Parashat Tzav

Shabbat HaGadol

12 Nisan, 5773 / March 23, 2013
Triennial Cycle III: Leviticus 8:1-36
Humash Etz Hayim, page 621
Haftarah: Malachi 3:4-24, repeat vs. 23, page 1295

(8:1-36) The ceremony installing Aaron and his sons as priests, and the ritual of initiation into their new holy vocation.

Maggid: Sharing Our Story
By Rabbi Philip Ohriner

From “Avadim Hayeenu” in the Haggadah
“We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and God brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm (Deut 6:21).” And if God had not brought our ancestors out of Egypt, we and our children and our children’s children would still be subjugated to Pharaoh in Egypt. Even if we were all wise and understanding and elders, and learned in Torah, we would still be commanded to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The more one tells about the Exodus from Egypt, the more praiseworthy.

Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, Sfas Emes, Passover 5643/1883
The more one tells about the Exodus from Egypt, the more praiseworthy. For the Exodus from Egypt never ends, as Scripture says: “[So that you will remember the day when you went out of Egypt] all the days of your life” (Deut. 16:3). In the act of telling about the Exodus, the miracle itself is continually fulfilled and enhanced. Since this story of the Exodus is a section of Torah, it has to go on forever. That is why the rabbis added to the story, saying that there were really fifty plagues rather than ten, and even more. Now, they felt, the fifty could be revealed, while previously they had been hidden within the ten. That’s what telling the story does: it keeps drawing out further potential. The real point of the story is that we are liberated from the force of evil. The root of that force was back there in Egypt, but the specifics of our liberation are worked out each year.

Art Green, Sfas Emes: Language of Truth, p. 392
The root of evil is the enslavement and the degradation of the human spirit, the denial, inherent in slavery, that each human being is the image of God. That principle is constant and unchanging; we are as committed to it now as we were on the day we left Egypt. But the many ways in which that evil force manifests itself, the human communities still crying out for liberation from bondage, the subtleties of enslavement even among those who think they are free, the new categories of evil and degradation we have failed to notice for so long—all these need to be discovered and worked out each year. In this sense our liberation from bondage is truly an eternal process, one that continues to grow through the telling and through our deeds.

Sheila Peltz Weinberg, A Night of Questions, p. 46
It is in the telling that transformation occurs. In every liberation movement, the sharing of stories becomes crucial. When women first gathered in consciousness raising groups or alcoholics shared their “experience, strength, and hope” in smoky church basements, stories were shared. I begin to see that my story isn’t just my story. First we touch the common pain, then the common hope. From there we devise strategies for transformation. I am no longer caught in the isolation of my uniqueness. The fear and self-doubt that I feel about myself is revealed to be without substance. Every oppressor knows how subversive groups can be and tries to keep the oppressed from talking to each other, from telling their stories to one another.

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