Parashat Bo: The balancing of Genesis 1 & Exodus 12

Published date27 January 2023
"This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year"

Exodus 12:1

This mitzvah is connected to the flight from slavery, as well as a year-round commandment: the establishment of a calendar.

Why did God command the institution of the calendar at that moment?

Slaves are not free to determine the use of their time. It is an instrument of free people. God introduced the calendar in anticipation of the fuller agency that would soon follow.

With that, we note the paradox of replacing the constraints of slavery with the restraints of a system of 613 mitzvot.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

Janis Joplin

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose," sang Janis Joplin. Explaining those iconic lyrics of his, Kris Kristofferson elucidated, "It looked like I'd trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it. By not having to live up to people's expectations, I was somehow free."

Judaism presents a different conviction: Freedom comes with expectations situated within covenantal relationships between humans and God, and between humans and humans.

For many Jews, the mitzvot give their lives meaning and purpose in profound and perceived holy ways, allowing their souls to sing through the course of everyday life. At the same time, for some, the power of the mitzvah system also comes, and in growing magnitude, with a blinding intolerant outlook toward those who live their lives differently.

Rabbi Reuven Hammer (in his Entering Jewish Prayer, p. 37) wrote, "Routinization is a very common disease. Anything that is done constantly, day in and day out, in a fixed manner, can become so much a part of human habit and pattern of action that it is done without thought. It leaves the realm of conscious action and becomes part of automatic functioning. Buber called this 'the leprosy of fluency'... an outward performance with no inner meaning" (ibid.).

Linked is the assumption that the more mitzvot one does, makes that person a more authentic Jew. As a yardstick, there is a logic with that thinking, but it does not yield the fullest picture.

There are many Jews who are considered Orthodox, halachic-living Jews, and are rewarded by the State of Israel for that lifestyle. Non-Orthodox streams of Judaism are barely supported by the state, if at all, since they are not perceived as being authentic representations of Judaism but rather whittle down Judaism by picking and choosing which mitzvot to follow.

At the end of the...

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