Ari Levisohn: Today marks a really exciting milestone for us at Aleph Beta. This episode is the beginning of our second season of Into the Verse. Yep, it’s been a whole year since we launched this podcast. It is amazing to think about how much Torah learning we’ve done together, and it’s been so inspiring to hear what impact that learning is making on so many listeners. I am so excited about the season that lies ahead, and I hope you will join us for the journey.

Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha and an upcoming holiday…diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself. This is Ari Levisohn.

Last week Imu and Rivky talked about the spiritual reasons we eat matzah and avoid chametz on Passover. I won’t give any spoilers, I recommend you listen. There was one observation they made that really left me curious. They pointed out that there’s one place where chametz, leavened bread, is forbidden all-year-round… in the Mishkan, the Tabernacle. I couldn’t stop thinking about why, on Passover, we do what was done all year round in the Mishkan? I just felt like there was something super deep here waiting to be uncovered. With that in mind, I decided to invite my colleague Beth Lesch to talk about it. Here we are.

Alright. I want to start by playing a little association game. So I'm going to say a word, and you tell me what it makes you think of.

Beth Lesch: Okay. I'm ready.

Ari: Matzah.

Beth: Matzah makes me think of haste, like hurriedness, getting out fast.

Ari: Okay. Awesome. The Torah does say that one of the reasons we eat matzah is because the Israelites ate it in haste leaving Egypt, but maybe just try to think even more generally.

Beth: Okay. A    iction. Unleavened. Slavery.

Ari: This is the problem when you ask this to an Aleph Beta scholar. I was just going for, I don't know…Passover.

Beth: Okay. Passover. You want to know what? Passover is coming. Passover’s on my mind anyway, but…Passover.

Ari: Right. It's the symbol of the whole holiday. The Torah often calls it Chag Hamatzot, the matzah holiday.

Beth: Right. If I'm going to choose one image to represent Pesach, then I'm going to choose a piece of matzah for sure.

Ari: Right. But it turns out that Passover is not the only time in the Torah that we have matzah. It turns out matzah is actually kind of the o cial bread of the Mishkan.

Beth: We have it in the Mishkan, right? I mean, matzah is an element of one of the korbanot that we bring before Hashem.

Ari: Yeah, lots of the korbanot come along with flour o erings. The korban mincha, which was the main flour o ering, was always matzah. The show bread, the lechem hapanim, the 12 “loaves of bread” that were always on the shulchan, God's table, were always matzah, and that was all-year-round.

Beth: Right. Which is…it's funny, there's sort of two parts of my brain. There's the part of my brain that knows that, and there's the part of my brain that can't help but picture it as 12 loaves of challah. But all of these instances of bread in the Mishkan were unleavened bread.

Ari: Right. Not just is matzah the bread of choice on God's table, but chametz, which is leavened bread, is actually explicitly forbidden on the altar.

Beth: Right. There's a sense almost in which it's Pesach all year long in the altar. Like, yes matzah, and no leavened bread, no chametz.

Ari: Right. Exactly. So you could see it as Pesach all year long, or if you think about what matzah is, you know, if you were, say…living at the time of the Temple, or especially if you were a priest who was working in the Temple, you might actually see it the other way around.

Beth: In other words, 365 days a year this is what the Mishkan looks like, and then during the holiday of Pesach, the whole community of Israel conducts their lives, makes their homes into a Mishkan, so to speak, makes their table into an altar.

Ari: Exactly. It feels like the laws of Pesach now are telling us to somehow turn our home into a Mishkan.

Beth: Yeah, that's a really cool idea, and we have to figure out how it sits with the whole Exodus story. You could do away with that whole story and just tell me, Oh, there's a beautiful chag every year. Pesach is the chag when we make our homes into a Mishkan. Like, oh, that's very nice. But that's not why we eat the matzah. We eat the matzah because we ran out of Egypt. We didn't have time for the bread to rise. So, like, which one is it? It seems like those two rationales don't go together.

