Passover 2018

At the end of this past weeks Torah portion is a very strange juxtaposition of ideas.  After the firstborn in Egypt are killed the Jewish people are told “therefore you use sanctify the firstborn of the Jewish people,” animals should be given to the temple and human beings are redeemed five coins.  But what does one thing have to do with the other? just because the firstborn of Egypt were killed why does that result in the sanctification of the first born of the Jewish people?

several answers are given to this question by the classical commentaries.   The most obvious is that the sanctification of the jewish first born is an act of thank s for spearing them.  This answer is not satisfying though.  To give thanks to god one should bring a thanksgiving offering, not offer up precisely that which was saved, and how does this explain the automatic sanctification of the first born and why human first born?

Rabbi tzdok hakohen of Lublin offers a more mystical explanation.  That God did not punish the firstborn of Egypt by killing them..  rather, this process of redemption is one of revelation of the divine.   God becomes better and better known in the universe throughout the story of the redemption and the accompanying plagues.   (And Egypt will know that I am god).   The climax of the divine revelation according to rav tzadok is the moment of the slaying of the first born, as the hagadah says, “I and not an angel”.   How we are transformed by divine revelation depends of who we are and our personal spiritual capacities.  Untrained IN M,ATTERS of the spirit and possessing “lower” souls, their capacity to withstand the experience of the divine and still keep body and soul tother was minimal.   Naturally therefore their souls left those bodies to merge with the divine.  The Jewish firstborn, possessing more godly souls, were able to withstand this revelation and this process of being close to god while within their bodies resulted in their sanctification.

I would like to suggest a more existential/phycological reason for the sanctification of the first born that necessarily resulted for the death of the Egyptian first born.   Something akin to survivor guilt.  When individuals are together in a life-threatening circumstance and one survives and the other does not, the survivor often asks themselves why they survived.  They were perhaps not more worthy than their neighbor, not smarter or more strategic.  What can result it not guilt on the part of the survivors but, especially given the seemingly random nature often of who survives and who does not, a sense of “hitchayvut” obligation.  That since they lived they feel a thrust toward making their life more meaningful, deeper, perhaps more spiritual than it would have been otherwise.   I think this may be why the Jewish people are not commanded to sanctify their first born (if it were about thanks that would make sense) but rather they are naturally in a state of sanctity that results directly from the act of slaying of the first born of Egypt.   I the Israelite who is saved while my Egyptian neighbors, not all of who were taskmasters, is as a result of the seemingly random nature of the universe propelled to make greater sense of my survival, to sanctify my life and come close to the Source of this grand complexity.  

Many years ago after I was in such a circumstance, an accident in which I survived and my friend did not.    I expressed to a rabbi I knew my sense of survivor guilt.  Why me?  I was no more righteous than he.   His response I have never forgotten, “we, all the living feel guilty, we are the survivors”.  Indeed he is right.  The very fact that we are alive should in this existential way propel us to make greater meaning of our lives, to become closer to the divine and to feel sanctified.  Set aside for special work, special sense of obligation.   We the living are are all the survivors.