Start here · day 7 of 14 · Out of slavery
פֶּסַח
The night a people was made
Exodus 12
First, read it
Exodus 12
Read it before the notes below. They are worth more once you have your own impression of it.
Open Exodus 12Then, the idea
The instructions for the first Passover are given while the people are still slaves. Mark the door. Roast the lamb. Eat it standing, dressed to travel.
And this: when your children ask what this means, tell them. The command to remember arrives before there is anything to remember. Memory is built before the rescue happens.
Three and a half thousand years later, families still sit down on that night and say the same story in the first person: this is because of what God did for me when I came out of Egypt. Not for them. For me.
One word of Hebrew
פֶּסַח
pesach — passing over, or sparing
The name of the festival is the name of what happened, so that every year the event is said out loud rather than remembered privately.
And one question
Why hand the story to children first, before priests or scholars?
Nobody is marking this. Sit with it on the way to work.
If this one landed: Every feast, and what it is for.