Ari: Okay. So let's talk about that for a second, because the Torah does give us a reason for the matzah. It says, when we left Egypt, we didn't have time for the bread to rise, and so we ate matzah on our way out. But there's kind of a very… There's a classic problem with that explanation, which is that at the time God first said that we had to eat the Passover o ering with matzah – the Korban Pesach that they gave when they were getting ready to leave Egypt…

Beth: Ah, they hadn't yet left in a haste! So what you're saying is, the night before they left Egypt, God gives them a whole bunch of laws, and they're laws about what they're going to do that night. And the instruction is, I want you to eat the Korban Pesach with matzah and with maror, with all these side dishes. So, why did God tell us to do that if we hadn't even yet had the whole issue with the not rising. Great question.

Ari: Right. It seems like whatever reason God gave after the fact about the haste and what it reminds us of, there was something more to eating matzah that first night. And if you then think about the use it comes to have later on, as you said, it kind of feels like on Passover, especially if you're talking about that first Passover, the Israelites were commanded to make their own homes into these mini-Mishkans, or they were like the original Mishkans, the original Temples.

Beth: Right. It's a fun idea because there was no Mishkan yet. But you get the sense that even back then, Hashem had, in Hashem's mind's eye, a picture of what an ideal holy space looks like – a space where people serve God. And in the space where people serve God, the way that people serve God, they don't do it with leavened bread for whatever reason. They do it with this thing called matzah. So at that moment, God tells the people, I want you to eat matzah. And then also when we get the laws of the Mishkan, it's like, Oh, here it is all over again. You're going to build a house for Me, it's going to look that way too.

More Links Between the Original Passover and the Mishkan

Ari: So the question then is, is there anything else about that first Passover that reminds us of what we see later on in the Mishkan?

Beth: What makes you ask that question?

Ari: Yeah, so, there's another aspect of this original Passover that, to me, seems like a precursor of the Mishkan, and I'm not talking about a small detail here. I'm actually talking about one of the…arguably the central part of Passover, right next to the matzah.

Beth: The korban. So the Mishkan is the place where…it's like the headquarters for all of the korbanot, where the sacrifices are o ered. But I think the first korban that Hashem commands us to o er is the Korban Pesach.

Ari: Yeah. So it is it you know. It's the first korban we've had as a nation, but it's not the first korban we have in the Torah.

Beth: Just remind me…I know Kayin and Hevel brought sacrifices.

Ari: Kayin and Hevel, Noach, Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov.

Beth: Right. Okay. We've had a bunch of sacrifices.

Ari: But, there's one component of all of those other sacrifices that seems to be, actually, missing in the Passover, the Pascal lamb.

Beth: Hmm. There's something that all of the other instances of korbanot have in common that we don't see with the Korban Pesach. Huh? I don't know. Give me a hint.

Ari: Think about what that space looked like. Think about the essential components that all of the previous sacrifices had.

Beth: Did they all have an altar?

Ari: Right. Ding, ding, ding.

Beth: Okay. They all had an altar. Yeah, I remember reading about Noach building an altar and Avraham building an altar…and Yitzchak and Yaakov.

Ari: Yeah. The typical sacrifice we're used to seeing is one where you go outside, and you build an altar, and then you sacrifice the animal on the altar to God. And not just is there no central altar, right? It's not just like, you know, Moshe and Aharon say, Everybody come over to our house, and we're gonna have a whole big Pesach together. And there's not even individual altars, but everyone's told to take this lamb and bring it into their own house and roast it on their barbecue, in their oven.

Beth: Right. In other words, what does it even mean to bring the Korban Pesach? Like what are you bringing it to?

Ari: You're taking it, and you're roasting it in your oven, and then you're eating it.

Beth: It's as if you're just making dinner.

Ari: You're making dinner!

Beth: I didn't realize that before. I think I assumed…there was a sort of phantom altar in my mind. But okay, you're saying there was none of that? There was no “o   ering” of it.

Ari: So if we put together the evidence here, we have no leavened bread in the house, and now you're taking these animals and roasting them in your house and consuming them there.

