Two Minute Torah Podcast

Bo 5770 by Joanne Palmer

"Hello, I must be going," sang Groucho Marx. "I cannot stay, I came to say I must be going."

Bo el faro, barks the Torah portion. Go to Pharaoh, our translations read. But they're wrong. Come to Pharaoh, Moshe and Aaron are told.

Are they coming or going, then? Or are they doing both at once?

The paradox might have to do with the nature of time. We live in the natural world, where time cycles, solstice after equinox after solstice. We go around with it, from season to season, from planting to harvesting, from Christmas music to sand in our bathing suits to back-to-school sales, year after year. But we also live in the world of history, of linearity, or moving on and forging ahead and never looking back.

Time moves inexorably forward, aging everything remorselessly at the same rate. ("The seasons, they go round and round, painted ponies go up and down, captive on the carousel of time.") But it is also true that time circles. One winter looks much like the next; the light changes, days shorten and then grow, the world gets greener and bluer, then orange and red, and then the blue develops the distant tint of ice.

Our lives neither circle nor plunge ahead as much as they spiral. Each year brings us back not to the same place we'd been the year before, but close enough so that when we reach out we can nearly touch it. Nearly, but not quite. The world hasn't changed but we have. The eyes through which we look at the same trees see them differently.

The exodus from Egypt is the Jewish people's defining moment, the one we are told to remember, the one that took a tribe of slaves and turned it into a nation. It happened just once. But we are told to repeat it every year, to act as if it happened to each one of us, to internalize it until I believe that it happened to me. We spiral back to it each year, the old story with another year's worth of living highlighting some parts of it, obscuring others.

So why does God say "Come to Pharaoh"? Perhaps because Groucho wasn't entirely wrong. Maybe coming and going aren't so far apart. Maybe it's because we don't move straight ahead but spiral forward, learning and revising, always moving but never exactly in the direction in which we think we're going. Maybe if we were to move only straight ahead we'd lose too much of what we have. Maybe if we were only to circle we'd never change and grow. Maybe the only way to go to Pharaoh is to come to Pharaoh.

Hello, I must be going.

As always, in loving memory of Shira Palmer-Sherman, z'l.