Shabbat & Passover 5776/2016: Did we all leave Egypt?

I always assumed given what the Torah says, that we all left Egypt. 

While some Israelites later complained about conditions in the wilderness, and said they would rather go back to Egypt, everyone who had been in Egypt participated in the Exodus and, like an ancient Anatevka, left behind empty houses, empty animal enclosures, and the now empty, quiet, and dusty streets of Goshen.

Apparently, I was wrong.

The Chasidic master Rabbi Abraham of Slonim, the Slonimer Rebbe, teaches us, “In the redemption from Egypt, the wicked were not redeemed.  Rather they perished in the plague of darkness.”

The Slonimer Rebbe’s reading comes from Rashi who brings down a Midrash, a rabbinic legend that explains, “They were among the Israelites of that generation wicked ones who did not want to leave [Egypt] and they died during the 3 days of darkness.”  And in the end, Rashi claims that only one in five Israelites lived through the the plague of darkness, meaning 4 out of 5 Israeslites died – 4 out of 5 were counted as the wicked, a staggering number.  If we accept these numbers, and we know that approximately 600,000 males left Egypt, then some 1.8 million Jews died during the plague of darkness. (Rash to Exodus 10:22 and 13:18)

Gevalt.

I’d like to recognize Rabbi Dov Kramer for putting together the sources from Rashi for his 2016 Dvar Torah on Parshat Bo.

And yet the rasha, the wicked child, is at the Seder.  And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to think more positively about the so-called wicked child, and with my increasing respect for the so-called wicked child I find it horribly dissonant that so many so-called wicked ones die in a plague meant to scare and motivate Pharaoh to let the Israelites go free, all the Israelites.

The Haggadah paints the rashah as wicked, rebellious, sometimes translated as ‘contrary’.  It says the rashah excludes himself or herself from the community by asking what does this avodah, this service, this Passover ritual, mean to you, that is, “to you and not to him or her”.  However, many have given the rashah the benefit of the doubt, Rabbi David Silber in his Haggadah argues the question of the rashah is, quote, “the most basic of religious queries and the very question that the Haggadah as a whole is designed to answer:  what is the relevance of the Exodus to our faith and our practice?”

In other words, the rashah is not excluding himself or herself, but rather seeking to do just the opposite – to connect, to better understand, to identify with an idea, an experience, that is clearly meaningful to his or her elders.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests we word the rashah’s question this way, “Father, Mother, what does Judaism mean to you?  You sent me to Hebrew school.  You gave me a Bar Mitzvah…I know what Judaism is supposed to mean to me – but you are my parents.  I am Jewish only because you are.  So I ask you from the depth of my soul:  what does Judaism mean to you?”

I would like to see more rashah types, more students who push us, the parents, the teachers, the mentors to put the fundamental questions that Judaism strives to answer in clearer and clearer language, and to show the depth, and sometimes surprising lack of depth, of how our ancestors sought to answer them.  The best study of Judaism recognizes that it could not answer every question, but the best questioning of Judaism, and the best way to expand its message to speak to us today, is by way of being familiar and conversant with its sources, language, and creating Judaism as a live dialogue rather than an autopsy on something closed, cold and lifeless, as Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi z”l critiqued some of the ways people study Judaism today.

And so today let’s applaud the Rashah, let’s put him or her at the head of the Seder table rather than in time out in the corner.  At a time when some presidential candidates are resorting to name-calling, when truthfulness in the campaigns continues to be mediocre at best, when groups with fanatical one sided visions of faith and nation-building are destroying history and slaughtering innocent people along their path toward hoped for power, we need the rashah to ask the honest question, the loving critique, that shows a surprising amount of respect both for the tradition and the elders who have practiced it.

The real question for us is:  how will we answer him?  How will we answer her?  I look forward to engaging together as a community in that discussion.

Shabbat Shalom.