Beth: Okay, I see. It's taking me a while to catch up, but I understand now what you're getting at, which is, Beth – in the Mishkan, have matzah, in your homes, have matzah. In the Mishkan, there's an altar, and you're going to be killing, cooking and consuming the animal on the altar, and in the home, kill, cook, and consume the animal in your home. So yeah, the parallel is holding up.

Another Connection at the Doorway

Ari:. If you're still not convinced that, on this first Passover, God is anticipating what's going to happen next – anticipating the Temple – and instructing the Israelites to set up their home as this kind of mini personal altar…I think there's more when we look at the word petach or doorway. So, let's just review. What do we know about the doorway in that first Passover o ering?

Beth: Okay. There's two things that come to mind. The first is that they had to paint blood on the doorway – blood that was taken from the Korban Pesach. And they painted it on the doorway as a sign to the angel of death, who was passing over the neighborhood that night, in order to testify and say, I am a God-fearing Israelite, and this is a home where we are keeping God's laws, and please don't kill me.

And then the other association I have with petach is…I think God's command to the people is, don't go outside all night long, but the language isn't, “don't go outside.” The language is “don't exit from the opening of the doorway.”

Ari: Right! And both of these things actually are in the exact same verse. Exodus 12:22. It says וּלְקַחְוֶֹם אֲגֻדַּת אֵזבֿב… – you're going to take a bundle of hyssop, and you're going to dip it in the blood, and you're going to paint the sides of the doorpost and the…top of the doorpost…

Beth: The lintel.

Ari: The lintel, that's the word!

Beth: It's one of those words you don't get to use.

Ari: So you're going to paint the entire door post, the doorway, with the blood. And then it says in the same verse,  וְאַוֶֹם א תֵצְאוּ אִישׁ מִצֶּתַח־בֵּיתבֿ עַד־בּקֶֹר– So you paint blood all over the doorways, and you don't leave through the doorways either.

Beth: Don't leave through the blood covered doorway.

Ari: There's all this focus on that doorway. Do you have any ideas of where I'm going with this?

Beth: I don't know. I was kind of thinking of the opposite, which is that by the Mishkan, there seems to be very strict rules about who can come in and who can't. But I don't know that there are such rules about who can leave and when and where. So, no, I'm drawing a blank.

Ari: So actually there is…in Leviticus 8:33, it's talking about the inauguration of the Mishkan. And it's now talking about Aaron and his sons, who are the priests who run the show there, and during this seven day period…

Beth: Yes. This was…I'll tell you…they had to do  בִּידוּד(bidud) – they had to like be quarantined basically. It was the inauguration of the Mishkan. They went inside, they did all their stu , and then they had to stay there for seven days.

Ari: For seven days. And the language…וּמִצֶּתַח אהֶֹל מבֿעֵד א תֵצְאוּ.

Beth: Okay. So that does sound a lot like the opening. It says petach. Okay, that’s cool. Ari: It says petach and lo teitzu. But instead of lo teitzu m'petach of the bayit (house), right… Beth: It's don't leave the petach of the ohel, which is the Mishkan.

So, Ari, the one thing that bothers me about what you're saying is, that law that Aharon and his sons can't leave the Mishkan, that wasn't like an eternal law of Mishkan-ness. That was a one time thing from the story of the inauguration of the Mishkan. But after that, there was no such law. So, it almost feels like the night before the Israelites left Mitzrayim is a night of inaugurating our homes as a Mishkan, in the same way that Aharon and his sons inaugurated the Mishkan as a Mishkan.

Ari: Yeah, I mean, the whole first night of Passover – it's all about inauguration: inauguration of the homes, or maybe it's not the actual space of the home but the family unit that makes up the home, or inauguration of the nation as a whole…

Beth: Yeah, I hear that. There's this idea that the private space where you dwell can be a setting for serving God, and we're introducing that idea on this night. I definitely see that.

