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This parsha (Exodus 10:1-13:16) covers the rest of the ten plagues, culminating in the killing of all Egyptian first born, including the animals, after the same back and forth we saw in the last parsha with Pharoah and YHVH designed to demonstrate YHVH’s power. The Israelites and a “mixed multitude” flee Egypt, miraculously winding up with lots of gold and silver that the Egyptian neighbors freely give them (and later becomes the Golden Calf). They also flee with unleavened bread, matzah, as we will discuss below. The parsha then sets forth the instructions about how to observe Pesach including who is allowed to celebrate and under what circumstances. Lastly there is YHVH’s claim for every first born (son) as a reminder that “It was with a mighty hand that YHVH brought us out from Egypt, the house of bondage. When Pharoah stubbornly refused to let us go, YHVH slew every first born in the land of Egypt, the first born of both human (adam) and beast. Therefore I sacrifice to YHVH every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first born among my sons.” (13:14-15)
I’m going to discuss four themes.
Protective magic of blood on the lintels
Sympathetic magic and drying out
When does the year begin?
Communal religious ritual in the wilderness
This parsha and the preceding one clearly demonstrate that powers that we might well call magical for lack of a better term are the currency of the sacred. The plagues and the contests with the Egyptian magicians show that YHVH is out to prove that He is the greatest God because his magical powers are greater than anyone else’s powers.
Magic is really hard to define. There’s a long history of scholarly debate that is highly connected to how indigenous societies are viewed and reeks of the assumptions of modernity. There are two major problems with most views of magic.
The first problem is that magic is viewed as a kind of primitive science which we no longer need now that we have the TRUTH of science. This perspective denigrates the scientific abilities of indigenous people who were incredible careful and diligent observers of their environment and constantly experimented and improved hunting, gathering, planting and breeding methods. It also assumes that all the miracles we read about can and should be given a scientific explanation and basically be explained away.
The second problem is the tension between “this worldly” and “other worldly” or “salvation” goals. The basic idea is that magic is oriented towards things like better crops, health, fertility etc compared to the more lofty goals of following the divine word and meriting a place in heaven or more mystical aims of merging with the divine. The theological assumption is that these other worldly goals are “higher” or better than the this worldly goals. It is simply not an assumption that I share.
Magic, of course, gets a bad rap in our modern world. The folks committed to the faith of science routinely tell us that if we only understood everything, we wouldn’t resort to magic. But we are never going to understand everything and I believe that there are powers in the world that cannot be intellectually captured by science and can be called upon through magic. And, that doesn’t mean, don’t lock your doors.
I think it is possibly easier to know when something is magical than it is to define it. Be that as it may, I’m going to use the word “magic” in the sense of something that is designed to have an impact on the world and doesn’t work in the way that cause and effect science does. I will look at both the protective magic of the blood on the lintels and the sympathetic magic of the dry matzah.
Protective magic is a major and frequent kind of magic. Think of a mezuzah. I hang mezuzot on the doorposts of my house because it is a traditional thing to do and I even know where it comes from—the v’ahavta, the first paragraph after the Sh’ma. Mezuzot are protection devices, as demonstrated by Joshua Trachtenberg in Jewish Magic and Superstition (a terrible title). The mezuzah is supposed to magically protect the house—it isn’t an alarm system that notifies a company about an unauthorized entrance. What about T’fillat Haderech, the prayer for safe journeying? It isn’t a warning system that notifies you when you are about to be robbed. What about amulets for traffic safety that hang from rear view mirrors and are popular throughout the world? They aren’t sophisticated accident avoidance software that we are starting to see in cars.
The blood on the two doorposts and the lintel of the doorway (12:22) is basically the same idea. You might argue that the blood isn’t protective magic, but is rather a sign. The argument would be that the blood it is the equivalent of a stop sign, telling YHVH and his destroyer to pass over this house and go on to the next one. (12:21:-23)
I think the blood is a kind of protective magic because the word “Pesach” can be translated as protective offering, a translation that dates as far back as the Septuagint, the original translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in the mid-3rd Century BCE. Further, we’ve already seen blood as having magical protective properties when Zipporah circumcises her son and saves Moses’ life. The mezuzah on the doorpost is the same thing, a message to YHVH that this is a Jewish household, please don’t let bad things happen but is definitely viewed as having magical properties. The blood on the doorposts doesn’t literally stop the “destroyer” who killed the first born of the Egyptians—the blood isn’t some kind of lock that mechanically keeps beings out. It’s protection magic.
How meaningful to you is the idea of magic in general? What about protective magic? Do you have any practices around protection magic? What things would you want to be magically protected against?
Sympathetic magic is the idea of like influencing like. In our crude idea of “voodoo,” a practitioner sticks pins in a representation of someone and they will feel like pins have actually been stuck in them because they are like their representation of them.
We’ve all learned that we eat matzah on Passover because we didn’t have enough time to let the dough rise. We are even told that in this parsha (12:34,39). But this simply makes no sense in the story. First, the Israelites are given time to shake down their neighbors. You are about to flee your house because a wildfire is coming. What’s more important, making bread ready for your journey or knocking on your neighbor’s door and asking to borrow their silver and gold? (11:2-3). Further, our ancestors were given four days notice of the ritual. 12:3 has the Israelites choosing a lamb or a goat without blemish for the sacrifice on the 10th of the month, and keeping watch over it until the 14th of the month when the sacrifice was slaughtered. Time enough to make bread. Then Chapter 12 verses 8 and 9 tell us about how we can eat the meat and go out of the way to say that it can only be roasted, not cooked with water, and consumed that very night (I don’t have a theory for why it has to be eaten that night.)
