(One night that would come to be the night of the Passover seder…)

Abram, I have good news and bad news.  Which do you want first?

Um, let me have the bad news.

The child that you don’t even have yet, his grandchildren and then the whole nation that descends from them will all be enslaved and oppressed in a foreign land for four centuries.

Yikes.  What’s the good news?

Once I free them, they will all be rich! (Genesis 15:13-14, more or less.)

We have a tradition that we are rewarded for righteousness and held to account for wrongdoing.  Yet long before “we” even existed, before the first Jewish child was born, our fortune was immutably cast by God to be misfortune.  Abram and Sarai, bereft of hope for children, are simultaneously buoyed by God’s promise of fertility and burdened by the certainty of slavery.

This is the foretelling of our bondage, a spring coiling tighter over time, trapping us in an inescapable spiral of Egyptian xenophobia, oppression, infanticide, slavery and wholesale death.  This is all Divinely divined and no measure of mitzvot will save us.

Our seder prompts us to ask questions.  I have one. What did we do to deserve a pre-natal destiny of slavery and near extinction?

Our teachers have puzzled over this for centuries.  The consensus understanding is that the Egyptian experience was deemed necessary by God to mold tribal families into one people.  The Torah itself refers to the severe harshness of that servitude as an “iron crucible” to purge the impurities of Egyptian society and prepare us to enter into a national covenant with God at Sinai.

It is far too easy for us to glibly accept the explanation that God did this – that God wanted to do this – from a distance of thousands of years and in the comfort of our reclining seats at the Passover seder.  Here we are called upon to cast ourselves again as slaves and to exalt again as free people. The contrast is meant to be stark, with the slavery-freedom paradigm as razor sharp as that of death and life. We try to get there by dipping food into salt water to taste our tears.  We bite into the bitterness of marror.  We smear our bread of affliction with the mixture of blood and mud that we used in slave labor.  As much as the stage directions call upon us to utilize these props, we will not even get close to fathoming our near-death experience in Egypt.

God foresaw the terrible pain that would shock our national body as we endured our sentence. Millions of Jews suffered in agony.  Our bodies wasted by labor.  Our spirits broken and abandoned.  In foretelling all of this, God offers what seems to be a bizarre token of contrition; God will judge the Egyptians and we will leave with “r’chush gadol, great wealth.” How feeble that gesture seems. How can money compensate for the lives lost, the futures forgone, the crushing blows to bodies and souls?

What did we do to deserve this? How much money could ever make it right?

Here is another way to understand this.

This covenant with Abram represents God’s third attempt at partnering with humankind to imbue the world with holiness.  The first attempt ended in exile from the Garden of Eden.  The second attempt ended with a drowned planet.  In this new iteration, Abram becomes the carrier of the covenant, and to help him succeed, God teaches him how the world works.

God is not determining that Abram’s descendants will be enslaved.  That deed will be done by the hands of Egypt itself without any divine assistance.  Abram will be “buried at good old age” long before his children will succumb to slavery.  Still, God is telling Abram a hard truth: there is evil in the world.  Evil that is powerful enough to entrap the Jewish People without God playing any role at all.  We are guilty of nothing.  Sometimes the innocent suffer.  That lesson will not be limited to Egypt.  It will reprise with Amalek, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, Haman, Khmelnitsky and Hitler.  They will rise up to destroy us in every generation. God, the creator of life, wants Abram to know that life is not fair. If we wait for God to rescue us, we will wait.  But if we confront injustice, God will be with us, somehow.

Although our enslavement was not ordained by God, we were transformed in epic ways.  We saw how God crushed evil, so that we may emulate this difficult and holy endeavor. We learned to take risks as treacherous as walking headlong into a raging sea, trusting that we will emerge on the other side.  We came to appreciate that we of different tribes and customs share one destiny, much as the different attributes of God share one name.

We were slaves not because God willed it, but because God-given free will enabled it. And when God rescued us, we did not leave everything behind.  We brought r’chush gadol, not because God granted treasure to us but because we paid for it dearly.  The strength to endure, the courage to imagine what could be, the power to conquer fate and to forge our own future, the humility to cherish our interdependence, and the dedication to nurture a flourishing relationship with God. These are the riches, acquired with our blood, that we carried to Sinai and carry still on a mission to create the world anew.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)