DVAR PARASHAT BO

Happy 2022! This week I am exploring what redemption might mean, and how it might be different from salvation - prompted by the beginning of our long journey east and my own venturing out west.

Explorations of Redemption

When the Israelites leave Egypt in the middle of the night, hastily, eastward, into the starry, open desert, they’re living the beginning of what will become a journey toward redemption. A journey that will lead them into the land promised to their ancestors -- but that land as well as the ancestors are arguably blurry notions at best in that moment. The Israelites may have felt some diffuse reassurance, some vague idea of what it means to worship the God of their ancestors, but dominant in that night different from all other nights were probably adrenaline and existential concerns.

Did they appreciate what freedom meant during their flight into an unknown future? Did they even have the words for what was happening to them: Were they saved, rescued, delivered, freed, liberated? Basically, they were taken out of Egypt – which in the Haggadah is understood as redemption and recounted on Pesach: “It was not only our fathers whom the Holy One, Blessed be He, redeemed from slavery, us, too, did He redeem with them.” The Hebrew word used here stems from the root ג א ל, which is generally translated within the lexical field of redemption.

Against the written evidence and cherished tradition, I wonder: Didn’t redemption – rather the potential thereof — only begin with Pesach and would be completed only with the arrival (and ensuing dwelling) in the Land of Canaan? The Israelites who left Egypt were saved from slavery — but redeemed only through their descendants reaching the promised land.

The arc of this Jewish journey begins in this week’s parasha. It spans from the Exodus, led by Moshe — the infant drawn out of the water now assisting in the drawing-out of his people — to the conquest of the Promised Land, led by Yehoshua, whose name stems from the Hebrew root י ש ע that gives us the word ישועה generally, translated as redemption in the Lev Shalem, but as salvation in the Koren siddur — a fact that deserves its own divrei Torah about linguistics and/or Jewish-Christian dialogue. (Some preliminary reading I did on the matter seems to suggest that one difference between “salvation” and “redemption”— or rather, between the usage of ג א ל  and י ש ע — might be that salvation comes upon us, while redemption needs to be earned.)

It is a popular maxim to say that the journey is more important than the destination. The Jewish perspective would, seemingly, disagree: While traveling is fascinating and lives from turning point to turning point — and sometimes grants a whole bag of revelation-to-go — the journey becomes pointless without the destination. For redemption to fully kick in, a desired (or promised) endpoint must eventually be reached, with lasting success — however we may define “lasting success.”

The ideal of the American pioneer is based on the same narrative structure: You, or your ancestors, leave a miserable existence, often in Europe, make it across the ocean, and then push further and further west until the Golden State and shores of the Pacific. While on the journey, you rid yourself of the baggage that wears you down; you shed a piece at each milestone in the Plains, at each river crossing, at each pass you traverse before the winter until you descend from the mountain range into a bright, free future, to remake whatever is left of the “old you,” after months or years of wandering and crossing over.

Yet not everyone who arrived in the West found a better life. Woody Guthrie’s songs are full of disillusioned dustbowl dreamers, and as for the pioneers before them, who left the East or the Midwest into a “blank dreariness,” as Joan Didion in “Where I Was From” quotes from a pioneer woman’s journal? Many didn’t even make it (neither did their descendants). And those who did cross into California did not necessarily encounter what might have qualified as redemption. Not every pioneer who built a house and business is still a well-known name carried on through the generations. Some did everything right, were open and flexible, took reasonable risks and still are not remembered. How to deal with the disappointment when the hopes for redemption did not get fulfilled?

Against the written evidence and cherished tradition, I wonder: Might they have been redeemed at least a little bit, just by having reached the West? That must count for something? Isn’t there a maxim that says that the journey is more important than the destination? Or does this wisdom only apply in hindsight, from a comfortable place that has become home to many generations?

To be clear, while it is compelling and has for that reason been done many times before this dvar, one must be cautious to compare the theological redemption story of the Israelites with the non-theological journey of individual lives. The story of the American pioneers and settlement in the West is not the same as the story of the Israelites going from slavery to the Promised Land, largely because of significantly different roles and agencies of both God and humans.

Yet both share the belief that reaching a specific, tangible destination constitutes a manifestation of redemption. Both beg the question of how we redeem ourselves when we don’t succeed in the place that was our destination. When we build something and they don’t come. When we realize that we may have put our money down for the wrong mine, the wrong piece of land.

Redemption is a paradisiac state humans of all stripes yearn for in one way or the other. Where does it begin, where does it end? Does it ever end, i.e., is it ever reached? In this context, it is important to note that in Judaism, another usage of the root ג א ל is to describe the return of property to its original owner in every 50th year – redemption here means to return (or be returned) to an original state of freedom and autarchy.

Being taken out of something is a passive experience. Being redeemed requires engaged participation — or 49 years of active existing, working toward a goal, serving a purpose. On the one hand, Judaism is clear that the redemptive arc reaches from the exodus to taking possession of the land, and that only because of this ultimate arrival in the land, every step between Egypt and Gilgal is significant.

On the other hand, it is just as clear that merely arriving doesn’t necessarily grant redemption. We must earn the benefits before we can “redeem” whatever coupon we might hold in our hands. Thus, to redeem ourselves (and to free ourselves from the burden that our hopes for a better life must all be fulfilled at once) means to accept that redemption lies in one moment after the next, in each next step of reaching, building, and believing in our, as of yet, unrealized potential — as individuals, as a community; here, there, everywhere.