Parshat Bo, February 3rd

This week we mark a major transition in the Torah. Sefer Breishit and the first eleven chapters of the book of Shemot are almost entirely narrative in their focus, containing only three mitzvot (10 if you include the 7 Noachide commandments, which are incumbent on non-Jews). In the middle of Parshat Bo, however, the focus suddenly shifts.

At the climax of the story of the ten plagues, just after Moshe warns that the plague of the death of the firstborn is coming and angrily storms out of Pharaoh’s presence, the Torah interrupts the narrative to give us a whole bunch of mitzvot, mostly relating directly to Pesach. From here on out, law and narrative will be interwoven.

This is one of the striking features of the Torah. Most other peoples in the world have codes of law and have stories about who they are and their history. For Jews, our law and our history are inseparable. Our mitzvot, eternal though they are, do not stand in a vacuum. They were given at a particular moment, in a particular place, in a particular context. The mitzvot are not only reflective of the story of our people, they actually are part of the story of our people, shaping who we are. The laws of the Passover only make sense because of the story of the exodus from Egypt, and at the same time, we needed those mitzvot in order to be redeemed from Egypt. It is not just that law and narrative exist side by side in the Torah; rather, the law is part of the narrative and the narrative is part of the law in Torah.

In our lives as Jews, we cannot separate the story of our people and ourselves as individual members of this people from the observance of the mitzvot. I think some of us gravitate instinctively to one side or the other of this equation. Some of us are law people—we want to follow the rules, we want to check all the boxes to be able to say we have fulfilled our obligations, and we could easily leave the question of larger purposes and meaning and values unexamined. Others are more interested in questions of meaning, identity, and values, and are less interested in the technicalities of the rules. However, I want to suggest that you cannot have one without the other. We cannot arrive at an accurate understanding of the Torah’s values without the Torah’s laws, and we cannot adequately fulfill the Torah laws without understanding the values that underlie it. To develop these two interdependent understandings is the project of a lifetime, and the spiritual mission of every Jew.

Rabbi Garth Silberstein