Bo: for the sake of the story
Bo: For the sake of the story
In the beginning ( 10;2), in the middle ( 12;14) and at the end ( 13;8 and 13;14) the parsha tells us its purpose: To generate a story that will be told from generation to generation. This is the foundational story: shared ancestry, shared persecution, the caring Gd with miraculous powers, and the liberation. To everyone but the generation that experienced it, it is a story. There are no clouds of hungry locusts crawling on our skin and despoiling the land. There is no impenetrable darkness.The firstborn are not all dying in a single night. But, to an extent , we can imagine these things. We sympathize with the the oppressed ancestors who are in the throes of liberation and their ambivalence at the severity of the punishment of their oppressors. We share the feelings of the victors and victims.
The lessons of the story: trust in supernatural salvation, be patient, obedient, follow instructions carefully. These are not so comfortable. They violate the Star Trek ethos of solutions through science ( even if the science is not understood). More importantly, they no longer seem to work.
I have another, additional foundational story. My wife recently published the outline of this oral tradition. It is the story of my parents survival in the Holocaust. In this, much more recent, story, the Hebrew ancestors are the victims of the plagues and 90% succumb. (Note that the midrash Tanchuma reports that only 1 out of 5 or 50 or 500 of the Hebrews in Egypt were redeemed. The ancients were always one up.)
The story of my parents' generation is also not immediate to me. I did escape come under fire in in a hail of bullets and bombs in operation Barbarosa. I did not feel the lice eating me alive, giving me typhus, like my mother. I did not witness the plague of firstborn, secondborn, ...justborn at Treblinka. There is no instruction to tell these stories to my children. The history is incomplete because of the raconteur's reluctance. But at the ceremony of recollection, the Passover Seder, my father would tell selected portions- usually those that emphasized his miraculous liberation. He took a broader view of the injunction to" tell the children." We try to continue that in our family.
As the experiences of my own life fade into stories, I can appreciate some of the common threads of hoping and believing that emerge from all of these stories
.
I now recognize every salvation as a miracle.
The lessons of the story: trust in supernatural salvation, be patient, obedient, follow instructions carefully. These are not so comfortable. They violate the Star Trek ethos of solutions through science ( even if the science is not understood). More importantly, they no longer seem to work.
I have another, additional foundational story. My wife recently published the outline of this oral tradition. It is the story of my parents survival in the Holocaust. In this, much more recent, story, the Hebrew ancestors are the victims of the plagues and 90% succumb. (Note that the midrash Tanchuma reports that only 1 out of 5 or 50 or 500 of the Hebrews in Egypt were redeemed. The ancients were always one up.)
The story of my parents' generation is also not immediate to me. I did escape come under fire in in a hail of bullets and bombs in operation Barbarosa. I did not feel the lice eating me alive, giving me typhus, like my mother. I did not witness the plague of firstborn, secondborn, ...justborn at Treblinka. There is no instruction to tell these stories to my children. The history is incomplete because of the raconteur's reluctance. But at the ceremony of recollection, the Passover Seder, my father would tell selected portions- usually those that emphasized his miraculous liberation. He took a broader view of the injunction to" tell the children." We try to continue that in our family.
As the experiences of my own life fade into stories, I can appreciate some of the common threads of hoping and believing that emerge from all of these stories
.
I now recognize every salvation as a miracle.
posted by Sheldon Goldberg at 7:56 AM
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