Parashat Bo

By Dr. Ariel Resnikoff, Jewish Studies Teacher 

But, Moon, and Star,
Though you’re very far—
There is one—farther than you—
—Emily Dickinson

This week’s Torah portion, Bo—meaning “come”—begins by narrating the final three plagues in Pharaoh’s Egypt: locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn. God also presents the Israelites with their first mitzvah, or commandment: to create a Jewish calendar based on the monthly cycles of the moon. Additionally, the Israelites are commanded by God to make a Passover offering of burnt lamb or kid goat, the blood of which they are directed to apply to their doorposts in order to ward off the angel of death. Following the final plague, Pharaoh drives the Israelites from Egypt, forcing them to leave so quickly that (famously) the dough for their bread does not have time to rise, and they are left with matzah. The portion ends with another set of commandments from God: to lay tefillin (phylacteries) upon the arm and head, and to retell the story of the exodus from generation to generation.

There’s so much in Bo that I could write on for this week’s d’var, so many dramatic and juicy moments; yet what I want to focus on is perhaps the least obviously dramatic element of the portion—namely the first commandment God gives the Israelites: to establish a lunar calendar. I find myself asking, what is the meaning and significance of this commandment, and why is it the preliminary directive God gives the Israelites, even before they’ve exited Egypt?

The first thing that comes to mind here is differentiation; the exodus story is one of rebirth in a sense, and the Israelites in Bo are on the verge of leaving one place in order to journey to another. We must remember of course that the Egyptians worshiped the sun God Ra, who was the king of all their other deities, and the patron of heaven, royalty, fire, light, and power. Ra was not only in charge of the sun, he was understood to be the sun itself in many cases. So the turn to lunar time in the biblical narrative is also a turn away from Ra and the wider Egyptian mythos and way of life, swerving toward a new temporality no longer chained to enslavement. If the splitting of the Red Sea might be read as an allegorical labor scene in which the Israelites are quite literally delivered from slavery into freedom, the commandment to establish a lunar calendar is a preemptive step in bringing the Israelites into a new temporal dimension, one that runs specifically on Jewish rather than Egyptian time.

The Zohar teaches that the Jewish people keep time by the moon because we imitate the moon in the formation of our collective character and identity. Like the moon, the Jews wain and grow throughout history, developing from the tiniest sliver to a fully formed and realized glowing force of reflected light—the light of the shekhina emanating upon each and every one of us. If we understand ourselves and our time-space as Jews on this earth through the moon, it is because the moon tells us something highly particular and powerful about ourselves: that we are not sun worshippers like the Egyptians, but moon readers and followers, always on the move, growing, changing, emerging, transforming.

As an open-water swimmer, I think about the moon often, since the moon has such an intensive impact on how the tides behave. Swimming vigorously in the cold winter bay at first light, I meditate on the waves of time that have brought us to this moment of exodus, as we depart from the Jewish month of Tevet and enter into Shevat. Rotating onto my back, I gaze up at the nascent moon, a tiny crescent, barely visible, and I know in my heart that the moon is not a God, not like Ra, but a cosmological guide and temporal compass of Jewish culture and civilization: a way of keeping ourselves oriented and afloat in our Jewishness through whatever difficulty, tumult or uncertainty we might face, from ancient times until the present.