Inaugurating us as a nation…Let me put it this way, I don't object to that idea. Like, if someone got up on Shabbat and gave a drasha and was like, Pesach is when we get inaugurated as a nation, I'd be like, Yeah, I've heard that before. But I think I'm struggling to tie it rigorously to the ideas we've been tracing this far in this conversation.

Ari: Right. I think we're actually raising a really great point, because it feels like this should be the night when we're inaugurating ourselves as a nation, right? Here's the night where we go from being a collection of slaves to becoming a nation. But what seems to actually be happening is, God's telling us to bunker in our own homes and inaugurate the home in some kind of way.

A Nation Building Night

Beth: So we traced some cool parallels that suggest that the night of Yetziat Mitzrayim is an inauguration of the home as a kind of Mishkan. And, if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're pointing to is how curious it is that that experience, the night before Pesach, the Korban Pesach, was…individuated is the wrong word because people were not experiencing it alone…but you could have imagined a truly communal ritual where every member, every Israelite, was coming together to do something. And that's not what we find. What we find are these small units.

Ari: Right. The way it describes it is that each head of the household takes one lamb back for their family. And if their family was too small to finish one lamb by themselves, they could join together with another one.

Beth: Ah, okay. So that's sort of a pragmatic rule, but there's an ideal sense in which every household is its own bonafide unit, and it is in possession of its own korban. And so then each household is its own Mishkan, and you've got all these di erent Mishkanot which are dotting the landscape.

But you raised a question which was…if you take into account the greater context of the Pesach story, the whole nation was undergoing this experience and really coming into its own for the very first time. They're about to leave and go to Har Sinai and settle in their land after all this time, so why does God want them to be having this experience that's just individuated at the level of the family when God could have chosen to command a much more public ritual?

And then the other question that you can ask is, why would it have been that at that moment, in that generation, the setting for our serving God is the home – and everyone's individual home – and then when we finally get a Mishkan, it becomes one centralized place? Why would that transition have taken place? Yeah, I hear both of those questions.

Ari: So as we said it, it seems like what's happening at this night in a really zoomed out level is that God's starting his nation, right? This is the night where they go from being just a collection of slaves, with a shared language and a shared ethnic background, to an actual nation.

Rav Samson Rafael Hirsch points out something really important about what God was trying to do when he was creating his nation here. If we look at how other religions are founded, they all follow the same pattern. One individual receives some kind of personal revelation, and then they attract disciples, and those disciples attract students, and slowly the religion builds and goes from top down and builds out like that. And that's proven successful for thousands of world religions.

Beth: That's right. It's a successful formula. You too can do it!

Ari: Right! If you open up How to Build a Nation for Dummies, like, that's the first page, right? Beth: First, get a revelation from God and then call some buddies and share it with them.

Ari: But Rav Hirsch explains that when God was trying to build His nation, He was trying to do it completely di erently. He was trying to start something bigger than just a religion. He was trying to start, as Rav Hirsch says, “a people, a nation, a society.”

A Different Way To Build a Nation

Beth: And so what did God do di erently with Israel that had that e ect? The revelation was before all of the people?

Ari: So for one thing, yeah, the revelation was before all of the people. But even before that revelation, He takes these people – He takes around 2 million men, women and children – and basically brings them together and tries to create a nation out of them, before He even gives them any of the instruction about the Torah and the laws and all of the…what we’d say, like, the religious stu .

Beth: Interesting. God is creating a relationship between the people.

Ari: He's creating a people.

Beth: A people, yeah. They're going to relate to one another in some ways, even before or adjacent to them relating to Him.

Ari: Exactly. So, that's God's goal. And let's just play the game, “If I were God.” Beth: Love that game.

Ari: Love that game, right? Best game!

Beth: Okay, if I were God…sushi every day!

Ari: Okay, so Sushi…

Beth: Okay, let's play your version.

Ari: Yeah. So, You have two million Israelites…

Beth: If I were God, I would resign…two million Israelites!

Ari: So, you have two million Israelites who share a lot of things. They share experience, they share ethnicity, they share forefathers, and you're trying to build a nation overnight. Maybe…what would you do?

