent of the
verse “And you shall remember the day in which you went out of Egypt all
the days of your life (Deut 16:3)” and so we do mention our exodus twice
daily in the Shema prayer, but it is not only cognitive. On Passover we must
actually re-live, re-experience the slavery as well as the freedom, the
affliction as well as the redemption.
This is the point of the Maimonidean comparison of our remembering the
exodus to our remembering the Sabbath, both emphasizing Zakhor (with a
Kametz): we do not merely mention that G-d created the world in six days and
rested on the seventh, but we actually re-experience the primordial week of
creation every week of our lives by our working on the six days and resting
on the seventh. In like manner do we eat the matzah bread of affliction,
taste the bitter herbs, drink the wine of freedom, and sing the praises for
our redemption on the first evening if Passover, since “it is incumbent
for each individual to see himself (or show himself) as though he himself
came out of Egypt” (Haggadah text). In other words, true remembrance
entails transforming national historical past into present and personal
individual experience. When we do this, our memory truly lives - because it
affects our lives today! And if the historical event is truly internalized
into existential experience, there is a chance that we will learn from it to
“love the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” to
fight for the freedom of others because you know in your very being the
sufferings of the enslaved.
And our Sages also censure, funnel and direct our memory, interpret the past
in a way that it will properly and meaningfully impact on our future. Hence,
when our Sages record the miracle of Hanukkah - both in the Talmudic
citation of Megillat Taanit (BT Shabbat 21) as well as in the Al Hanissim
prayer - they begin with the entry of the Greek-Syrians into the war against
the Maccabees, neglecting to start at the beginning, which was a Civil War
of the religious Maccabees against the secular Jewish Kohanic government of
Judea. Clearly our Rabbinical tradition does not wish us to remember - and
thereby eternalize - a Civil War of Jew against Jew.
Similarly does our Bible and Rabbinic tradition urge us to remember and
eternalize our enslavement in Egypt - but only within the context of our
exodus from Egypt and redemption from slavery. From this perspective, it
behooves us to carefully examine our method of remembering the holocaust,
through hundred of millions of dollars expended on holocaust memorials and
Holocaust Study University Chairs. Despite all of this and despite the
7,000,000 hits the word holocaust provides on Google, 63% of passers by in
Orlando, Florida could not even begin to define what or where Auschwitz was.
Did the world learn anything from the lesson of the holocaust? Has even the
United Nations properly responded to the carnage in Rowanda, Cambodia,
Bosnia and Darfur, or to European and Islamic Fundamentalist anti-Semitism?
(“Stop Teaching the Holocaust,” Elliot Jager, Jerusalem Post, January 9,
2005).
Why do we continue to see Jewish consciousness plummeting, intermarriage and
assimilation rising, despite all of this heightened holocaust communication?
Is it not possible that repetition of mass slaughter can often desensitize
human consciousness to human destruction? Remember that Chaim Nachmon Bialik
wrote his tragic poem “The City of Destruction” after the Kishinev
Pogrom - when (only!!) thirty six people were killed. Many studies have been
made to show that the plethora of violence and bad language on television
only serves to make such conduct and vocabulary words part and parcel of our
daily life. And even more to the point, a holocaust which emphasizes a “victim”
psychology and a “battered wife” syndrome often serves to make people
believe that we Jews must have deserved the treatment we received at the
hands of an unfeeling world. After all, how many people desire to identify
with the underdog? No wonder the Biblical concept of remembering Egypt
insists on emphasizing our exodus from Egypt.
If we learn to remember and eternalize the holocaust from our remembrance
and eternalization of Egypt, if we look to our Seder celebration as a model
of our means of remembrance, then at the same time that we mourn over
Auschwitz we must rejoice over the establishment of the State of Israel only
three years later. The God of our Bible is first and foremost a redeemer who
eventually brought Pharoah to his knees and redeemed His nation. Our bible
never minimizes the suffering which evil brings to the world. At the same
time, however, our Bible emphasizes our eventual extrication from exile and
servitude into the light of freedom and peace in our own homeland.
Shabbat Shalom
Shlomo Riskin
Chancellor Ohr Torah Stone
Chief Rabbi - Efrat Israel
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