Parashat Bo: On Time

In this week’s parsha we find, for the first time, not just stories, but commandments -- many, many commandments, mostly concerning the paschal sacrifice and future Passover celebrations (chapters 12-13). The first of these commandments concerns the marking of the month of Nisan, the month in which the Israelites left Egypt, as the first month of the year. The first commandment to the Jewish people, in other words, concerns the control of time. Why?

For 2, 448 years, says Rabbi Simon in the midrash Pesikta deRav Kahana, the calendar was God’s job. It was God who kept track of the months and the new moons. Now, with the exodus from Egypt, the job is being passed on to the people of Israel. The midrash compares it to a king who has many storage-houses and keys to each one. When his child comes of age, he hands the keys over to his child. The midrash also compares it to a carpenter or a doctor who passes on his bag of special tools when his child comes of age.

Jewish time centers around two big events, creation and the exodus from Egypt. During creation, God created light and dark to demarcate day and night, and then the special Sabbath day. These times are built in to the fabric of the universe, eternally God’s to control. With the exodus from Egypt, though, God passed on to humans some role in time-keeping, the keeping of the lunar year, with all its holidays, and the responsibility of ensuring that Passover, the center-piece of that holiday calendar, always falls out in the spring. Indeed, the responsibility for the holiday calendar is considered so entirely in human hands that stories are told about God looking down to earth to find out from us exactly when a certain holiday falls!

This time-keeping is the bag of tools or the set of keys that God has passed on to us. It gives us a chance to be partners with God in the running of the universe’s time. It gives us a chance to participate in God’s time, in eternal time, a chance to escape the finitude of our own mortal existence by being part of a system of time that endures.

Enduring is the whole point of this new lunar calendar. The Torah uses the term hukat olam, “an eternal institution” (12:14) for the first time here, in connection to the yearly celebration of Passover. Through such annual commemorations, we escape our individual temporariness and become part of an eternal history, part of the past event of the exodus itself but also part of its past, present and future commemorations. We become, momentarily, like God, eternal.

The alternative is to be enslaved. Part of the reason God chooses this time commandment as the first for the new Jewish people is that they need it to escape the mentality of slavery, a mentality in which someone else controls their time.

But the danger of enslavement is not limited to Egypt or to actual bondage. Time itself has a way of enslaving us, as we rush to accomplish everything we can in our limited time. That first mitzvah, then, the mitzvah to keep track of months in a divinely ordained way, is partly a way to escape such enslavement, a way to elevate our concern with time, to create and participate in a kind of time that is not finite, but eternal.