Pesach: Time Is Not Continuous

We are continuing our reflection on Pesach, and I begin it with the relationship that exists between the ten utterances of creation and the ten plagues of Egypt. For the ten plagues of Egypt are, in sum, the illustration of what happens when the utterances of creation are manipulated and emptied of their purpose. These plagues of Egypt bear witness to a breakdown in the rules of creation, in the laws of nature. We speak of the nissim and nifla’ot of Egypt, the miracles and the wonders. The Rambam says that on the night of Pesach one should bring to the fore only the miracles and wonders of Egypt. But what is so particular about these miracles? What is particular about them? Water turned to blood, the swarming of lice — these are epidemics, rules or events of the ordinary kind, which nonetheless throw into disarray all the laws by which nature normally functions […]. But we must grasp the close relationship between the plague of the firstborn and the first ma’amar — the utterance that is not an utterance, but is the premise of creation. You know that, in the unfolding of the phenomenon of creation, the world was created through ten utterances.

When we count the ma’amarot, the utterances of creation, there are in reality only nine; but our Sages completed the count with the word Bereshit: “Bereshit too is an utterance” (Rosh Hashanah 32a). Yet an utterance implies that there is speech. And Bereshit is not speech, since there is no one to whom I could speak. If there is no one, I can speak only to myself. Then there is no immediate relationship, no creation, no manifestation of any kind: it is I who speak — I speak, but nothing comes of it. It is always my ani, which is an ayin, because it is a nothingness. You know that ani and ayin are made of the same letters: ayin, there is nothing; ani, I am. When I truly wish to assert myself, it is this ani, and by the same token I express my manifestation in the world. For it is in the withdrawal of my self that I can assert my self; but I cannot assert my self without first recalling that at a certain moment I was not — I did not exist. My own existence, then, is like the creation of the world.

Yesh me’ayin — something from nothing! There is a reality that comes out of nothingness; and so Bereshit, as the Gemara says, is also an utterance, because there a leap was indeed made in the world of creation. That leap is the first point. We know very well that every figure presents faces, does it not? One can view it from four sides; but there is also the dimension of above and the dimension of below. The first dimensions to be created were not those of the four cardinal points, but above all the principle of below and above. Above is the rakia, the firmament, the heavens. […]

“Lift up your eyes on high and see” (Isaiah 40:26). And the second aspect of the reality of the world is ha’aretz, the earth. But what separates the upper waters from the lower waters? For, as we noted in our reflection last week, Mitzrayim is metzar yam, the boundary of the sea. Now why the boundary of the sea? Water expresses the movement of the infinite. As long as it has no frontier, no limit, it keeps on spreading; it tends to spread as far as it can, to flood the world, the entire universe. And this world of the infinite had no place in Egypt’s categories of thought. For them the world was limited: its forces had to be mastered, had to be channeled. That is what brought about, in Egypt, the first rupture between the ayin and the ani — between the infinite, you see, and the ani, the self, reality.

Yet one cannot separate the ani from the ayin. Amalek was born of this separation: “Is the Eternal among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7) — ayin, “there is not,” “there is not.” […] In this chochmah — wisdom itself, science itself — it is through this subtraction of oneself from the reality of things that one can ultimately discover the world. For the world is there to be discovered, in the same way that the presence of the Creator is there to be discovered. And this discovery of the Creator’s presence takes place through the reshit, the beginning. Now what is the reshit? We spoke a moment ago of the faces of every creation, of every object; but there is also the invisible point, the center of gravity, which holds it together. And that center of gravity — the essential one — is Shabbat. In time, it is invisible. In space, too, the point is infinitely small, until it grows and begins to trace the line, to trace the plane, and to develop into volumes. But at the beginning there is this reshit, this point. That is why our Sages said — you know what the reshit is? […] One must see this in Shabbat. You know, there are three Shabbatot within Shabbat. Shabbat is not uniform in its structure. The festival prayers, for their part, simply repeat themselves.

That prayer is common to all the festival days — Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot. On Shabbat, however, there are three different prayers. The evening prayer is Ata kidashta: “You sanctified the seventh day.” It is the celebration of creation, a remembrance of the work of creation; and whoever were to probe the phenomenon of creation in depth would, at the end of his path, discover the Creator. Now the next day — the next day there is another prayer: Yismach Moshe bematnat chelko, ki eved ne’eman karata lo, “Moshe rejoiced in the gift of his portion, for You called him a faithful servant” — Moshe will rejoice in the Ten Commandments that You gave him, in the Torah that You revealed to him. So there is a second aspect of revelation […].

