Two Minute Torah Podcast

Hol HaMoed Pesah 5769 by Dr. Benjamin D. Sommer

Hi. My name is Benjamin Sommer, and I'm a professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Welcome to KOACH's Two-Minute Torah; a project of the College Department of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

I'd like to talk about one of the texts we read at the seder, and also in every morning service during Passover. That text is Psalm 114. Because it is part of the prayer called Hallel, we read this psalm on most holidays, but it is especially associated with Passover because it talks about the Exodus from Egypt:

When Israel went forth from Egypt,

the House of Jacob from people speaking a foreign tongue,

Judah became His Holy property,

Israel, what He ruled.

The sea saw and fled,

The River Jordan turned itself around.

The mountains danced like rams,

Hills, like little sheep.

This is a very vivid, very brief retelling of the Passover story. Now, whenever you're telling a story, an important decision you have to make is where to begin and end -- which is to say, how to define what the story really is. If, for example, you tell the story of the recent war in Gaza as most newspapers do, by starting on December 27, 2008, then it's one story, the story of an Israeli attack on Gaza. If you start it a week earlier, when Palestinians in Gaza started launching close to a hundred rockets and mortars at Israel each day, then it's another story, the story of a Palestinian attack on Israel and an Israeli counterattack. I'd like to point out something very interesting about the way Psalm 114 defines the Exodus story.

Since the psalm is retelling a story first told in the Torah, in the Book of Exodus, it's no surprise to learn that the wording of the psalm is actually based on wording found in the Torah. Listen to the first line of the psalm, and the first line of Exodus 19. Here are the psalm's first words:

When Israel went forth from Egypt...

Now, Exodus 19.1:

In the third month after the Israelites had gone forth from the land of Egypt, on that day, they arrived in the Sinai desert.

The first line of the psalm is borrowed from Exodus 19 -- each of its first words comes directly from Exodus 19.1, and they come in the same order. Psalm 114 opening words are a boiled-down version of Exodus 19's first verse. The psalm's first line takes the prose of the Torah and translates it into the poetry of the psalm.

What's surprising is which chapter the psalm uses as its base-text. Chapter 19 of Exodus does not tell the story of the liberation from slavery, which came to a close back in Exodus 15. Instead, it presents the story of the revelation of Torah at Sinai -- the story we commemorate on the holiday of Shavuot, not Passover. And on second glance, the psalm seems as concerned with the lawgiving at Sinai as with the exodus from Egypt. The psalm's second line, “Judah became God's own holy possession,” matches something crucial in the story of the revelation, where God announces that if the people accept and obey the Torah, they will be God's own possession (Exodus 19.5-6). Further, after the psalm describes the splitting of the Red Sea, it goes on to describe mountains quaking, which happened when the Torah was being given at Mount Sinai. Our poem in Psalm 114 doesn't differentiate between these two events, which happened two and a half months apart. For that matter, it lumps the splitting of the River Jordan into the event, too, even though the River Jordan split to allow the Israelites into the Promised Land forty years later (see the Book of Joshua, chapter 3).

What we're seeing here is the difference between the prosaic perspective that the Torah gives us and the poetic perspective of the psalm. The Torah is concerned with history, with the basic facts of chronology. But the psalm wants to point out something deeper: both events, and also the entry into the Land of Israel forty years later, were really all part of one event. Liberation from slavery was not just an event of its own, an end-in-itself. It wasn't just liberation from something. Rather, it was liberation for something. The Israelite were not just leaving a country; they were going somewhere: to Sinai, to receive God's Torah, and to Canaan, to create their own society.

This psalm that we sing at the Seder, then, has something to say about the holiday we are celebrating. Exodus and revelation are really a single, complex event. Put differently: Passover and Shavuot are a single holiday. The psalm is telling us something about what it means to celebrate Passover -- which is that it means nothing without Shavuot. The freedom God gave us is worthwhile only if we use it to accept the Torah and the land that God gave us along with it. You might have a seder, you might drink four cups of wine, but if, seven weeks later, you don't also learn Torah and go to shul for Shavuot, well, then, your seder was a nice meal, but it wasn't a Jewish ritual. The only real seder is one that leads into Shavuot, one that shows we accept not only freedom but the responsibilities that come with it. I hope you have a ?? ???? ????? , a happy and kosher holiday -- and when I say this, I don't just mean for the eight days starting the night of April 8.