What matzah and this direction for how to cook the meat have in common is that both are dry. Dry is super important because of what is happening ecologically in the land of Israel. Passover marks the transition from the wet season to the dry season. No rain is crucial for the ripening of first the barley and then the wheat. If it rains too much during the 50 days of the grain harvest aka the Omer to modern Jews, the grain will sprout and then can’t be stored for the winter. Given that grain is an absolute mainstay of the diet, a wet spring when it is supposed to turn dry was absolutely crucial to our ancestors who would do whatever they could to ensure the needed dryness—including afflicting us with matzah. For a wonderful book on ancient Israel agriculture see Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel.
Eating dry foods is a way of praying for dry weather and a way of aligning ourselves with what we hope will happen in the more than human world. It’s magic because it isn’t harvesting corn and putting it in enormous grain elevators and frying the planet with natural gas to dry the harvested corn which is not dry enough to store.
What in your life needs to dry out, like matzah? What needs to be wetter? Play with the metaphor. Are there actions you can take to be aligned with what you want to have happen in the more than human world?
When does the year start? For contemporary American Jews, we might have two answers: the Jewish new year is in the Fall with Rosh Hashanah and the secular new year is January 1. But here’s what this parsha says: (12:2) “This month is the beginning of the months for you. It is the first of the months of the year for you.” The Bible does mention a holiday at the time we now have Rosh Hashanah (literally the head of the year) in Leviticus 23:23-5, but there it has no name and the only thing we are commanded to do is to have a holy assembling with the blasting of the shofar, a ceasing of work and a fire offering (korban) to YHVH.
So when does the year start? If you are like me whose body is attuned to the Continental Climate of the Eastern part of the US, it has always felt like the year started in the spring, when the earth wakes up from the cold, quiet and calm of winter and starts the mad rush to raise children. For some species, such as the cool season grasses that make up the basis of a cow’s diet, or spring annual weeds, or cool season plants such as lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower etc., that mad rush is designed to beat the heat of summer. For some plants, think trees or tomatoes, that mad rush is to beat the return of the cold, starting in fall. But it is a mad rush for everyone, from the lowliest dandelion to the birds with babies in nests to the deer who inhabit my backyard.
Starting the year in fall, as we do at Rosh Hashanah or for school, has always felt weird to me in my body because ecologically we are going into a period of endings, rather than beginnings. We are harvesting our produce of the spring and summer in the fall, getting ready for winter by putting up fruit and vegetables, getting ready to kill animals for winter meat because the winter will let us freeze the meat the natural way.
The Mediterranean climate of our homeland Israel is completely different. Mediterranean climes are 2 season climates, wet and dry. The dry season begins at Pesach when we need it to be dry for the grain. The wet season begins at Sukkot and we desperately need that rain so crops can grow in the context of a relatively unirrigated agriculture without major rivers which could be used for irrigation purposes in ancient times (today’s technology is much more sophisticated, but water is being used at an unsustainable pace and is a flashpoint of conflict). So when does the year begin in a Mediterranean climate? Both Pesach and Sukkot could be good answers, and both occur at the full moon of their respective months.
Of course, most of us have no or little connection to any of this. Food comes from the grocery store where it is always the height of summer abundance. Like a drunk who drinks in the morning and justifies it by saying it is 12 o’clock somewhere, it is always the height of summer somewhere. But if we would become earth based Jews, rooted again in a connection to land, we must reconnect to the cycle of the seasons. Further, how I experience these seasons need not be the same way you do
When does the year start in your body? How do you experience the seasons? What are some ways that you can reconnect with the cycle of seasons in the ecosystem in which you live?
There’s an odd tension in the request to go have a large communal festival for YHVH in the wilderness. This is the request that ostensibly drives Moses’s demands of Pharoah, but in my own experience and in the history of religions, wilderness is the setting for a lot of deep solo time or maybe a combination of small group and solo time. It isn’t usually a big gathering where you bring all of your stuff, including your livestock and have a big feast. It’s a time of less eating, not more, less partying, not more, simpler, not more complex. (perhaps Burning Man or Wilderness Torah’s Passover in the Desert to the contrary). In fact, Pesach was one of the three pilgrimage festivals in Ancient Israel where our ancestors all supposedly gathered together in Jerusalem—the city, not the wilderness outside of Jerusalem-- to give blessings for the rain that had fallen, to pray for dryness for the grain what was about to be harvested and to have big, communal feasts that were facilitated by all of the infrastructure that existed in Jerusalem, but certainly did not exist in the wilderness.
I’m not privileging wilderness over city here; I’m just saying they are really different and the connections to other humans and to the divine are different—at least they are for me. They are different because, again at least for me, wilderness demands something different than does agricultural life than does city life. Big communal feasts require infrastructure—think even about the fairgrounds that exist in most rural counties and are mostly used for a three or four day fair once a year.
Do you feel yourself different in the city, in agricultural land, in wilderness? If you do, how would you express the differences in what is asked of you in connection with the divine? How would you express the differences in terms of who you are? What about in your relationships with others?
QUESTIONS
How meaningful to you is the idea of magic in general? What about protective magic? Do you have any practices around protection magic? What things would you want to be magically protected against?
What in your life needs to dry out, like matzah? What needs to be wetter? Play with the metaphor. Are there actions you can take to be aligned with what you want to have happen in the more than human world?
When does the year start in your body? How do you experience the seasons? What are some ways that you can reconnect with the cycle of seasons in the ecosystem in which you live?
Do you feel yourself different in the city, in agricultural land, in wilderness? If you do, how would you express the differences in what is asked of you in connection with the divine? How would you express the differences in terms of who you are? What about in your relationships with others?