Beth: Interesting. You know what comes to mind? What comes to mind is…what's the word I'm looking for?... Icebreakers.

Ari: Yes!

Beth: When I graduated from college, I did a fellowship in Boston. There was a group of young professionals who were all trying to get training in a certain field, and we would come together every week, and the organizers of this initiative wanted to help us create a community – to turn ourselves into a community. So, you can kind of let it happen organically, but it takes a really long time, and it might never evolve, or you can kind of accelerate trust, and you can accelerate the building of relationships. You have people do trust falls, and you have them share stories, you know, deepen their hearts and all that kind of stu .

Ari: Yeah. You do a rock-paper-scissors tournament.

Beth: I don't know that one.

Ari: It's like you play rock-paper-scissors against someone else, and then the winner plays the winner of a di erent game. So you start with a room of 200 people, and every time that you win, whoever you beat has to come and root for you. And you gather like a crowd of people rooting for you until there's like two people, and the room is split into two.

Beth: Those were not exercises that we did, but I like the idea.

Ari: Modern innovations in team building.

Beth: I like that. No, I did one for new moms in Jerusalem, and we all got together. And on day one, bam! – birth stories. You walk out of that room, and you are bonded.

Ari: God doesn't do any of that.

Beth: No. No sharing birth stories.

Ari: And not just do they not get together and have icebreakers… Beth: They don't get together at all.

Ari: Right! They spend the entire first night together with their families – doors locked, bolted, sealed.

Beth: Wait…Are you getting to…There's something very beautiful that I think you might be getting at, which is exciting for me, as a parent. Are you gesturing at the idea that the family is the essential building block of a nation?

Ari: That's exactly what I'm getting at!

Beth: That needs to be rock solid before you can start doing the other stu . I love that!

The family is the place where you learn how to be a member of a community, and if you don't have that experience in a healthy, functional way, then there's a dimension of that which is going to be missing from your adult faculties.

Ari: Right. So in a sense, the family is kind of a microcosm for the community at large, and everybody has their roles in it. And it gives you a sense of importance and identity.

Beth: Yeah. And it might be…it's a training ground, you might say.

Ari: Yeah. But I think, not just a training ground, but also, I liked the language used before – building block. That in essence, the nation, as a whole is…really all it is, is a collection of families, and those families are a collection of individuals. So, this is actually exactly what Rav Hirsch points out and that he argues what God is trying to do in creating this nation. Instead of starting from the top down and saying, You know, okay, we're all just going to look towards Moshe and look towards Hashem, he says, we're going to start by, first, each individual comes to their family seder table, and they join together. They build this identity as a family, and eventually those families form into tribes and those tribes into nations, but it's built from the ground up.

Family Valued

Beth: Interesting. I'm picturing a whiteboard. And it's like you've got all of the names of all the Israelites written on the bottom, and then there's God and there's Moshe, and it's, like, how are you drawing your lines? Are you drawing the lines so that the first thing that you're worried about is forging a bond between each individual member of Israel and God and Moshe, the primary prophet? Or are you saying, no, that'll come a little bit later, or that'll happen simultaneous to…we need to draw these bonds tightly in these little circles between one another.

Ari: It reminds me of something that Rabbi Fohrman talks about in relationships in general. Any relationship, you could define it as a “we,“ right? But a healthy relationship requires two independent "I's" coming together first to become a “we.” And if those two individuals, or those two million individuals, don't have a solid identity as "I's" before they come together, then that collective isn't going to work.

Beth: So, if I'm understanding your analogy correctly…in your analogy, the families are the "I's," the larger Klal Yisrael is the “we.” Meaning this dynamic works at every level. It works at the level of, well, you also need to have strong individuals in order to constitute a healthy family. And then we can talk about what makes a strong individual, you know, what does that mean exactly – what do you have to work on? But, like a dating coach might say, before you get married, you need to work on yourself – that kind of thing.