It no longer comes through creation; it comes through the Exodus, which was the prerequisite for the giving of the Torah, for the manifestation of G-d on Mount Sinai. And in this manifestation of G-d on Mount Sinai we find the same phenomenon: there are nine commandments, but Anokhi Hashem Elokecha, “I am the Eternal your G-d,” is not a commandment; it is a given. We are obliged to learn it; without it there is nothing. I cannot speak of a commandment if there is no one who commands; otherwise I do not accept the principle of a hierarchy, and then there is nothing at all. That is why there is a parallel between makkat bechorot, the plague of the firstborn, and creation — the Bereshit of creation. Let me explain. Into the parashah of the Exodus from Egypt an independent chapter slips — we touched on it last time: Kadesh li kol bechor, “Sanctify to Me every firstborn” (Exodus 13:2). […] But what connection does it have with the Exodus? Precisely this: everything lies in the principle of the beginning — that is the whole secret. Either we have sanctified the point of departure, and then we shall […]. Creation is not the continuous movement we tend to believe it is.

Shanah, the year, is a cycle that repeats itself. We generally live within the laws of nature, with programs set for tomorrow, for the day after, for one year, two years, three years from now, because we always believe in the continuity of things, of the elements — a logic bound to continuous time. But the notion of continuous time does not exist in Hebrew. Just as a straight line is nothing but an uninterrupted succession of points, time is an uninterrupted succession of moments. An uninterrupted succession of moments means that no moment is necessarily identical to another, and that every moment is a creation. Now, who gave this definition?

It is what is called lakol zeman: “For everything there is a season” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Everything has its duration within this time. It is a moment; this time […] — a time to embrace, a time to love, and so on. […] The moments are not uniform. But the zeman is the one we create ourselves; this zeman is creation itself. […] The Eternal does nothing but renew His own creation at every moment. As I have explained […], there is no continuous energy that sustains the world; this energy is renewed, just as the drop that keeps a lamp alight is renewed — but it is not the same drop, it is another drop. With each drop, a tiny little drop has been drawn up, drawn off, so that the light keeps shining, and that gives us a notion of continuity. […] That is the reshit of Amalek. The reshit of Amalek is, in sum, what happens when the notion has been falsified, when it has been halted, when this beginning has, as it were, been given another point of departure. It has been replaced, since that black hole was never found — no secret, no mystery; so let us posit such a beginning. That is Reshit goyim Amalek, “Amalek is the first of the nations” (Numbers 24:20). And when the principle of reshit is trampled, nothing remains, because all the rest is included in its failure. As our Sages told us, the last plague was ultimately the first; for as G-d went on revealing Himself to Moshe, He was already announcing to him what the last plague would be […]: I will reveal Myself at the moment when I reveal Myself.

All the firsts of Egypt die away and disappear. The plague of the firstborn is the disappearance, the collapse of all the premises — the premises of thought accepted in Egypt. For the Exodus sets off a new beginning: the world of creation is neither a cycle nor […]; it is not a continuous movement of rules for the functioning of creation, as in vayehi erev vayehi voker, is it not — evening followed by morning, and so on. Either revelation is there, within reach, and we seize it, or else the phenomenon of death triumphs over everything that man has built […]. That is why, in the last plague, […] it is not Moshe or Aharon who steps in to set the plague in motion. It is I who go forth, I who manifest Myself — and My manifestation alone suffices to sow death.

What, then, is death? You know, there is an idea that death is impurity. Death is not impurity. The dead person himself is not impure; it is we — who are in contact with the dead and do not know what death is — who are in impurity. As for impurity, I have already given you an idea of it: tum’ah comes from the word atum, blocked. When one is blocked, when one has no answer to give, then we are in a state of tum’ah — that is impurity. And what is contrary to tum’ah, what is far from tum’ah, is mayim, mayim tehorim, pure water, which has the power to purify, to spread blessing, to replenish. It is life, and this life belongs to the infinite; it has no limits. This life is mayim, which exists only in the plural. Why? Because in the separation of the waters there is no single, isolated element.

The waters were separated into those below and those above. And how did the plagues of Egypt begin? With the corruption of the waters. And what does this corruption of the waters attest to? The water being closed off to dibbur, to speech — to speech, because what separates the upper waters from the lower waters is speech. The lower waters are the heart, the whole system by which blood irrigates the human body; the upper waters are the sekhel, reason, the brain. We need two tefillin: we need one for the mind and one for the heart. Can a separation be set up between the two? Whoever sets up a separation between them has understood nothing of life.

