BS"D

BEAUTIFUL BIRTH: PESACH I

Shira Smiles shiur 5784/2024

Adapted by Channie Koplowitz Stein

As we begin our Pesach preparations,  it is important that we prepare not only our homes, but also our minds and our hearts for the Seder experience. To participate in the Seder, one must try to feel that Hashem has acted on my personal behalf when He redeemed us from Mitzrayim. How do we get there? Rabbi Wolbe zt”l suggests that while we begin by questioning, discussing and interpreting various unique words and phrases in the Haggadah, we must pay closer attention to the deeper meaning and overall process of that redemption.

We begin with a medrash on a verse in Devorim: "... או הנסה אלהים לבוא לקחת לו גוי מקרב גוי/Or has any god ever miraculously come to take for himself a nation from amidst a nation..."           This is the image the Medrash focuses on, explaining that Hashem took us out of Mitzrayim as one draws out a fetus from the body of an animal. 

Using this powerful image, the Sifsei Chaim conceptualized the Seder night as the night of birth, the birth of our nation. However, a basic tenet of our faith is that this birth was not a natural birth, that it was just as miraculous as all the plagues in Egypt and as the splitting of the Sea. For, like the fetus in the uterus being nourished through its open umbilical cord, we were completely surrounded by the Egyptian culture, imbibing it and being subsumed within forty nine levels of its depravity. But like the fetus whose umbilical cord gets sealed and who opens its mouth at birth, so too was Bnei Yisroel removed from that culture and opened its mouth to be nourished its personal identity through the mitzvoth. That was the moment of birth.

While Blessing the New Moon was a mitzvah originally specifically to Moshe And Aharon, the first mitzvah to all of Bnei Yisroel was the Korban Pesach, the Pascal sacrifice, continues the Sifsei Chaim. This offering had both individual and communal elements and, as such, could even be brought on Shabbat during the Temple era. While every individual needed to partake of the offering, the meal was meant to be communal, for families and neighbors to join together around one table. We were still in Egypt, but we were united in this one observance, an observance not dependent on land, but on a common purpose. We remained connected throughout our history, both within our Land and dispersed among the nations.

Even in Egypt, we were scattered throughout the land, but Hashem lifted us on eagle's wings, and we arrived, all of us, on that very day at Ramses. Hashem overrode natural time and natural space so that we left Mitzrayim miraculously, together.

Leaving Egypt in such unnatural haste, in the blinking of an eye, was an absolute requirement for our identity as a nation, writes Rabbi Tatz in Living Inspired. Our birth needed to be rooted in the spiritual, the transcendent. Had the exodus been natural, over a period of time, our existence as a nation would also have remained subject to natural laws. This idea is encompassed in the mitzvah of eating matzah and the prohibition of chametz on Pesach. The only difference between chametz and matzah is the passage of time. Even the letters that comprise these two words, חמצ and מצה differ only by one tiny speck of ink in one letter. We remember the haste with which Hashem took us out of Egypt by eating the food that represents the antithesis of time, the matzah. We, the nation that transcends time, memorializes that truth in our Pesach rituals.

Rabbi Wolfson cites a fascinating observation from Targum Yonason. The Torah commands that the Pesach Sacrifice be eaten only in Yerushalayim. Therefore, when Hashem tells us that He carried us "on angel's wings," He is telling us that He literally transported us to Yerushalayim surrounded by the Clouds of Glory, and then returned us to Yerushalayim. Therefor, every year, when we eat the matzah at the Seder, our souls are mystically transported to Yerushalayim. When we start the Seder and sing the הא לחמאה עניא, we are anticipating our spiritual return to Yerushalayim on this very night.

The Haggadah goes on to cite Yehoshua's farewell speech to the nation before his death. Yehoshua traces our ancestry, beginning with Terach, Avraham's father, and continues, with, "And [Hashem] gave him Yitzchak." Rav S. R. Hirsch zt”l comments on the name Yitzchak, meaning, "He will laugh." When do we laugh (even sometimes involuntarily)? When we witness something absurd, incomprehensible, something totally at odds with expectation. Indeed the birth of Yitzchak was absurd, against all natural expectation. It is laughter at Yitzchak's very conception and birth that defines the existence of Bnei Yisroel throughout history, and points to the primary Cause of all existence and of our survival through the first enslavement and through all our exiles.

As our first redemption was miraculous and instantaneous, so too will our final redemption be miraculous and instantaneous, writes Rav Schlesinger in Eileh Heim Moadai, citing the Sanzer Rav zt”l. When Moshiach comes, the shopkeepers will suddenly close their stores and the shoemakers will quickly put down their tools. all going to greet the Moshiach on his arrival, for he will come instantaneously, without warning, transcending time and space.

Our first redemption, and our Sages theorize the last redemption, was in the month of Nissan, the spring, the season of rebirth. We needed to be taken out of that narrow, confining place where we had no unique, national identity, as a fetus within the womb. While we were unique in some of our mannerisms [names, clothing and language], we still were immersed in the culture and idol worship of Egypt.

