The Paschal Offering

by Rav Moshe Leib HaCohen Halbershtadt, Founder and Director of YORU Jewish Leadership, yeshiva.org.il, translated by Hillel Fendel.

When the Children of Israel left Egypt, G-d commanded them to take lambs, one for each household, on the 10^th day of the month of Nissan, and slaughter them for the Paschal sacrifice. (See Sh'mot 12). Specifically, Moshe told the elders of Israel, "Pull forth or buy for yourselves sheep for your families and slaughter the Passover sacrifice" (verse 21).

Elaborating on the word Mish'chu, "Pull forth," the Medrash (Sh'mot Rabba 16,3) states:

When the Holy One, Blessed be He, told Moshe to slaughter the Passover lamb, Moshe said: "Master of the world, how can I do this thing? Do You not know that the sheep is Egypt's god [and they will stone us; see Sh'mot 8,22]?!"

G-d answered: "By your life that Israel will not leave Egypt before they slaughter the gods of the Egyptians' before their very eyes, and thus I will show them that their gods are worthless.”

And in fact that very night He smote the firstborns of Egypt, and that night Israel slaughtered their Passover lambs and consumed them. And the Egyptians saw their firstborns killed and their gods slaughtered and they could do nothing, as is written, "And the Egyptians were burying all their firstborns that G-d had smitten, and G-d had destroyed their idols" (Bamidbar 33,4). This is a fulfillment of the verse, "All worshippers of graven images will be humiliated" (Psalms 97,7).

Why did G-d test Israel with such a difficult test? Why did He command them to do something that was liable to provoke the Egyptians to stone them? Why did G-d not simply continue to smite the Egyptians with miraculous plagues?

Israel's Idol Worship

Sh'mot 12 also tells us that Israel was commanded to take the lambs on the 10^th of the month, and to hold them in safekeeping until the 14^th of the month, when they were to perform the slaughter. The Medrash (Yalkut Shimoni, Sh'mot 195) asks why Israel was told to take the lambs such a long time before they were to be slaughtered. It answers:

Israel was awash with idol-worship – a sin that we are commanded against in a mitzvah that is equivalent to all the mitzvot of the Torah … If one violates just the one mitzvah of idol-worship, he is like one who violates all the mitzvot of the Torah, throws off the yoke of Torah, and comes out brazenly and mockingly against the words of Torah… Therefore G-d commanded us here to "pull out" – mishchu u'kchu – and draw away from idol worship, and adhere to the mitzvot.

As the Zayit Raanan (a commentary on the Yalkut Shimoni by the famed Magen Avraham) explained, the Israelites also fulfilled other mitzvot at the time, but by killing the gods of the Egyptians – and the object of their own idolatry as well – they were truly abolishing idol worship.

How to Escape the Deep Pit of Egyptian Impurity

It appears that the message of the holy Torah here is how to avoid impurity. It was telling the Hebrews who left Egypt how they could climb the stairs of spirituality all the way to the summit: the acceptance of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. The way to do this is firstly to totally leave all evil. As written in Psalms, "Forsake evil and do good" - precisely in that order. The first prerequisite before quitting Egypt was to "leave all sin." They must depart from the gods of Egypt by slaughtering them before their eyes, and only afterwards would they be able to begin the process of "do good," of leaving Egypt and its impurities, and then climbing the spiritual ladder, step by step until they receive the Torah.

For a person cannot become ritually clean when immersing in a ritual bath if he is holding a reptile in his hand… They could not have left Egypt and expected to become pure if they were still involved in idol worship; they had to first destroy all vestiges thereof, with great sacrifice and at significant risk to themselves – and only then could they begin the climb upwards to the greatest spiritual revelation in history: the Giving of the Torah by the Holy One, Blessed be He.

The Recipe for Spiritual Ascent

This is in fact a very fundamental principle in the service of G-d: One cannot climb the ladder of spirituality merely by doing good deeds, without first ridding himself of corrupt ideology. To try to improve spirituality while still holding on to bad deeds is a contradiction in terms. First the Paschal lamb must be destroyed and slaughtered, the ideological reptile must be cast aside - and only then can we embark upon a journey of spiritual ascent, of "do good," of mikveh, purification, of rising spiritually, and coming close to G-d.

May it be G-d's will that we merit to see His return to Zion, and the reestablishment of His Temple on the Mount, to where we will go up and bring the Pesach offering at its right time!