Life then has no meaning: at that point it is falsified, false, denatured. We need to balance it. By what means? By the breath of the mouth, by speech — speech is the balance between reason and heart. Now, when one has not understood this well enough, one is kesheh oref, stiff-necked; one’s neck is stiff, one is caught in endless obstinacy. And Pharaoh was an oref, a stiff nape; he was the unbending neck; he was the one who kept these two apart. It is this separation that made things depart from their original functioning: it became parua, which means disordered — it no longer obeys any rule. And the Exodus from Egypt came when kedushat habechorot, the sanctification of the firstborn — of the premise — was instituted; in the same passage the mitzvah of tefillin was joined to it, and in the same parashah the mitzvah of sanctifying the month was added to it: the new moon, the perpetual beginning, tied to lunar time yet brought back into step

with the solar cycle. The years, spread over a cycle of nineteen, are arranged so that the remembrance of the Exodus falls in the spring month. The spring month, Aviv — […] — is the premise, the nitzanim, the buds. It is the month of the nitzanim, the month of new budding; it is the month of the bechorot, the firstborn. That is why the firstborn observe a fast on the eve of Pesach: because one must be mekadesh the bechorah, sanctify the status of firstborn. And when one cannot do so through […] speech, one does it through the study of Torah.

One attends a siyum, or completes one oneself […], and at that moment one accedes to a new creation, the one introduced by the Exodus and the giving of the Torah. That is the second Shabbat. The second Shabbat within Shabbat is the Shabbat of the morning: the morning kiddush sanctifies the Shabbat of the Exodus from Egypt and of the giving of the Torah. And so the prayer is Yismach Moshe bematnat chelko: Moshe rejoices in the portion granted to him — the tablets of the Law that he brought down, and everything surrounding them. It is a manifestation of G-d through the tablets of the Law. That is the second Shabbat.

Now the third Shabbat. It is at Minchah, the afternoon prayer. We have a third Shabbat — or rather, a third prayer: Ata echad veshimcha echad, “You are One and Your Name is One, and who is like Your people Israel, one nation on earth?” Unity — that famous unity in which the people is one, bound to its whole history, one, bound to the One G-d; let us discover the Name of the One G-d. But that is a projection into the future. It is neither creation, the origin, nor the starting point of the bechorah — which parallels that creation: the bechorah of the people, “My son, My firstborn, Israel” (Exodus 4:22). It is already the projection of the final purpose, the one we wish for with all our heart: that the Eternal will grant us as an inheritance a day of rest and serenity — yom shekulo Shabbat, a day that is entirely Shabbat.

A day that is entirely Shabbat — does that mean total idleness? What are we going to do? A spiritual retirement home? What is the meaning of it? There is a marvelous idea in it: the plan for the future lies in recognizing this Shabbat which is the starting point of creation. There are the Shabbatot — the final purpose, what has ultimately been instituted, what determines the course of life. It is the paths: there are forty-nine paths, forty-nine gates of purity and forty-nine gates giving access to impurity. They almost touch, and one must know how to keep to the path one ought to. The forty-nine degrees of understanding, […] — it is always this number seven, is it not? It is always this number seven that comes back, with the starting point of the seventh — the point, the center of gravity of all existence, of all reality.

But when one reaches the fiftieth point, there is death: there is no longer access to anything at all; it is total collapse. Yes, let us remember that Haman was hanged on a tree fifty cubits high. Why fifty cubits? Why not thirty, why not forty? Fifty cubits. Haman is a descendant of Amalek; he too regards himself as a reshit; he considers that he belongs to the elite that may decide how everything is to function. Such a one […] will lose his life. But those who truly know how to advance through life in the right direction hold the gates of access, and open them one after another throughout the seventy years allotted to them.

Yes, seventy years — it is the discovery of the seventy. But that does not mean one fails to discover the fifty — the fifty years, the fifty […], the fifty gates of access to knowledge. To wish someone “until a hundred and twenty years” is to wish him to integrate into his life the seventy approaches of the Torah through the fifty paths of access to knowledge. There you have your hundred and twenty. And that is why Moshe, who had discovered the seventy languages and attained that fiftieth degree of knowledge — “no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6). His grave no longer exists; we have no knowledge of it. It is in his Torah; it is in his way of living. He is ish haElokim, “the man of G-d” (Deuteronomy 33:1): ish, a man, below; Elokim, above.

