Bo

Shemot 10-13:17

The Mitzvah of Counting Time
Aryeh Bernstein, 5763

In this week's parashah, God smites the Egyptians with the final three plagues and the Israelites observe the first Pesah and leave Egypt hastily, becoming a nation free to worship God. In preparation for the final plague and the exodus, the Israelites receive the first commandment addressed only to them (Shemot 12:1-2):

Hashem spoke to Mosheh and Aharon in the land of Egypt, saying, "This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it is the first for you of the months of the year."

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה אֶל מֹשֶׁה וְאֶל אַהֲרֹן בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לֵאמֹר: הַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה לָכֶם רֹאשׁ חֳדָשִׁים רִאשׁוֹן הוּא לָכֶם לְחָדְשֵׁי הַשָּׁנָה:

In the continuation of the passage, God commands them regarding all the preparations for the exodus: on the tenth of the month, each household should take a lamb and hold on to it until the fourteenth, when they should slaughter it late afternoon and eat it at night as a Pesah offering, with their bags packed and ready to go. Our verses, though, are not a mere introduction to the mitzvot of the qorban Pesah and, in fact, they are irrelevant for that purpose. "This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it is the first for you of the months of the year." This is a separate mitzvah-the mitzvah of marking time. The significance of this mitzvah at this particular juncture of time, on the eve of freedom, is illustrated in a midrash (Tanhuma Bo 6):

"This month shall be for you": R. Yishmael taught that [God] showed [Mosheh] the moon at night and said to him, "you will see it like this and establish the law accordingly throughout the generations....Until now, I took care of [adjusting the calendar by] adding months to the years. Now, though, be aware that I have passed it on to you; from now you should start to count."

"'החדש הזה לכם': ר' ישמעאל אומר, הראה לו הירח בלילה ואמר לו, 'כזה אתם רואים וקובעים הלכה לדורות....עד עכשיו אני הייתי מעבּר את השנים, והרי כבר מסרתי לכם; מעכשיו, הַתחילו למנות."

This midrash highlights that our verse is the first time God shifts responsibility onto the Israelites, and this first order of responsibility is counting time. The Torah, then, seems to be telling us that the basic condition for being free, for becoming a people, and for serving God, is to mark time, to organize it, and to read it in terms of the experiences one deems most important.

We sometimes think of time existing independently of us. It is true that the day becomes light and dark at regular intervals, that our bodies need certain amounts of sleep, and that Earth revolves around the sun and the moon around the Earth at regular, predictable intervals. However, what is an hour? Does it exist in nature? What about seasons? How is it decided that there are four seasons, and not two, or nine? What are the months on the Western calendar? They correspond to nothing in nature. Time is very much a function of human choice. A slave has no control over her time. The first mark of freedom is to face the infinity of the world and to organize it into units we deem meaningful. We organize time according to what makes sense to us and what we value.

The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 10b) records a dispute between R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua over whether the world was created in Tishrei (the month of the High Holidays) or in Nissan (the month of Pesah). R. Eliezer, arguing that the world was created in Tishrei, seems to have won the mahloqet, since our liturgy on Rosh Hashanah is filled with statements such as "זה היום תחילת מעשיך"("this is the day of the beginning of Your works", in the "Malkhuyot" section of the Musaph amidah) and "היום הרת עולם" ("today is the conception of the world", in the shofar blowing service). Be that as it may, it is a strange mahloqet. On the face of it, they are arguing about an historical fact, a piece of trivia about past time. We can, perhaps, understand why God would charge us to organize our time in the future, but why should the past matter so much?

In his outstanding novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera reflects on how the Communist party invested so many resources into the enterprise of rewriting history and that all human beings really do the same all the time: "They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past" (pp. 30-31). The way we understand "yesterday" makes a world of difference regarding how we shape our identities and our rights and responsibilities in the world today and tomorrow.

I think that what R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua were really arguing about was how to understand God's relationship with the world. At the moment of creation, was God already anticipating the creation of the Jewish people or did creation have independent value? For R. Yehoshua, nothing mattered essentially before the creation of Israel. God created the universe on the day that Israel would one day go free and arise as a free nation. Everything in the universe beforehand was just preparation for that epic event; everything was a preparation for Israel. According to him, we can easily understand why the Torah commands us to count time from Nissan: the world, inasmuch as it makes any difference, was created in Nissan, so we count from there. R. Eliezer looks at the world differently. For him, each individual in the world has inherent value. The world was created in Tishrei; the redemption/creation of Israel, sixth months after the universe's birthday, generated one particular point of significance, but was not the entire story. Nevertheless, God commanded our ancestors to count time from this event. Why? How would R. Eliezer-who seems to be the "victor" in that dispute-understand why we are commanded to count time from Nissan, given that the world was created in Tishrei? To try to crack this question, let us turn our attention to the comments of the Netziv.

Netziv, Ha‘ameq Davar on Shemot 12:2	נצי"ב, העמק דבר על שמות יב:ב
"This month shall be for you the beginning of months":	"לכם ראש חדשים"...
To YOU specifically shall this month be singled out in the year, just as Tishrei is favored in its relating to the needs of the world, since in it was the world created....On account of this, the essential judgment for human beings for the whole year is in Tishrei, for on that day Adam was judged...All this is in regard to matters of nature. In the month of Nissan, though, the uniqueness of Am Yisrael was first created with the exodus from Egypt. Accordingly, that month is singled out for strengthening oneself in service of Hashem by way of telling the story of the exodus from Egypt, which causes faith...	לכם דוקא החודש הזה מובחר בשנה כמו שחודש תשרי הוא המובחר במה שנוגע לצרכי העולם משום שבו נברא העולם....ומשום הכי, בחודש תשרי עיקר דינו של אדם על כל השנה משום שבו ביום נדון אדם הראשון....כל זה בענייני הטבע. וכך בחודש ניסן נוצר בראשונה סגולת עם ה' ביציאת מצרים. על כרחך, אותו החודש מסוגל להתחזק בעבודת ה' על ידי סיפור יציאת מצרים שגורם אמונה ובטחון...".

Our way of counting time is not exclusive: multiple systems can and must co-exist so that the multiple truths in the world can be expressed. Relying on universal, natural time would be insufficient, because we would get lost. Our particular story is important: in the midst of degradation and meaninglessness, God showed up and redeemed us, breathed new life into us, and gave us the Torah, through which we are charged to create a just society that manifests kindness and peace for the whole world. As the Sefat Emet notes in his 5650 (1890) derashah on Parashat Bo, the first of the Ten Commandments was "I am Hashem, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt", not "I am Hashem your God who created you." The latter statement might inspire awe and wonder, but it would not demand response and responsibility. The awe and wonder can generate self reflection: where do I stand in this majestic kingdom? Therefore, mid-year, we have Yom ha-Din, Rosh Hashanah, in which we stand in judgment before the Creator. Responsibility and redemption are communal enterprises, though, so, as people with work to do in the world, we count time from the moment we were able to count time and take responsibility for ourselves, from the moment we left slavery to begin to make sure others would not be enslaved.

The central mitzvot of Pesah are to tell the story and to re-enact it. The rest of the year, with all of our actions, we interpret that story into real life. This attitude is shaped every time that we tell time according to our story.