I Saw the Sign: Passover 5786

There’s a part of the Exodus story that has always troubled me. It’s not the plagues, exactly, though the plagues are troubling enough. It’s not even the death of the firstborn, as morally staggering as that is. Rather, I’m perennially vexed by this one basic question: What’s with the blood on the doorposts? 

I’m guessing you know what I’m talking about. You likely talked about it last night. It is, after all, part of the popular etiology of the name of the holiday we are currently celebrating – that before the tenth plague, every Israelite family was instructed to take a lamb, slaughter it, and paint their lintels and doorposts with the blood. When God passes through Egypt to slay all its firstborn, and God will pass over the homes with bloodied entrances, thereby sparing the Israelites. 

But what is the function of the blood in this story? 

According to the portion we read on the first day of Pesah, the blood seems to function as a kind of magical repellent that keeps divine danger at bay. It is, to borrow a fancy scholarly word, apotropaic, meaning a substance believed to have the power to ward off danger. In this case, the blood on the doorposts somehow supernaturally protects those inside the home from a dangerous deity.

The apotropaic explanation is often dismissed by traditional commentators and rationalist modern theologians. After all, if we had the power to repel God by smearing blood on our doors, then wouldn’t that mean God is not all-powerful? Wouldn’t it mean that God can be manipulated and controlled through human action?

Yet despite the challenges it poses to the dominant theology, the apotropaic explanation is hard to reject out of hand, especially when we consider the relationship between the account of the tenth plague and another, even stranger, story found earlier in Exodus: 

Back in chapter 4, just after Moses receives his commission at the burning bush, Moses heads back toward Egypt from Midian with his wife Zipporah and their son Gershom. Along the way, they stop at a roadside inn for the night. And there, without warning or explanation, God attacks someone – maybe Moses, maybe Gershom; the text is ambiguous – and tries to kill him. Zipporah unhesitatingly grabs a flint, circumcises Gershom on the spot, touches someone’s feet – again, the text is ambiguous; it may be Moses’ or Gershom’s feet – and declares, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” Zipporah’s action stops the attack as suddenly as it began.

The strangeness of the story leads many modern biblical scholars to conclude that it implies a belief, quite common among ancient near eastern cultures, that blood can ward off dangerous deities, particularly at night.

At the same time, we also must consider the fact that back in Exodus chapter 12 verse 13, we are given another explanation for the blood. In that passage, we are told that the blood is “a sign” that enables God to pass by the homes of the Israelites. 

But this explanation is as problematic as the apotropaic one, at least for those who conceive of God not only as omnipotent but also as omniscient. If God knows all, why would God need a sign to know which homes belonged to Israelites and which belonged to Egyptians?  Would God not have been able to distinguish between households otherwise?

This theological conundrum has led many commentators, like the medieval sage Isaac Arama, to argue that the blood was not, in fact, a signal to God. As an early rabbinic midrash puts it, לכם לאות ולא לאחרים לאות — the blood is a sign to you, and not to others. Not to God, not to the Destroyer, not to the Egyptians watching from their windows — to you. The question, of course, then becomes – a sign of what?

To understand how blood on a doorpost can function as a sign to the Israelites themselves rather than to God — I want to go back to that strange story in chapter four, Zipporah’s circumcision of Gershom, because I think it contains the answer. Somehow, the circumcision saves Moses’ firstborn son’s life, just as the bloody doorposts will later save the lives of the Israelites’ firstborn sons. Somehow, these two texts seem to suggest that the blood of circumcision and the blood on the doorposts serve similar functions.

According to tradition, circumcision is also thought of as a sign, a marker of the covenant between God and Israel. Through brit milah, we symbolically declare that a boy belongs exclusively to the Jewish people and to its God. Conversely, it is also a statement of separation from other peoples and all they worship. It is an intentional act of separation and inclusion, a mark of distinction as well as belonging.

Circumcision is a reminder, inscribed on the body, of who we are and whose we are. 

Perhaps, then, the painting of the doorposts and lintels with blood was meant to remind the Israelites what, on that fateful night, they are being called to separate themselves from and leave behind – and conversely, who they were being called to become.

Recall that the words "let my people go" – which are memorialized in song, in story, in the conscience of every liberation movement that has drawn on this narrative — are only half the sentence as it appears in the biblical Exodus narrative. The full phrase, echoed throughout the Exodus narrative, is "let my people go, so that they may serve Me." Freedom from Egypt is not an end in itself. It is a beginning, a clearing of hands and heart so that the Israelites can take hold of something else entirely. And what they are to take hold of, the Torah makes clear, is a vision of society that will stand in direct contrast to the Egypt they have just escaped — a place where power and privilege are consolidated in the hands of the few, suffering is institutionalized, and human dignity is denied. Israel will be called to build the opposite: a society in which the intrinsic dignity of every person is equally and universally honored and secured, in which there is no permanent underclass, in which the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor are not merely objects of charity but the beneficiaries of justice. In Egypt, the cries of the oppressed are met with hardened hearts. Israel is called to heed the cries and redeem the oppressed, just as God heard the cries of the Israelites and, with aroused compassion, acted to end their suffering. The Exodus is not simply an escape from slavery. It is a commission to construct a counter-Egypt.

