The Night Before

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, February 4, 2006

Have you ever gone on a big trip, or moved, or left home for summer camp or college ? Remember how you felt the night before- a mixture of excitement, anticipation, anxiety. Something new is about to start and you're ready to move forward, but something also holds you back. Perhaps in these circumstances each of us has felt to some extent like the Israelites felt, in this week's Torah portion on the eve of their departure from Egypt. It was a layl shimurim, a night of watching, a fierce some night, but perhaps, and a hopeful one as well.

The rabbis, reading the story of the Exodus from Egypt, were a little confused. It seems as if the Israelites left Egypt in great haste. Remember their bread didn't even have enough time to rise. And yet it also seems like they made a lot of preparations. They took a lamb and sacrificed it, prepared their door posts. Moses tells them to leave but they seem to linger otherwise why would the Torah say in Chapter 12 verse 39 that the Egpytians had to force them to leave.

So which is it, did they prepare or not prepare- leave in haste or drag their feet?

Back in 1998, Rabbi Joel Grishaver in the publication Learn Torah With (Volume 4 Number 15) , asked this question to three rabbis and I thought their answers were interesting.

A contemporary scholar, Richard E Friedman, perhaps best known for his classic book Who Wrote the Bible, doesn't see a problem. They were told to prepare to leave hastily, and that's what they did. You may start your preparations weeks in advance, but the last minute is always chaos.

Rabbi Elliott Dorf, a Conservative rabbi best known for his work on medical ethics, responds differently. Leaving Israel was like a birth, it was after all the birth of a nation. With a birth, all the signs are there and you know its coming. You take steps to prepare, but even today, no one knows the time of the birth in advance and the exact moment comes as a surprise. There is something out of our control as there was in the Exodus.

Rabbi James Stone Goodman, a musician and poet, gives a different perspective.

You have to remember that the Israelites were ambivalent. They didn't think their chances of success were great. There weren't a lot of successful slave revolts in the ancient world. The plagues went some way to convince them that freedom was possible - but still they are caught by surprise when the Egyptians, in their fear, begin to hurry them out.

He writes: "When you have lived in a narrow place, no matter how much you plan your liberation, when you finally break out, you run away like a jack rabbi into the night."

He writes: "You plan and you plan and you plan, you think you know how to leave, you have turned it every which way and the day has finally come when all your preparations come due: tomorrow. What happens the night before? It is a night of anxious watching. You realize that in spite of all your plans, there is something you haven't accounted for, something you haven't planned for, something you didn't realize in the detail work you have given yourself to up till now. You know you are going but the night before..... there is hesitation. .....The curtain is about to go up. You've prepared a long time. You realize that you are scared, really scared, but ...." There is also the call of freedom.

Megan, in the years ahead as you face exciting nights of anticipation on the eve of big moves in your own life:

May you be able to balance deliberation and planning with execution and action.

- May you develop the wisdom to response to those things that are out of your control

And may you never be so constrained that you are not able to hear the call of freedom.