B'not Mitzvah Speech
Julia and Elie Piper
January 31, 2004

Most of us know that in the Passover story, God sent ten plagues to Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Hebrew people go. At first I asked, “If God is so powerful, why not just free the Hebrews? Why have the plagues? Why wait for Pharaoh’s consent? Who cares if Pharaoh’s heart was hardened?” Sometimes it seems like instead of just helping the Hebrews get out, God made it even harder for them. My assumption became that God was using the plagues to get someone’s attention, but my question is: Whose attention was God really trying to get with these plagues?

You could say that God was trying to get the attention of the Egyptians, to warn them that God is very powerful and not a force to reckon with. The Egyptians were acting like God was no big deal. God was showing them that he was beyond any power that they could comprehend, much more powerful than the magicians in Pharaoh’s court. The plagues grew steadily worse, from turning the water into blood, all the way to killing the Egyptian’s first-born sons. Moses even went to Pharaoh to warn him of what the last plague would be, but even that failed to get his attention. Even when the first-born were killed, it only got his attention for a little while. We are left to conclude that God was simply not able to get Pharaoh’s attention.

On the other hand, God might have been trying to get the Hebrews’ attention. Maybe God was saying that he was a trustworthy god that would protect them; a god they should awe and respect as well as fear. God knew that to get all these people to the Promised Land, all the way through the desert, he’d have to be respected. But you have to wonder if this actually worked. Look at their trek through the desert. The Hebrew people lost their faith whenever anything went wrong, starting at the Red Sea when they thought they were trapped. Then comes the Golden Calf, when they reacted to Moses’ prolonged absence by building a god of their own. Then comes the time the spies exaggerated their opponent’s might so as to avoid a conflict, and again the Hebrews respond in their typical way, saying, “why is the lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt.” Finally, when they whine about not having enough variety in their diet, God gets fed up, complaining like a toddler would, and Moses had to remind him of all the things he had done to get these people there. In fact, in many ways, God ends up more committed to the Hebrews than the Hebrews are to him.

So, as it turns out, God didn’t get the Egyptians’ OR the Hebrews’ attention, at least not for long. But hey. Every seder it gets my attention. I’d like to think that had I been there as either a Hebrew or Egyptian, the plagues would have showed me how serious the situation was and how powerful God was.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, I have another set of concerns about how God acted. This goes back to the questions I asked a few minutes ago: If God is so powerful, and could do this any way he wanted, why bother with signs and wonders, with a long Exodus, with 40 years in the desert? After thinking about this for a long time, I realized that if God granted everything anyone ever wished for, just like that, then no one would really appreciate what they got. If God had simply let the Hebrews out, maybe they wouldn’t have enjoyed their freedom as much. In fact, as I just said, once they were in the wilderness, the Hebrews seemed to prefer the slavery they knew to the freedom they had no idea about Even with all those miracles, they still wanted to go back the first time they faced hardships.

It also occurred to me that every change that ever happens takes a lot of time and many steps. Slavery to freedom, childhood to adulthood, everything takes time to become complete, and if you have to work at it, you’ll cherish it more. Even if the Hebrews wanted freedom, they might not have been ready to handle it.

Having just been freed, they probably didn’t know what to do with themselves. Being free is something you have to learn how to do. Maybe that’s why God forced the Hebrews to wander in the desert for so long, so the Hebrews who had been slaves could die out and the new generation would be the ones to see the Promised Land. It was the new generation that God put his hopes onto.

Come to think of it, I don’t always know what to do with my freedom either. Not that I have much of it. Maybe being a teenager is the time to get ready to be an adult. A long time ago, 13 was considered adult age, which is probably why this is the age of bar/bat mitzvah. People got married and had children and careers at 13, which I find very weird. Now it’s just the beginning of the beginning of beginning of becoming an adult. While sometimes I can’t wait, mostly I’m glad it’s a ways off.

Bo. It’s the name of our parsha but also the center of an interesting issue. The word “Bo” has been translated in this torah portion to mean the command “go”. In the first line of our portion it is used by God as he tells Moses to “go” to Pharaoh to question how long he will keep the Hebrews as his slaves, “Va yomer adonai el-mosheh Bo el paro,” then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh.”

The thing is, that the word “Bo” is actually the command form of the verb “Lavoh”, which means, literally in Hebrew-“to come”-, not, “to go.” Thus the line really reads “ then the Lord said to Moses “Come to Pharaoh,” not “Go to Pharaoh.” But why would God say to come to Pharaoh? When someone says “come,” as opposed to “go,” it somehow implies that this is where they are. Traditionally this has been interpreted to mean that God was with the Israelites throughout their 400 years of slavery. But what if God is actually with Pharaoh, issuing an invitation for Moses to join both of them in Egypt?

What could this mean? Maybe we have been understanding it the wrong way all this time. Maybe this means that God is with the Israelites but also with Pharaoh. Maybe God resides with the Egyptians as much as God resides with the Hebrews.

