Re-Membering the Events that Determine Eternity: Parashat Bo

The Torah tells of a traumatized national silence that erupts into cries of pain--

four different synonyms for the cry.

[Exodus 2:23-24 The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out. and their screams rose up to God. God heard their moaning..." ]

...At the darkest hour, when language, even divine words of promise, fails altogether, at that breaking point, what is lost may become unlost. The sufferer may open herself to an intimation, something emerging from the depths never before fathomed....

A Hasidic reading [of this text] speaks of a people who can barely experience their own history. When God arrives at His ultimate promise of redemption, which is to demonstrate that His words do indeed hold good, He uses four synonyms:

"I will take you out, I will save you, I will redeem you, I will take you to me as a people." (Ex. 6:6-7)

This is known as 'the four languages of redemption': four repetitions that are not repetitions -- divine stammers... But the Israelites, we are told, "did not hear" these words (6:9) Moses tries to convey this message of redemption, but the message falls on deaf ears.

-Avivah Gottleib Zornberg, Moses: A Human Life, pp. 44-45.

"Since the message took no root in their consciousness, writes Sefat Emet [Hasidic Commentary], we must keep telling the story... (SE, VaYikra 42)

The effect of repression is the fertility of re-membering, of the effort to create coherent narratives in an experience of rupture.

The traumatic gap in communication is indicated, writes Sefat Emet, by the word chipazon (12:11), God instructs Moses just before the Exodus. And forty years later, in retrospect, Moses remembers, "You left Egypt in chipazon" (Deut 16:3)"

The unassimilated experience of the Exodus is made good by generations of storytelling. Each in its own language, the generations play out the multiple possibilities-- the four languages-- of redemption. In telling these stories of unclaimed experience, we fulfill a mitzvah, a positive commandment. From the unregistered power of the Exodus, Torah is made for all generations.

-Avivah Gottleib Zornberg, Moses: A Human Life, pp. 45-46.

“While Jewish tradition offers us no definition of the concept of eternity, it tells us how to experience the taste of eternity, it tells us how to experience the taste of eternity or eternal life within time. Eternal life does not grow away from us; it is ‘planted within us,’ growing beyond us.”

– Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

“We believe that if we could somehow work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we would be far more productive. But the very point of the Sabbath is to teach us that this all-encompassing approach to work helps neither us nor the world.

Refreshed and renewed,

Attired in festive garments,

With candles nodding dreamily to Unutterable expectations,

To intuitions of eternity,

Some of us are overcome with a feeling

As if almost all they would say would be like a veil.

There is not enough grandeur in our souls

To be able to unravel in words

The knot of time and eternity.

One should like to sing for all people, For all generations…

There is a song in the wind

And joy in the trees.

The Sabbath arrives in the world,

Scattering a song in the silence of the night;

Eternity utters a day.

Where are the words

That could compete with such might?

- Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

How Ritual Redeems Us

"Passover returns us to an ancient time and place, and drops us into the climax of the most powerful human drama of redemption.

That is the power of ritual, according to one of the giants of ritual studies, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). His most enduring and influential contribution to religious studies is likely his Theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies (appearances of the sacred), but – at least to the minds of the religious – rituals actually enable us to participate again in those experiences. For a traditional religious person – and maybe for the rest of us less traditional folks, too – a ritual-filled life constantly unites us with sacred time, giving our existence value.In Judaism, as in many religions, a ritual cycle correlates certain parts of the year with mythical events, making the year an endless repetition of the mythical age.

But Passover is even more than that because it also creates a second “Renewal of the Cosmos,” through rituals associated with the new year of the first month of Nisan; these Passover ceremonies of renewal serve to simultaneously reestablish a mythic world of the past and at the same time, confirm our yearning for a time of redemption in the future. Beginning with our struggles of slavery in Egypt, we end with redemption, joy and a plan to be in a rebuilt, ideal Jerusalem by next year: L’Shana Haba’a b’Yerushalayim – Next Year in Jerusalem!

In the middle of the Seder, the mysterious prophet Elijah appears – as he does at a circumcision ceremony or at the end of Shabbat – calming our uncertainty and ensuring us that a clear and positive future is in sight. And by the end of the night, we have ritualized our way into redemption, not only of the past but of the future.If Passover can return us to a mythic age, then perhaps it can also transform us into seeing ourselves as more than we believed we were beforehand. The ritual experience is one that can alter the individual in such a way that they want to alter the society in which they live. In fact, another great scholar of ritual, Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), reminds us that “in ritual, the world as lived, and the world as imagined… turn out to be the same world.”

-Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi, "How Ritual Redeems Us," The Jerusalem Post, 2015. https://www.jpost.com/not-just-news/how-ritual-redeems-us-395235