Challah and Pharaoh
Shabbat Va’eira 5783
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
We are blessed here at Beit Simcha with a homemade challah each and every week for our congregation to enjoy. Now, I don’t know how much you know about challah itself. Yes, yes, of course, challah is braided egg bread—you knead it, you let it rise twice, add some seeds, you bake it, and—boom, you’ve got challah. But I’m talking here about more than a simple twisted egg bread; I’m speaking of real challah. I’m talking about the finest accomplishment of the baker’s art, the apex of the ovenmeister’s craft, the ambrosia of the cereal family. This is a challah that brings tears of joy to your eyes, that warms the heart and the fills the stomach and tantalizes the palate, that makes you feel loved and cared for and delighted, that brings new meaning to the words “Oneg Shabbat”. This is a challah that makes manna look like a poor cousin. This is a challah that makes you understand the fate of Marie Antoinette—for if your regular bread was true homemade challah, and someone told you that you had to eat cake—well, by God, you would revolt too, and the guillotine would seem like a splendid fate for such an infidel!
Well it’s not so easy to find a good challah at a bakery in Tucson, Arizona, which is why MeMe, Ilene, Sandy and Lynn do such a splendid job of creating delicious challah for us every week. Which reminds me of an experience some years ago that happened at the beginning of December. I found an almost-as-good-as-homemade challah in, of all places, Albertson’s market, not usually known for its high quality Jewish food. For several weeks my family reveled in this challah at home: my kids loved it, I loved it, everyone loved it. And then in early January we went into Albertson’s intending to buy several loaves of this challah, and discovered that there wasn’t a challah in the whole place. There wasn’t a challah. Finally we went up to the bakery counter and asked, “Where is that wonderful twisted egg bread you have had for the last several weeks?”
“That’s a seasonal bread,” we were told. “We only have it for Christmas!”
Just when we think we are welcomed and comfortable as Jews, in fact a fully accepted culture in Tucson, we are reminded yet again that there is a need, on a constant basis, to stretch and strain, to knead if you will, to continually affirm our identity in this place where we are in fact not the majority.
You know, there is an interesting parallel in this little challah tale. It goes to the notion of exercise. We are told that in order to keep muscles alive we must strain a little. When things are too easy for us, when we have a smooth and even path to tread muscles atrophy, our abilities disappear, we no longer need to work to be who we are, and so we become something less. So it is, I think, with being a Jew in Tucson, or anywhere in the Diaspora. As soon as we think that we have it easy—we’ve found a genuinely good bagel, we have a place to buy thin sliced lox, we live with other people who know what Chanukah is—we’re slapped in the face, as it were, with Christmas challah.
This week we’re in the Torah portion of Va’era, which shines a very harsh and unforgiving light on a person who gets a terrible rap in Jewish history. Pharaoh was the ultimate bad guy. All you have to do is remember Yul Brenner in Ten Commandments: Pharaoh is not only a bad actor—arguably, played by a bad actor, too—but he is really the great villain, not only of our Pesach story but of most of the first half of the book of Exodus. He’s the one who enslaves our people, who decides to kill our children, who threatens to destroy our entire future.
But I think Pharaoh gets a bad rap, because, in fact, without Pharaoh you have no Judaism. Without that important and, if you will, negative and pernicious influence you have nothing to stretch against, nothing to push against, nothing, in fact, to exercise those Jewish muscles. A little lesson about how important Egypt is in our own people’s history, in our minds, in the entire culture of Judaism. In the Kiddush we chanted earlier tonight, we said something very interesting about Shabbat. We said that we were doing this Shabbat Kiddush, doing the blessing over the wine because Shabbat is Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim, a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. Now Shabbat is many things: a day of peace and rest, a day that commemorates God breaking from the work of creation to refresh and reinvigorate. It is a time when we remember to be with our families, to worship God, and not to work. But nowhere in any of the history of Shabbat does it tell us anything about Egypt. Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim it is not. Passover is the holiday when we remember the Exodus from Egypt, but every Shabbat we are constantly reminded in the Kiddush and in several other prayers that even this Sabbath of rest is supposed to be a remembrance of Egypt.
And then, on every single holiday, we also sing this phrase, Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim. On Shavu’ot, which commemorates receiving the Torah at Sinai, we are told that we do this festival as a remembrance of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. On Sukkot, when we celebrate the feast of tabernacle and the harvest festival and give thanksgiving: Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim, a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. Even on Rosh Hashanah when we look at our souls and begin a new year, we celebrate Zecher l’tziyat Mitzrayim, we say, as a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, as a resistance to this great and terrible Pharaoh, the one who stood against us, who enforced hard and unfair labor upon us, who in fact was our great antagonist in ancient history.
You could come to believe—and you would be right—that virtually everything in Jewish culture is a remembrance not only of the Exodus from Egypt, but as a response to this terrible tyrant. In fact, without Pharaoh you have not only no Passover, but you have no Shavu’ot and no Ten Commandments, no Shabbat and no Judaism. Only in the presence of this kind of resistance, of something that forces us to constantly reexamine our commitment to Judaism to push ourselves, to show our beliefs and to demonstrate our practice; only in the presence of this kind of resistance do we truly become Jews.
You know, we struggle frequently with the injustice of certain specifics in this Egypt story. We are told that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh can harden his own heart but when God hardens it, how is that fair? Why should God punish the people of Egypt in this way? These are issues. But I think the central issue of this Egypt story, the reason that Pharaoh matters so much to us, is because without that resistance we don’t truly come to know who we are. Without endeavoring, without pushing, without working those spiritual muscles, we don’t genuinely choose to be Jews and we don’t remain committed Jews. If we live in a place in which Albertson’s knows that challah is for Shabbat and not just for December, well, perhaps that makes it just a little too easy to be Jewish. Maybe we don’t need to belong to a synagogue, maybe we don’t need to actualize, to live our Judaism, to experience our commitment through study and prayer and practice.
It is Jews like Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, the father of last week’s speaker Rabbi Bill Rothschild, who fought for integration in the South when it was incredibly unpopular and dangerous to do so. It was Jews like next week’s Cohon Memorial Foundation honoree, Rabbi Seth Farber, who works through an incredibly challenging system to get Jews fully accepted by a bureaucracy and a reactionary ultra-Orthodox rabbinate in Israel that pushes back constantly, who remind us what it means to be Jews. It is Jews right here in Tucson who work hard—and often push uphill—to create a warm, loving, successful synagogue in the Northwest of Tucson.
My friends, this is not just a parable about Jewish history or the lives of our people or even the lives of our Jewish community of Tucson. It is, rather, an injunction for each of us individually to embrace our ability to be different in a positive way, and to choose to be something more and something special. It’s a time in which we can look to our commitments and on this Shabbat of Va’era, look to those in our past that stood up to the Pharaohs, who saw the resistance in their own lives and chose to commit themselves at a deeper and more profound level to Jewish action, to Jewish life, to Jewish celebrations.
On this Shabbat may you enjoy our homemade challah at Beit Simcha, and may you, too, find a level of commitment to equal those our people have found throughout our history.