Ari: Yeah. Truth is, Rav Hirsch, actually, he argues that the way the verse (Exodus 12:3) is structured  וְיקְִחוּ לָהֶם אִישׁ שֶׂה לְבֵית־אָבתֹ שֶׂה לַבָּיתִ– it's actually building up in these concentric structures as a family. First the individual, then the beit avot seems to be like the immediate family, and maybe bayit is more like a larger household unit or extended family, who probably live together at that point. But what God's really focusing on here with the Korban Pesach, this original Passover, is building those family units really, really strong. And so instead of having any kind of communal o ering or coming together, they're all going to spend that night with the doors locked and bolted, just spending time building their identity as a family. And they're not just going to sit around playing board games or having icebreakers within their own family. What they're actually going to do is turn their house into an altar so that that kind of becomes their identity.

Beth: In other words, you might have thought that if God's goal in that night is to create strong family bonds, then you might have seen something more icebreakery going on. But, the activities on the agenda…I don't know…There's di erent ways you can construe it. You can construe it as a meal, in which case it does feel very relationshipy, because breaking bread is a great way to make people feel bonded to one another. But you can also construe it as…

Ari: And there's no doubt that that experience was like a great time to bond and get close to each other. And that was certainly part of the goal, but it's not just any meal.

Beth: It's a meal in the service of God, and it's a meal that is… like the blood from the lamb is your way of testifying that we are for God. So, it's very much a family exercise in kind of declaring what values the family stands for.

Ari: Exactly. And it turns that family into its own religious community.

Beth: That's beautiful. So, I'm just thinking about my own family, and it's, like, no one's objecting to movie nights or handing out mugs of hot chocolate. But imagine if part of what defined your family, and all of your family members felt it, is that you all were motivated by a shared mission. And it's, like, our family…we're really into chesed, and we're shared partners in chesed, and we go to…and every chag we try to think of some way that we can take our blessings and share them with others. So this Purim, we're going to the hospital to distribute costumes for children who are sick there. And this Pesach, we're going to go make sure that everyone has enough matzah on their table and that kind of thing. So, if that's in the mix alongside all the hot chocolate and all the movie nights, I think that that's going to make a really powerful…and it's funny…there's kind of two ways to think about it. It's, like, is your goal instilling the value and the family is a really great vehicle in order to do it? Or is your goal strengthening a family and if so getting a value in there is a really great way to do it?

Ari: Or is it both?

Beth: Or is it both? Yeah. They serve each other.

Ari: It's very much not one or the other, but it's about what kind of family are you trying to build? Are you trying to build a family that is rooted in these values? Spring Cleaning for the Family Unit

Beth: I can't help but make the leap to thinking about the way that we celebrate Pesach today, which is really very similar.

Ari: And it's funny, though, because if you think about it…if that original Passover in Egypt was about building a nation for the first time – you're going to start by building a nation by building these individual family units – then you would think it would be a one time…or you could think that maybe you did it once – you built the family – and then, once you have a nation, why go back and do it again every single year?

Beth: Right. But, now that you're raising the question, it seems intuitive that relationships require maintenance. You need the annual family retreat.

Ari: It's kind of a spring cleaning for the foundation of the nation, the building blocks of the nation. Once a year, you kind of take it all apart and then rebuild it again, so that you never have a loose foundation, that it's always strong underneath. And, although once you have the Temple, the laws of the Passover change a little bit – so it's slaughtered in the Mishkan or in the Beit Hamikdash, and there's certain parts of it that are taken and given on God's altar – then you still take it home, and once you take it home, it looks almost identical to the original Passover. You're roasting at home, you're eating it with matzah, only those who are in the… either in the family or in the kind of combined joint family are allowed to eat it.

Beth: The Buy in Club… Is it the case that there were no other korbanot that were o ered on the central altar and then taken home to be eaten in people's homes? Everything was eaten on picnic tables in the courtyard at the Temple?

Ari: Yeah, there are other sacrifices that are taken and cooked at home. But the details of how it describes the Korban Pesach – the fact that it has to be roasted, not boiled or cooked in any other way. No other sacrifices have those kind of rules. Why roasted, of course?