Rabbi Pincus zt”l notes an interesting characteristic of the human body, a characteristic that is instructive about human nature. The human body is composed of two main parts, the head and the body/torso. These two parts are relatively wide when compared to the neck that connects them. Yet it is in the neck that the life force pulsates, through the jugular vein [and through the esophagus]. The head is the source of all things from the upper realms, all things spiritual, while all things physical emanate from the heart in the center of the torso. The neck is the place of connection between the two, where thoughts can be transported and transformed to action. [When there is major injury to the cervical spinal column, one becomes a quadriplegic. One may continue to think and to speak, but no thoughts can then be transformed into action. CKS]

Pharaoh wanted to strangle Bnei Yisroel, to blunt its birth in the narrow place [מצרים=צר= narrow] to prevent the loftiness and spirituality contained in the head from engaging in the body. Therefore, he worked Bnei Yisroel so hard so they would not have time to think, to contemplate life and its meaning.

Rabbi Tatz further develops this idea. The organs of speech, the vocal chords are within the throat. Pharaoh wanted to silence that voice, to keep it from bringing God's voice into the world.[Interestingly, evil=רע is bracketed in Pharaoh's mouth, פה, together forming his name, פרעה. CKS]

Danger is always present at the moment of birth, continues Rabbi Pincus zt”l. That's why a delivery room is sterile [and hot water and towels were once the order of the day]. And the first miracle of birth is when the child opens its mouth, a moment, if it doesn't happen spontaneously, is hastened by a slap from the doctor or midwife, for it is the air coming in from the mouth, through the neck, to the body that is the path of life.

Pharaoh was so full of the 'hot air' of his ego, considering himself a god, that he left no room for anything else. He blocked the healthy airflow through the narrow space, not allowing us to cry in words, not allowing speech. He is like the chametz, full of itself. But the Seder night is a night of speech, of Haggadah, of telling and retelling, connecting the lofty ideas of our redemption to our symbolic actions of the Seder. In fact, this speech, this retelling/hagaddah of the story of our redemption is the main mitzvah and focus of this night, reminds us the Slonimer Rebbe. This constant retelling strengthens not only our faith, but our faithfulness, our turning our belief into action in the way we live our lives, in the way we connect our head and our heart. 

Why We Celebrate R. Wolfson uses the connection between Pesach and birth to explain why transgressing the prohibition of eating chametz on Pesach is punishable by koreis, not just death, but excision from the nation. Since refraining from chametz and eating matzah on Pesach represent our emunah and complete connection to Hashem, violating these mitzvoth severs that connection and cuts us off from our Source of life. In fact, Onkelos translates matzah as patir/ opening, as in peter rechem/opening of the womb at birth. Matzah is the key to emunah; it opens our hearts to Hashem. The author then suggests the source for an interesting custom, the custom of shlissel challah/key challah for the first Shabbat after Pesach. According to this interpretation, since Pesach is over and we no longer have matzah as the key to our emunah, we are symbolically inserting another key into the chametz challah.

Since the matzah represents the moment of our spiritual birth and the growth of our faith, the section of the Haggadah when we eat the matzah is a time of connection with Hakodosh Boruch Hu, and is a most auspicious time to daven to Hashem. It is a time when the heart and the head are connected through speech.

In his Haggadah, Rabbi Glatstein takes us back not to the birth of Bnei Yisroel, but to the very gestation of our nation in Mitzrayim. Using the analogy of Rav Yitzchak Isaac Chaver zt”l, he points out that gestation best takes place in a dark, cramped place. There was no place that fit this description better than Mitzrayim.

The analogy continues by dividing this incubation period into three trimesters. The first trimester started with Yaakov's descent into Mitzrayim. Yaakov and his twelve sons lived in Goshen as aliens, relatively unobserved by the Egyptians, and were not enslaved. The second period began after the death of the last of the tribal patriarchs, Levi. The Jews were then put to work and ultimately enslaved. The final, bitter period began with the birth of Miriam and lasted for eighty six years until the redemption.

These three periods correspond to the three trimesters of human gestation, continues Rabbi Gladstein. In the first trimester, the fetus is hidden, with no one taking notice. During the second trimester, it becomes obvious that there is a baby on the way. At this point, the host nation, Egypt, notices the new entity and puts it to work. Finally, the baby grows larger, labor pains begin, and birth is imminent. In Egypt, too, the labor intensified and birth was imminent. The infant nation's labor began on the night of Pesach when Hashem smote Egypt's firstborn and ended with the full birth of the nation as they emerged from the "amniotic sac" of the Red Sea.

There are three "keys" that only Hashem controls, the key of rain, the key of resurrection, and the key of life/birth. Since only Hashem controls the key of birth, no angel could deliver Bnei Yisroel;  it had to be the Ribbonoh shel Olam Himself.

On Pesach we feel the unconditional love of our Father at the birth of His firstborn son, tells us Rabbi Kluger in My Sole Desire. When we eat the matzah, we tap into the unique kedushah of the day. We are reminded of how we followed Hashem unconditionally, into the wilderness, eating the pieces of matzah as they baked in the sun. The taste of the matzah returns to us the sense of total reliance on Hashem and on His love for us. Like a baby secure in its mother's arms, on this night we feel calm and secure in our Father's love for us. The Seder experience should rejuvenate us, infusing us with the physical matzah and the spiritual rebirth of our special status an Hashem's firstborn son, His chosen nation.