April 2003 - אֲדָר ב׳ .. נִיסָן תשס״ג Adar II..Nisan 5763

Why is this night different than every other night? Passover is the time to reflect on the role that God plays in our lives. On Passover more than the other holidays (with the exception of the miracle of the oil on Chanukkah) we dwell on God's miraculous intervention in history. The ten plagues, the rescue at the Sea (the Yam Suf), the manna in the desert, are all exhibitions of God's miracles that brought us out of Egypt and then sustained us for many years in the wilderness. How many miracles did our ancestors see? In one of my favorite passages in the Haggadah, Rabbi Yose, the Galilean, taught that the ten plagues were only the finger of God, and since God smote the Egyptians with an outstretched hand at the sea, there must have been fifty plagues there (ten plagues times all five fingers on the hand). Rabbi Eleazar insisted that there were four parts to each plague in Egypt, totaling forty plagues in Egypt and two hundred at the Sea. Rabbi Akiva has the final word, arguing that each plague had five parts in Egypt, totaling fifty plagues in Egypt and two hundred and fifty at the Sea.

In the explanation of a Torah verse quoted by the Haggadah, we are commanded to see ourselves as if we each had personally be redeemed from Egypt, for it is written: And you shall tell your child on that day, saying, This is what God did for me, when I came out of Egypt. (Exodus 13:8) We have to imagine being slaves in Egypt. Often I think it is easier for us to imagine slavery than to imagine the awe and majesty of God freeing us with the plagues. Would we have seen the Nile turning to blood as a miracle or a natural occurrence that happened annually as the river began to rise? Would the dead frogs, or the cattle disease, or the locusts, have struck us as the finger of God, or would we have all too natural explanations? Which one of the plagues would have convinced us of divine intervention? The hail, the boils, and lice, were all fairly regular natural occurrences. Perhaps the darkness would have seemed a little out of the ordinary. Did God need the tenth plague, the death of the first born of the Egyptians, to finally convince us that the plagues were indeed the finger of God? Even after the ten plagues in Egypt, our ancestors were not sure of God's protection until the miracle of the splitting of the Sea. What would it have taken to convince us? What can I imagine that God did for me, when I came out of Egypt?

Sometimes when I sing Mi chamokha, the song sung by our ancestors after the rescue at the Sea, I try to imagine passing through the walls of water, and the final victory over the Pharaoh's troops. It is not easy. We do not live in a world in which we are aware of miracles. We tend to think that we are too rational, too smart, and too scientific to believe in miracles. So perhaps, Passover is the time to stop and reassess our belief in God and our faith in miracles. There are miracles around us every day. The flowers grow, babies are born, and somewhere in the world there is peace. These are all miracles too. Why is this night different than all other nights? On all other nights we are modern people, but on this night of Passover, we imagine that we are our ancestors, and we try to tune in to God's miraculous world.

Kein yihi ratzon. May this be God's will. Chag samayakh. Happy Passover!

—Rabbi Harry A. Manhoff, Ph.D.

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