Beth: Why roasted? Because it's much more delicious than boiled lamb. Why roasted… because that's what they did the first night?

Ari: Because that's what you do on the altar.

Beth: In other words, yes – it was cooked on the altar, but it's also being “o ered,” in a sense, in the home. So when you stick it in your oven, your oven is now a mini altar.

Ari: Exactly.

Beth: Interesting. Okay.

Ari: And then you're required to eat it with matzah…the rules about who is allowed to eat it…If you think about a similar sacrifice, one that's often actually compared to it, is the thanksgiving o ering, the Korban Todah, where you brought it and you also had bread, but here you're having chametz with the Korban Todah. And you're actually supposed to share it with as many people as possible. You're supposed to invite tons of people to come eat it. The Pesach is completely the opposite: You're only allowed to eat it if you were one of the people who were named originally when it was brought

Beth: So that's interesting to me. In all the subsequent celebrations of Pesach, it could have been that the Korban Pesach becomes like any other korban where the whole nation brings one, and that's it. It's brought on behalf of everyone and then we're done. But you're saying that's not the case. There's still a way in which the Korban Pesach is operating on the level of the house as a unit, the family as a unit.

And…wow…I love this idea, Ari. And that's what you mean when you say take it apart – you're saying there are times for us to stand as a nation: Hakhel – every seven years, every single member of the nation comes together and stands in one place. And it's that Giant Stadium movement of we're all having a communal experience, and then there's times when…

Ari: And by the way…that is the experience much of the year. We're supposed to have that shared identity as we're all one people, we're all together. And even a little bit on the Korban Pesach, because you did have to come and do it in Jerusalem. It wasn't actually your own home. It was whatever hotel room…

Beth: Your Airbnb, right. But there is still this sense in which you're going home that night, and you're going home to be just with your family. There's no ideal that you are in a crowd with the two million others.

It's really interesting. Do you know what it makes me think about? How do I put this? When I talk about Pesach coming, and I'm excited about Pesach coming, so depending on who I'm talking to, I'm going to give a di erent explanation for what it is about Pesach that I'm looking forward to.

If I'm speaking to my teacher from seminary, I'll say, Oh, I love Pesach. It’s my favorite chag. And I'm just looking forward to that moment when I'm going to lean and take a bite out of the matzah. And as I'm chewing it, I'm going to be thinking, I, with my freedom, am choosing to serve God and what an incredible bracha that I have to do that. And, like, that's really spiritually a meaningful moment for me.

And if I'm talking to my friend from college who's not religious, that's not what I'm saying. She's saying to me, Oh, you're probably going to get to have…Your kids are o from school for two weeks, and you're going to get a lot of family time. You guys are going to go and take lots of trips and go to the Dead Sea and stay up late and just relax as a family. And I often relate to that whole idea of Yeah, the holidays can be a time for family time, but sometimes it feels like, well, that's not the spiritual purpose. That's just, almost like, the secularized version of it.

But what I hear you saying is, No, no, no. With Pesach specifically, there's a sense in which our religious curriculum, designed and assigned to us by God for that period of time, is to be going on those trips and go to the Dead Sea and stay up late and have a good time with one another and really strengthen your bonds and to remember that that's a building block, that's a prerequisite, in your service of God

Ari: Yeah. And especially on that first night, the Seder night, when it's really a time where we gather together as families, or extended families, or joint families. But we come together, and it's this really intimate night where we spend several hours re-experiencing and reliving that exodus from Egypt. And it kind of feels like for that one night like nobody else really exists…except for the brief moment when you open the door for Eliyahu, for Elijah.

Beth: Umm…I think that as someone who is co-CEO of a family, I'm often trying to strike the right balance between when we close our doors and when we open our doors.

Ari: Are you talking about inviting guests?

Beth: Yeah. And I'm just thinking about…what about people who don't have a family? Maybe you just invite them into yours, and then you have adopted members of your family.