This helps us understand a strange linguistic detail in the Torah portion we read on the first day of Pesah, Exodus chapter 12. When Moses tells the elders about the paschal offering and the bloody doorposts, he says "Draw out and take for yourselves a lamb according to your families, and slaughter the paschal offering." Why mishkhu and k’hu, draw out and take? Rabbi Yosé ha-Glili, who believed that there were no superfluous words in the Torah, understood this as two separate commands: draw away from idolatry, and cling to the commandments. In other words, the verse is not merely an instruction about how to acquire a lamb — it is an instruction about how to leave Egypt, which requires first letting go of Egypt – of the moral order Egypt represents and reinforces. Only when the people are no longer clutching what has enslaved them, can they take hold of something new. The release has to precede the grasp.

The blood on the doorpost is the outward enactment of the inward act that משכו demands: you have drawn your hands away from Egypt's gods, you have taken hold of this covenant and its vision of a world unlike Egypt, and the mark on the threshold declares it — to yourself, to your household, to whoever lives inside that door — so that the liberation is enacted at the threshold of their homes in Goshen before it is completed at the base of the mountain in Sinai. The act of drawing away and taking hold that precedes marking the threshold is where the real liberation happens.

Intriguingly, circumcision comes up again in our parashah this morning. According to Exodus 12, when the ritual of the paschal offering is performed in the future, outside of Egypt and separate from its origins in protecting the people from the tenth plague, only men who are circumcised may eat of it. The passage is trying to tell us that marking the lintels and doorposts with lamb's blood was a one-time thing, limited to the eve of the exodus. After that event, circumcision will take its place and fulfill a similar symbolic function.

The thing about circumcision, though, is that it’s not particularistic. Anyone assigned male at birth can do it. As today’s Torah portion reminds us, the non-Jew who accepts circumcision "shall be as a native of the land." Through circumcision, even a non-Jewish male can become fully and inseparably part of the covenantal community (for women, immersion in a mikveh fulfills the same ritual function). 

And if bloody lintels and circumcised bodies are symbolically interchangeable, then would it not also be the case that, theoretically, any Egyptian household could have done exactly what the Israelites did to escape the fate of the tenth plague? They must have watched with wonder at the strange behavior of their Israelite neighbors – each of them slaughtering lambs, collecting blood, dipping hyssop branches in the basins and using it to paint their doorposts. Presumably, the Egyptians had lambs of their own. They could have acted similarly to save themselves. Did any of them stop to ask what was going on? Did any of them take their neighbors' warnings seriously? Could any of them have believed that slaves could hold the keys to their salvation? What stood between the Egyptian firstborn and survival was not divine favoritism but the Egyptians' own choice to stand apart from Israel. The covenant is not limited by ancestry but by choice. It’s not restricted to one people but rather offered freely to anyone willing to accept it.

Covenantal community is self-selecting and self-constituting. It is not defined by ethnicity or ancestry. "There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you." The stranger who accepts the mark participates fully and on equal terms. The covenantal community has always been defined by commitment rather than descent, by what you are willing to draw away from and what you are willing to take hold of.

The converse is also true. A Jew by birth can reject their place in the covenantal community and choose to regard themselves as outside of it. The rabbis recognized this logic in the figure of the wicked child at the seder, who excludes himself from the community by saying "you" instead of "we" — placing himself grammatically outside the covenant. But the Haggadah warns that one who excludes themselves from the community also excludes themselves from the community’s redemption. Perhaps it could be said that the Egyptians made the wicked child's mistake at scale. They said "you" when they could have said "we," and they reaped the consequences of the distance they themselves had created.

The great twentieth century Israeli commentator Nechama Leibowitz notes that the blood on the doorpost, the lamb, the careful ritual of the tenth to the fourteenth of the month, all of it applied only to that first Passover; for every generation thereafter, what remains is the seder. The seder is not merely a commemoration of what happened in ancient Egypt — it is a re-enactment of the act of self-constitution that made the Exodus possible, a ritual that invites us to reconstitute ourselves, each and every year, as people who choose deliberately to draw away from Egypt and take hold of becoming Israel: “b'chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo k'ilu hu yatza mimitzrayim / in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.” The seder is not a memorial service for dead history. It is an invitation to us, the living, to continue the journey of liberation.

We live in a moment when that choice is not abstract. Ours is a moment of cruelty toward the most vulnerable — toward immigrants and refugees, toward the poor, toward the widow and the orphan and the stranger at the door — cruelty carried out by people wielding enormous power and justifying it in the language of strength, order, and national interest, which is to say, in the language of Pharaoh. Indeed, we live in a moment when Jewish identity itself is sometimes invoked to sanctify that cruelty. 

Each and every year, the seder invites us not only to affirm what we believe but also what those beliefs require us to reject; not only where we’ve been but also who we are; not only who we commit to become but also what we are willing to do to get there. משכו is not only what our ancestors were commanded to do on the eve of the exodus from Egypt but also a command addressed to every generation that tells this story. Draw away. And then take hold.

Drawing away means being willing to reject cruelty as cruelty even when it is inconvenient or risky, even when it is carried out by people we thought were our allies, even when naming it costs us something. And taking hold means embracing anew the obligations our covenant places on us: to pursue justice for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor; to insist that our synagogues and our voices and our resources be used not only to defend Jewish life but also to defend human dignity; to build, in our communities and in our country, a society fundamentally distinct from the oppressive regime represented by biblical Egypt.

We no longer put blood on our doorposts.

But the commands associated with that ritual still call and claim us today: First, משכו, draw away from. Then, קחו, take hold of.

The work the Exodus commissioned us to do is not finished. The counter-Egypt we were freed to build remains a work in progress. 

May we recommit ourselves to continuing that work, having the courage to draw away from comfortable certainties and convenient silences. 

May we take hold of the obligations that our covenant calls us to carry forward.

And may we walk through our thresholds toward one another and join together to walk hand in hand, side by side, toward redemption.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.