(I wrote the following piece on Tuesday night - the moment of shift from the last shabbat to this one. And I feel that together with the joy of redemption, I must stop and recognize the pain and the struggle. It is so hard to go free sometimes. And yet, we must always remember where we are going, what we are coming to.)
Finally we have come. Parshat Bo. The portion that beckons us to come and re-experience redemption. The story that tells us of slavery overturned, of pride broken, of the ultimate revelation… "Bo"(áà). Bet (á). Aleph (à). The two (bet) that become one (aleph).
There are so many ways we learn this, so many different angles to express it. Take Rabbi Yehuda's way. He took all the plagues that Egypt went through and grouped them into acronyms. And so the last four, three of which are described this week, make up the acronym "BeACHaB" - or, in English, HLDF (Hail, Locust, Darkness, Firstborns). What binds these all together? Perhaps this: they all teach unity. The hail was no ordinary hail - rather it was fire inside hail. As the Midrash says - what do we mean when we say, "the Maker of peace in the heavens (will make peace upon us)." What peace must be made in the heavens? A special coexistence between the angel of water and the angel of fire. This is ultimate peace.
The Locust - these are the perfect teachers of unity - they travel together without leader or guide and yet all are together. "There is no king for the locust, yet he goes out complete without separation." (Mishlei 30:27)
Is there a thing in the world that people experience more together than darkness? It was the same darkness that could be felt from one end of Egypt to the other. And then - the ultimate breaking down of borders - death, which struck every household, from the great Par'oh to the lowest slave. Bottom line, G-d is saying, I must show you Oneness.
But it goes so much deeper. What is more separate in the world than our knowledge and our experience? We know so much - but when it comes down to life - we don't live it. The Midrash tells us that four-fifths of the Jewish people died during the Darkness. These were those who somehow couldn't get themselves to want to go free. Those who knew about freedom (for who in those days of miracles could not?), but didn't really want it. Even Par'oh needed to want it - we couldn't go free until Par'oh himself came down and screamed: "Go free! Now!" To go free means to live what we know. To unify what we want and live with what we know is true.
Open your hearts and minds and perhaps there is one more level deeper we can go. G-d told Moshe: "Bo el-Par'oh" (Come to Pharaoh). Not go to Pharaoh, come to Pharaoh. Where is G-d? By Par'oh. Rebbe Nachman and the Ishbitzer teach the same thing about this: if Moshe is to reveal G-d's Oneness in the world, he must show that even in the darkest, most G-d-forsaken person, there too one can find G-d's light. Those vacated spaces in us, those places where we consciously deny G-d, they too are ultimately revelation. We can step toward our darknesses, our "other sides", and hear G-d calling to us: "Bo". Come. Let the two, the bet, become one - aleph. Let all aspects of being, the dark and the light, the good and the evil, resonate with Oneness.
Rebbe Nachman tells us of two levels of how we do this. There's the level we can all do - it's called having faith. The ultimate bridge between separateness and unity is the belief that all can be one, the faith that all really stems from the One. And then some people bridge it truly through finding the niggun, the song of faith. To really bring two separate notes together into melody - or harmony - this takes a musician, a tzaddik. So some can play and sing the music, and some can hear the music, but everyone has a part: "Come hear (Moshe's) band, by the riverside…he's come to take his children home."
Rav Raz Hartman
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Rav Raz Hartman, born to Israeli parents, grew up in Southern California. He was attending U.S.C., majoring in Music Peformance, when he met Rav Natan Greenberg. That meeting eventually result in Raz's coming to the Bat Ayin Yeshiva, where he studied for six years and was given Semichah in 2003. He is married to Leah, and they live, with their three children, in Nachla'ot, Jerusalem. Raz serves as Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Simchat Shlomo, and founder of the v'Ani Tefillah minyan. He has produced several albums of Jewish music. |