פרשת בא
This week’s Parsha describes to us the first קרבן פסח that was offered and all the prescribed rituals therein. The verse informs us that the Pesach offering had to be eaten in a manner which indicated great rush. Rashi explains that all of the prerequisites such as “with shoes on their feet and their walking sticks in their hands” were indicative of one who is about to travel on a long journey and is ready to go while he eats the Pesach. However, this commandment is difficult. We know that there are two opinions as to when one has to finish the lamb: One opinion is by midnight, and the other opinion holds that it must be consumed by sunrise. Either way, there was plenty of time for the Jews to prepare for their journey. Why then is the Torah so adamant about the rushed nature in which the Pesach offering is consumed? The Torah generally wants a Mitzvah to be fulfilled with great relish and attention, and not in a hurried manner!
The Seforno dwells on this point and says that the reason why the Jews were commanded to eat the Pesach offering in such a rushed manner was to display their unswerving belief in God’s ability to redeem them at any minute. As we know, Chazal say, “The redemption can come in the blink of an eye”, and the Seforno says that God wanted to teach the Jews to be aware of this principle and of the fact that he could redeem them instantaneously.
I once heard a similar explanation to a different question. What is the significance of eating Matzah on Pesach? The Jews only ate Matzah because they had no time to wait for the bread to leaven. But why was their lack of preparation necessary for us to replicate in modern times? Clearly the Torah meant for us to learn something from what this “lack of time” represents. Furthermore, why would the Jews themselves have eaten Matzah? They knew that they would be leaving Egypt the next day. Couldn’t they have taken the necessary steps to ensure their comfortable extraction from Egypt?
It seems obvious from these points that God wanted us to leave Egypt with no preparation in advance. God is attempting to imbue in us, with these events, a fundamental reliance on Him and not on natural cause and effect. The daily kindness and miracles which God performs for us are based on no action or preparation of our own. They are based solely on the benevolence of our creator. Similarly, this is the message that the Torah is giving us with the commandment of Matzah throughout the generations – We must be constantly aware of the fact that just to get through the day, we are relying on God’s kindness and even in the darkest of moments, when there is nothing more we can do to help ourselves, our creator is there to gently help us out of our troubles and is the only constant that we can rely on as the Gemora in Berachos says, “Even when a sharp blade is placed on one’s neck, he shouldn’t abandon his hopes for mercy”
The Ohr Hachayim on this week’s Parsha has another approach to this issue. The Ohr Hachayim asks the same question that we asked previously, but from the opposite point of view. Since the whole point of our eating Matza was to commemorate the Jews’ leaving Egypt with such haste, why did the Jews themselves eat Matzah that night while they were still in Egypt and exile? The Ohr Hachayim answers that the Jews needed this one final merit of consuming the Matzah in order for Hashem to allow them to leave Egypt. Similarly, he explains the function of the Pesach Offering. The whole point of the Pesach offering was to commemorate God’s “passing over” of the Jewish people and redeeming them. But they hadn’t been redeemed yet!? Again, the Ohr Hachayim explains cryptically that the Jews offered up the Pesach offering in order that God should redeem them.
Perhaps we could explain these strange words of the Ohr Hachayim with the נפש החיים, שער א’ . The Nefesh Hachayim explains that whatever is created in this world, has a spiritual root who’s creation preceded it in the upper worlds. Similarly, explains the Nefesh Hachayim, whatever is destroyed in this world, had to have had its root destroyed first in the upper worlds. This is what the Gemora means when it says that at the time that Titus destroyed the temple, a voice came down from the heavens saying that God had already destroyed the temple up in Heaven.
With this concept, we can explain the Ohr Hachayim. In order for the Jews to be redeemed in this world, they had to first be redeemed up in Heavens. When the Jews ate Matzah in the prescribed way, they gave Hashem the ability – so to speak – to redeem them because they created the concept of redemption up in the Heavens. This also explains why they had to eat it so quickly and in a rushed manner with their shoes on and their walking sticks in hand. They were essentially creating their own extraction from Egypt. And when the Jews ate the Pesach offering, they gave Hashem the ability – so to speak – to “pass over” the first born of the Jewish people by creating that concept in Heaven.
The verse in תהילים, ס”ח says, “תנו עוז לאלוקים” – “Give strength to God”. When we perform good deeds and kindness, we are essentially giving God the strength – as it were – to reciprocate that kindness back to us and to the entire world. As strange as this concept sounds, man has the unique ability to cause God to bestow goodness upon him and the entire world due to his exclusive gift of free-will. This unique creative ability of free will endows man with the power to affect all of the most remote worlds every time he makes the correct decisions which in turn, creates entirely new universes in the Heavens, which in turn allows God – so to speak – to use those new universes to bestow goodness upon the world’s inhabitants. (Of course, there is a downside to this creative ability. When one makes the wrong decisions and abuses his free will, he destroys the corresponding roots in the upper realms and brings destruction to us down on earth). In any event, one important point that we must keep in mind is that the more intent which goes into our good deeds and the more care with which we perform them, the more potent they will be. The level of goodness that our deed has is directly proportional to the effect it will have in all of the realms.
May God help us to perform our Mitzvos properly and positively affect all of the worlds around us!