Our portion is one of the best known stories in the whole Torah, not only read at this time of year, but told every year at the Passover seders. My experience of these times is that we always think of the Egyptians as the enemies, not as a people who had needs and wants just as the Hebrews did. We think: God is on our side, the Jews are the “chosen” people because God helped Moses and the Hebrews out of Egypt and “punished” the Egyptians through the plagues and the Red Sea.

However, look at this through Pharaoh’s eyes. He was probably convinced that his Gods were on his side and that they were at least as powerful as YHVH, the God of the Hebrews. To him, keeping the Hebrews as slaves seemed necessary to his power and to his life style. He thought that he needed the slaves to keep his empire working; after all the Egyptians were very advanced for their time. When Moses comes to Pharaoh and asks him to free the Hebrews, why would he have agreed? He thought that he was protected and supported by his Gods, that no God of the Hebrews could do anything to him.

If you think about it, this is how all conflicts start- thinking you’re right and another person is wrong, instead of looking at the disagreement from another person’s point of view. So once again, maybe God is with Pharaoh and Moses at the same time.

This whole idea of thinking that maybe God is on both sides isn’t just a “nice idea” that can be hoped for but not practiced. It is vital to understand this in a world where the decision to take a step back and look at something through another person’s eyes can be the deciding factor in whether to drop a nuclear bomb and kill thousands of people or not. Wars and violence wipe out entire civilizations. We need to see all of humankind as people, all of whom have real lives, and base our conclusions on that. Only in this way can we understand what God might have meant when he said “Bo.”

Prophets are usually messengers of bad news, and it’s hard to get people’s attention when they don’t like what you are saying. Jeremiah, the prophet in the haftorah attached to Parsha Bo, is no exception. God speaks to Jeremiah about the conflict between the Babylonians and the Egyptians, who were both vying for the Hebrews loyalty about 600 BC, 600 years after the Exodus itself. Jews felt like they had to decide which side to join. First, Jeremiah tells them not to side with Egypt because Egypt will lose. But more than that, Jeremiah says they shouldn’t side with anyone; they should deal with their own sins first and trust God. So the bad news is, if they do what God says, both sides will be angry with them and neither side will protect them. But if they don’t do what God says, well, we saw what happened in Egypt, didn’t we? See? We paid attention.

What does that tell us about what to do in times of conflict? Does it simply tell us to trust God and listen to the prophets? No. It tells us to look at our own role in the conflict. The Hebrews had to look at the past and see that God had come through for them every time, even though it may not have seemed like that at first. Their best bet was to stay with God.

Can we say the same? In the past century Jews have experienced the Holocaust, pogroms, repression in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. And presently, what about the whole complicated conflict in the Middle East? What would it be like to trust God now, and to focus on our sins? Anything that brings on this much violence must be a sin. Any time you don’t treat your neighbors with kindness, you’re not seeing their Godliness and you’re not doing the right thing. Hillel said the whole Torah could be summed up as saying, “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow; this is the whole Torah and the rest is commentary.” With this in mind, think about this: if the Palestinians had land we thought was ours, would we want them to build permanent settlements on it before all the issues were decided? If we think about it and are honest with ourselves, the answer would probably be no. We can’t speak for all the Jews, but as a community and as individuals who want peace, we need to look at ourselves and our wrong-doings, rather than take the easy route and merely criticize others. God really is on all of our sides.

In the end, Babylonians took over the land of milk and honey and the Jews entered the diaspora. We’re still there. On the other hand, this prompted the Jews to enter the Rabbinic period, where prayer and mitzvoth/good deeds took the place of animal sacrifice, which we vastly prefer.

This concludes our opinions about a small part of our complicated Torah portion. By now you’ve probably all heard about our mitzvah project to raise money for two girls in China to go to school. We’ve created a poster for your viewing entertainment and hope you will support our mitzvah project.

We would like to thank everybody for being here and celebrating our B’not Mitzvah with us. Thanks to Barbara and Aura for leading the service and to all of the Havurah for coming and for providing a Jewish community for us to grow up in. Thank you so much to all the people who participated in the service and helped to make it an unforgettable day. We really appreciate and want to thank the famliy members and friends who came long distances to help, support and celebrate with us.

Thanks also to all of our Hebrew teachers, Barbara, Bev and Andy. And thank you to Deb who taught us the tropes and showed us the ropes of everything that had to do with our Bat Mitzvah, as well as helped us to deal with our stress. She was more than just a Torah teacher. We want to acknowledge our grandparents for passing down their values. And finally to our parents who started us in our Jewish education and guided us from the beginning phases of our Bat Mitzvah, from starting trope lessons, to learning our portion, and through our anxiety to help us have a memorable Bat Mitzvah.

And last but not least, I’d like to thank my sister. Mazel Tov.
And last but not least, I’d like to thank my sister. Mazel Tov.

Mazel tov us!