Edited and adapted from Ari’s Grill & Torah – April 14, 2017
This week’s special Grill and Torah edition is all about Pesach. The week’s Torah reading is all about the Korbanot, the sacrifices of Pesach and the commandments that we have to have on Pesach. But I want to discuss a little bit about this holiday itself.
When we learn about Pesach, and even now when we celebrate the holiday, we tend to imagine that the events described in the Torah went smoothly, just as planned. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The truth is, we really gave God a run for His money when He was trying to get us out of Egypt, and Moshe Rabbeinu certainly felt it as well. I’m not sure why we don’t mention this part at the Passover Seder.
We really were not the most appreciative nation when we were being taken out of Egypt.
Unlike other religions, we don’t claim that our leaders never sinned. We say they did, we list their sins, and we learn from them. That’s something important in Judaism: our leaders are not infallible. We’re going to talk about that and try to learn from our own mistakes. If they managed to sin, then how much more careful do we need to be?
Why Did We Become Slaves?
We were slaves in Egypt for 210 years. So when did our slavery start, and why did it start?
It’s difficult to understand that the Chosen Nation was promised to go through so much suffering. It’s truly unbelievable.
Which leads to the real questions: why were we sent down to Egypt in the first place? And could we have avoided it altogether?
The Jews were given their own city in Egypt, called Goshen. They opened yeshivot there, and everything was wonderful. Everything was great. The Jews became powerful and successful. They were in Pharaoh’s palace, the White House of Egypt. Pharaoh didn’t want them to leave, because they brought such prosperity to Egypt.
Everything was great, except for one small detail: the land of Goshen wasn’t Eretz Yisrael.
According to several commentaries, that’s why slavery started. The Jews became comfortable there. Not happy, comfortable. They wanted to stay. The hotel room became home.
They took their eye off the ball. And the ball is the Land of Israel, where we belong.
Comfortable Is Not Home
When I was a teenager, my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, asked me if I was comfortable in America. Obviously, I said yes. She gave me a look, and I understood what she was really asking. After all, Jews were comfortable in Europe too.
I said to her, Grandma, come on. A Holocaust isn’t happening here.
She answered that America is a great place, and thank God they’ve been very kind to the Jews. But we’ve been in America for only a couple of hundred years, while Jews in Hungary and Poland were there for over a thousand years. Yes, we’re doing well, and yes, we’re comfortable, but we’re not home.
That’s exactly what happened in Goshen. The Jews became very comfortable, and they lost focus on the real goal. And that’s when slavery started. Two hundred and ten years of slavery, and Pharaoh was throwing our childen into the Nile.
When the Jews came to Pharaoh and said they wanted to go pray to God, Pharaoh responded that they must have too much time on their hands if they were thinking about religion.
So Pharaoh doubled the workload.
Sometimes we get so sucked into work that we forget the more important things in life. Pharaoh understood that very well.
The Torah says that after the Jews cried out, God remembered the Nation of Israel.
Did God forget us?
Of course not. But redemption requires us to ask for it. We have to say: we are still Your children, and we’re not happy where we are. We have to turn to God.
It’s much easier to ask for redemption when life is uncomfortable. When things are comfortable, you forget the main point and say we’re fine right now.
Where Pragmatism Goes Wrong
Disbelief was Bnei Yisrael’s first reaction to Moshe. That’s understandable. You can’t erase 210 years of slavery in 30 seconds. We get used to a certain lifestyle, a certain mentality, and it’s very hard to break out of it. You can’t blame the Jews for not immediately believing Moshe.
But after the miracles, the ten plagues and the splitting of the sea, there were still doubts. So much so that some Jews said to take them back to Egypt, that it was more comfortable there than dying in the wilderness.
Nowadays, the State of Israel is independent and flourishing. Yet people still make destructive political decisions, arguing that we have no choice. If we don’t do this, if we don’t give in, we’ll be destroyed, they say. That’s not faith.
“It’s better to be smart than right,” is a ridiculous slogan used to justify surrender to evil, to immorality, to terrorism under the guise of pragmatism. That happened in Egypt.
At least we had homes. We worked from morning to night, they whipped us, they killed our children, but we knew our food was coming tomorrow.
Pragmatism.
Did You Know We Were Supposed to Be in Israel After Three Days?
We were supposed to be in the Land of Israel after three days!
God said to go up and “inherit” the land. What does “inherit” mean? Weren’t we supposed to fight for it?
The answer is no. We wouldn’t have had to fight if we had simply listened and gone up.
But we hesitated. We had doubts. And when we doubt, our enemies attack.
The spies were sent not to see if we could conquer the land, but to tell us where to go up from.
But the Nation of Israel became pragmatic and said to let them check if we could conquer it. Nobody asked them to ask that question. That wasn’t a decision we were meant to make.
No one asked us if we wanted manna. No one asked us if we wanted the sea to split. Suddenly, though, we thought we were the big bosses making the big decisions.
The irony is that the spies were the greatest rabbis of their generation. Every Jewish source says so.
They wanted to stay in the wilderness, where God was obvious and where everything was provided. In the Land of Israel, you have to plant, sow, and work. Nature takes over, and God is less visible. It’s much easier to see God when water comes out of rocks.
But guess what? That wasn’t the goal. Apparently not, because the sin of not going into the Land of Israel when God commanded it is the only sin in the Torah that we never received repentance for. Even the Golden Calf has repentance on Yom Kippur. The sin of the spies, we never received repentance for it.
It was such a horrific sin. It included fake pragmatism, overconfidence, lack of faith, and a refusal to do what was right.
Redemption Is a Process
Pesach is a process.
For those who say Zionism isn’t Jewish because people in Israel don’t keep this or that mitzvah, notice that we didn’t wait to celebrate Pesach until after receiving the Torah or entering Eretz Yisrael. We celebrated Pesach immediately after leaving slavery, when we were at the lowest level of impurity.
Pesach teaches us that redemption is a process. We are moving upward, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but we are moving.
A leftist I debated recently showed me a Pesach Haggadah published on a kibbutz. It was called “50 Years of Occupation.” The entire Haggadah focused on our so-called “occupation” of the Arabs.
At first, I was upset. They’re nice people, but they’re lost if they think Jews stole Jerusalem. They have no connection to who they are as Jews. Two thousand years of yearning for something, yet after only such a short amount of time, we lose it?
But then I said to him: in 1948, there wasn’t a single kibbutz that wanted a synagogue. Not one. And today, secular Israelis, even those who have the audacity to call the liberation of Jerusalem a bad thing, are writing Pesach Haggadot!
Yes, the content is wrong. But the fact that they’re writing a Haggadah shel Pesach is incredible.
So I told him: you’re moving slowly in the right direction. I’m glad you’re writing Haggadot. Hopefully, next year you’ll be demanding the rebuilding of the Temple, so we can eat the Pesach sacrifice, God willing, in the Beit HaMikdash built in our days.
Remember Thank You
Wishing everyone a Chag Sameach.
As bad as things may look sometimes, remember, we are in a good place. Redemption is a process. Seventy-five years ago, things were bad. Today, we’re in a good place.
And we need to say thank you for that, every single day.