Ari: I think that really is what it is. And that's why we start the seder by making this open call for anyone who needs a place to come and join us…Probably because it's so important for someone to, at least, have a kind of makeshift family.

Beth: To be somewhere where they belong that night. Right? But you don't have to be too strict about the definition of what family is.

Ari: From the very first Passover, it was really clear that we're not being strict on who's part of the family, who's not, what does a family look like.

Beth: Yeah, that's right. If your family isn't big enough to really act like a family or doesn't have the means to be able to su ce as a family, then you can join with others and kind of create a bigger unit. Okay. I was feeling uncomfortable about it, and now I feel at peace with it.

Finding Family

Ari: So Beth, I love when our research and our discoveries lead us places that we kind of instinctively know is true.

Beth: I wouldn't have described it that way. I would've said I had an internal conflict. It wasn't obvious to me, anywhere in the book, that it said, this Pesach work on strengthening the bonds of love in your family. And, yet, I guess part of what you're saying is that's an instinct that I have very strongly. There's something very satisfying about seeing it coming from Torah.

Ari: Or that the Torah's laws led us, kind of, to behave in that way, whether or not we realized just the significance of what we were doing. You know, we all do that. We all try to spend time with our family over Passover, and especially that first night. And I think to me, this just shows us the magnitude of what we're doing. And not just is this good for us and it's good for our families, but if we didn't do this, we couldn't exist the way we do as a nation – if we were not built on strong faith-based families, service-based families.

Beth: Ari, I have this big smile on my face. I'm very charmed that you were drawn to this and that you saw this, because I think you come from a family that you enjoy being with, and I'm guessing that there are very sweet memories that you have of seder night spent with your family.

Ari: Yeah. I consider myself very fortunate in that regard, and maybe that makes this more intuitive to me or feel more natural to me. But the truth is, I think if you're not fortunate enough to come from a strong family like that or have those experiences, I think that makes this Torah even more important. Whether you have the opportunity to strengthen a maybe weak family, and you can do that through Passover, or whether that's just not possible for you, but you can join together with some other people and create kind of a makeshift family. I think this is showing us just how important that is, and not to just be like, Okay, maybe I don't have such a great family, or my family's not religious, or whatever the things are, so I guess I'm not going to have this experience. No. Find a way to have this – whether it's with them or whether it's with some friends, or whether you're joining somebody else's family – but to start the year, because this is really the real beginning of the Jewish year, to start the year as part of some kind of family.

Beth: It's beautiful. For me, I think about this in terms of infrastructure. What do I mean by that? You want your family to look a certain way. How do you get it there? So you can either set up systems, set up processes, so to speak, set up a kind of infrastructure that's going to support those values, or you can use all your energy, fighting upstream, trying to actualize them. And God, as a gift, gave us a Torah which doubles as an infrastructure that helps us get to those values. So, if I didn't have Pesach and I didn't have Torah but I had a family and I wanted it to be a family that's close and loving and united around a shared mission, so I could create it, but I would have to build every piece with my bare hands. And I'd have to sit down with my husband at weekly meetings and be like, Okay, what are we gonna do this week in order to bring the family together? What are the rituals going to be? And what memories are we going to create? And what stories are we going to tell? And instead, it's just…automatic is the wrong word because I don't mean that we don't put thought into it…but it's just this time-tested process, this time-tested handbook, that's just handed to us which I'm really grateful for.

Ari: Beth, thank you for joining me today.

Beth: You're welcome. Are you kicking me out? I think so. You're sending me home to my family. That was so fun.

Ari: Beth, have a happy Passover. Chag Kasher V'sameach, as we say.

Beth: Chag Kasher V'sameach.

Ari: And to all our listeners out there…on behalf of the whole Into the Verse and Aleph Beta family, I want to wish you a happy Passover, a Chag Kasher V'sameach.

Credits

This episode was recorded by Ari Levisohn together with Beth Lesch Editing was done by Evan Weiner.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our senior editor is, me, Ari Levisohn.

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you after the break.