He is at once a man here on earth and a manhig, a leader, a ruler beyond. That is the Shabbat of the plan for the future, of which our Sages tell us […]. Now, we do indeed manage to keep these Shabbatot, and yet one feels that ultimately there is no […]; things have not changed. Whether we serve G-d on Shabbat or go about our affairs on Shabbat […]. But when we have integrated the Shabbat of creation into the Shabbat of revelation, and the Shabbat of revelation into the Shabbat of creation, that will be the yom shekulo Shabbat — the day that is entirely Shabbat.

For at that time, when one picks a fig from a tree, the fig will say to us: “Shabbat hayom! It is Shabbat!” It will react. The world of creation will protest at the harm we do to its very constitution of being. Yes, that is the […] yom shekulo Shabbat. So it is the Exodus from Egypt that set in motion this process of change in our perception, in our way of seeing things. That is why the festival of the Exodus is called Chag haMatzot, the Festival of Matzot. What is the connection? What is the connection? […] Because it was in haste — “for in haste you went out of the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:3)? Because of that haste? Well, of course: when one is driven out — ki gorshu miMitzrayim, “for they were driven out of Egypt” (Exodus 12:39) — one hurries out.

So we took our baggage and left — all the more so since we were suffering in Egypt. We have known this throughout our history; it is nothing new, and we have not, on that account, imposed on ourselves any particular diet. But no — here we went out in haste, and it became Chag haMatzot, Chag haMatzot. So what lies between a matzah and bread? The time to let the dough rise, to change it, to give the dough another flavor, another aroma. Well then: this continuous movement of time, which intervenes in the way we understand our instantaneous liberation, which repeats itself and alters the original composition, the original flavor, giving it a flavor of our own — there is nothing wrong in that. But for seven days one must be aware that this is what we do during the year — and do it consciously, with the idea that this notion of time, which intervenes in the evolution of things, is something we should be able to neutralize in our minds.

We should know that in this way we are going to repair the first sin of Adam harishon, the first man, which lay in his way of […]. Not to leave chametz means not to give our spiritual ascent the time to rise — the time to denature our first impulse, to rationalize it. Indeed, in this discovery of another reality — for it is not merely leaving Egypt, it is leaving a reality — there is no continuous movement between the Exodus and the next day. It is […]; it is not within the logic of things. There is an interruption. “They could not tarry” — velo yachlu lehitmahmeah (Exodus 12:39). On the simple level one would say that they could not linger; but our Sages interpreted lehitmahmeah […]:

[…] as if to ask questions at every moment: “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?” Try to grasp something of this discovery of a movement which attests that even the continuous movement of creation — that is not the right word — consists of discontinuous creations: they are nissim and nifla’ot, miracles and wonders. It means that every moment of life is in itself a wonder. And that is Yachol meRosh Chodesh, “One might think it applies from the New Moon.” Can one discuss this subject fifteen days in advance? No. The Haggadah, when it discusses this, answers: only at the time when matzah and maror are set before you […].

So matzah is the first food of a life — the first food recommended to man in the Etz haDa’at, the Tree of Knowledge. And we have already explained the difference between da’at and haskalah. Haskalah can lose itself in the world of intellectual awakening, the world of reasoning, the world of ratio: what I understand. I can understand even the Talmud and study it the way I studied mathematics; it opens my mind […] — science, biology. Da’at is something else: it means integrating what I learn, realizing it within myself […]. For da’at, as it is said, “and the man knew Chavah his wife” (Genesis 4:1) — true knowledge lies in love, and true love is the love that reveals.

It reminds us that this life has its rhythm: it proceeds by discontinuous movements of life and death, yet it is no longer interrupted […], and that there is a davar, a word, a speech. So how does one say “to lead”? […] A leader is first of all one who carries the word — one who gives the word its full meaning, its authority, its direction. There are beautiful […] in the Talmud […] who lead peoples subjected to their will. That is what we do on the night of Pesach, through the Haggadah, toward the Haggadah […]; and the Haggadah has its capacity to be a davar, to be a manhig, to lead our life in the right direction.

So I put a question to myself, together with you. After all these grand explanations of how one frees oneself, of how the gaze changes on Pesach and we change our gaze, returning to the sources of the first gaze, of the first Shabbat — it is so marvelous — why do you say we should not do it all year round? Why should this kind of gaze, these attempts to recover the gaze of the first Shabbat […] — when, in the end, one would almost have to eat matzah […]?