DON’T CRY OVER SPILT BLOOD
Spilt blood; what image conjures up in our mind? Is it death and destruction or is it joy and vitality? In this week’s Parsha, Bo, we are taught that the Jewish perspective is the latter.
Pharaoh tells Moshe that it is not a good idea for the people to leave Egypt because his astrologers see the sign of blood on the path of the Jewish people. The implication is that there will be destruction. However, there was no destruction. Instead, that blood was the blood of our people’s performance of the mitzvah of Bris Milah in the desert just prior to our entry into the Land of Israel. It was a life giving blood not a destructive blood. What appeared to be our demise turned out to be the source of our life. We were only able to enter the Land of Israel once we were circumcised. Without the blood of our national Bris Milah we could not have entered our Land.
The prophet Yechezkel compares the condition of our people at the time of the Exodus to a newborn baby whose mother abandoned it and left it on the street to wallow in its’ birthing blood . He portrays a picture of absolute hopelessness. This picture concludes with HaShem calling to this newborn ‘In your blood shall you live! In your blood shall you live!’ Our Sages explain ‘the blood through which we will live’ is a reference to the blood of Bris Milah. From our very birth, spilt blood was the sign of our future! To the world, it looked like we would never exist when, in fact, it is the source of our unending vitality.
In this lies the distinction between the Jewish perspective on life and the non-Jewish perspective on life. From the non-Jewish perspective there is no stronger metaphor for murder and destruction than blood. This is why Pharoah understood that destruction lies ahead on the path of the Jewish nation.
We, on the other hand, see blood as the metaphor of life and vitality. The Prophet is teaching us this very principle. The picture of the Jewish people at the time of their birth appeared hopeless. All one could see was blood with no future. HaShem entered the scene and in-structed the Prophet that it is specifically through the blood that we will find life.
Many churches are built on the front lawn of cemeteries. As opposed to our people where a priest is prohibited to even attend a funeral, let alone to walk into a cemetery!
The irony! The gentile nations who rule the world see spilt blood as a sign of destruction and we, the persecuted nation, the nation who for thousands of years had no place that we could call home, see spilt blood as a sign of vitality! Does it make sense?
There is universal recognition that eternal life does not exist in the physical world. In this world, all organic life has a beginning and has an end. Nothing lives forever. The only hope for eternity lies in the spiritual world. The dilemma that Man struggles with is how to achieve that eternity.
The non-Jewish approach to this dilemma is that it is not possible to achieve it in this life and therefore salvation lies only in death. Hence, the church goer is constantly reminded that until death he is doomed. His only hope is in the next world. That allows him to live a life of material pursuit in this world because you only live once in this world. Eternity begins only after departing from this world.
The Jew, however, knows that even as we live in this material world we are still able to connect to eternity. When we perform HaShem’s mitzvos we transcend the limitations of the physical and bring eternity to this world. The synagogue goer should not associate mortality with this life because even as we live here we are immortal. We do not live only once we continue living on and on.
We have the answer to Mark Twain’s dilemma “all other forces pass, but he (the Jew) remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” Mr. Twain, Bris milah is our secret.
Have a wonderful Shabbos.
Paysach Diskind