Why is this Shabbat, the Shabbat before Passover, called Shabbat HaGadol (the Great Shabbat), while no other festival has a special Shabbat preceding it?
The Talmud (Shabbat 87b) tells us that in the year the Jews left Egypt, the 15th of Nisan—the day of the Exodus—was a Thursday. The 10th of the month, the day on which they were to take the lamb and set it aside for the Passover offering, was thus the Shabbat before Passover. The moment of taking the lamb was a seminal act of rebellion by the Jewish people against their captors. The Egyptians believed the lamb—Aries, the constellation associated with Passover—was a god. The Torah tells us that the Egyptians would not eat with the Jewish people because they considered shepherds to be an abomination. The Egyptians thought slaughtering a lamb would lead to death because it was a god, but the Jewish people showed that precisely the opposite was the case and used it for life; its blood on their doorposts on the Seder night protected them from death.
Why, then, don’t we celebrate the 10th of Nisan each year? Why do we always commemorate it on the Shabbat before Passover, just because it fell on Shabbat that year (as it will be this year)? The Shabbat before Passover can fall on other days of Nisan, not always on the 10th.
The answer is that it was precisely the power of Shabbat that enabled the Jewish people to perform this act. Taking the lamb was the act of saying God is the true sovereign over all. Even though the Jewish people as a nation had not yet been commanded to keep Shabbat, Shabbat was already present in the world from the time of creation. Shabbat is the day on which the veil of this physical world is parted and we can sense the Divine even within the physical. Shabbat is the day God’s presence is more palpable in the world. We do not celebrate the 10th of Nisan but that Shabbat, because it was that same power of Shabbat that enabled the Jewish people to prime the pump of redemption and extract themselves from the idolatry of Egypt.
This Shabbat HaGadol offers us all the power to rebel against our captors, to connect to the one God, and to extract ourselves from the bondage of our own Egypt.