The Jewish home: Key to our survival, and the world’s

Walk into any Jewish home and ask yourself: What distinguishes it as a Jewish home? There is actually no ritual, biblical obligation concerning the Jewish home, save one: the mezuzah. One would expect to find this symbol, therefore, in the center of our homes, the living room or dining room. Yet we place our mezuzah in the doorway at the entrance to the home, a place we only pass through, never really stopping to focus on much of anything.

Imagine a close friend gives you an incredible gift: an original painting by Monet. And the next time he comes to visit he is shocked to discover you have hung the painting … outside your front door! He would probably be horrified! Why do we place our mezuzah in the doorway, rather than hanging it somewhere special inside our home?

Rav Ephraim Oshri, the last Rabbi of Kovno, Lithuania, in 1941, was asked a fascinating question in the ghetto:

One of the Jews wanted to know if there was a mitzvah to place a mezuzah in a home in the ghetto, given the horrible conditions the Jews were forced to live in. Would such a place constitute a home, requiring a mezuzah? His intent, in the event there was such an obligation, was to make it his mission to share with every Jew the beauty of the mitzvah, and to teach them the blessing.

Amazingly, given the danger inherent in such a practice, and the fact that public Jewish ritual in the ghetto was often punishable by death, there was no question as to whether they should try and hide the mitzvah somewhere inside the home, as opposed to the front door. Yet, it was a given that a mezuzah only makes sense on the front door.

To understand this strange mitzvah, we need to take a closer look at the origins of the mitzvah of mezuzah, whose sources are to be found in the Exodus from Egypt, in this week’s portion, Bo:

After 210 years of slavery and nine plagues, G-d announces that the end is finally at hand, the Jewish people will finally be redeemed.

Hashem will bring one more plague on Egypt, and this one He will do Himself.

But one week before the redemption, on the tenth day of Nissan, each family (actually, each “home”) must take a lamb, and tie it up in front of the house (Exodus 12:3). Then, on the fourteenth day of Nissan, they must slaughter this lamb in the middle of the afternoon (12:6). What is the purpose of this strange sacrifice? And why are the Jewish people, enslaved by the most sadistic and evil society in history, made to wait for four days before being redeemed — just so the lamb can remain tied up in the front yard?

But that’s not all. Even stranger is what happens after the lamb is slaughtered: the Jews have to collect the lambs’ blood and paint their doorjambs with it!

And strangest of all is the explanation G-d gives (12:13) for this bizarre ritual: The blood will serve as a sign for G-d when He passes through Egypt at midnight. And wherever G-d sees blood on the doorjamb, He will pass over that house and spare the family from the plague of the first-born.

Why does G-d need a sign to implement the tenth plague? Indeed, the Torah tells us (12: 24-25) that we need to safeguard this ritual for our children, and our children’s children, forever!

Incredibly, this condition is somehow so crucial to the story of the Exodus from Egypt, that the festival we celebrate to commemorate these momentous events, Passover, takes its name from this part of the story. Why does this represent the essence of the Exodus?

Thirty-two hundred years ago, in what was then the darkest place on earth, the Jewish people were given the opportunity to take a stand. One of the gods of ancient Egypt was the lamb. So Hashem asked the Jewish people to take this lamb and tie it up outside their homes on the tenth day of Nissan, and leave it there for four days. Then, they had to slaughter this lamb, and paint their doors with the blood. No Jew could hide behind closed doors. While the first-born of Egypt were dying around them, they marked their front doors with the blood of the god of their masters.

Imagine how difficult this must have been.

Mordechai Anielewicz, in the diary he kept during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, points out how incredible it was to these embattled Jews that their bullets could kill the Nazi “übermentschen.” After nearly ten years of Nazi rule, the Jews could barely imagine their masters as men of flesh and blood, just like them.

Imagine how challenging it must have been for the Jews in Egypt to kill the god of their masters who had enslaved them for 210 years. In fact, the slaughtering of the paschal lamb takes place on the eve of Passover in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone could watch — and the doors of all the Jewish homes that slaughtered the Egyptian god were marked with its blood.

You see, before Hashem would take us out of Egypt, we had to be willing to take Egypt out of ourselves. The reason we celebrate Pesach on the night of the tenth plague when we were still in Egypt, is because it was on this night that we took a stand and set ourselves free. This tremendous act of faith was the first step in the long process of the Jewish path to freedom.

On that night every Jewish family placed a sign on their doors that declared: through this doorway the gods of Egypt will not pass. The beginning of our emergence as a free nation was the birth of the Jewish home.

It was easy for G-d to take the Jews out of Egypt. It was much harder to take Egypt out of the Jews. G-d did not spare the Jews by virtue of seeing the sign on their doors; the Jews saved themselves by declaring themselves, for the entire world to see, worthy of being redeemed.

And this is the essence of the mitzvah of mezuzah. It is not accidental that the mezuzah is placed in the doorway; it is a sign that you are entering a Jewish home. And it is a challenge: what really makes each of our homes a Jewish home?

What influences do we bring in to our homes from the world, and what message do we carry forth when we go out into that same world? Are we proud to be Jews? Are we ready to define ourselves as such for the entire world to see?

Three millennium ago, a people, written off as one more culture that was about to disappear, began an incredible journey. Against all the odds, defying every rule of history, and confounding historians and scientists alike, the Jewish people began their odyssey to make a difference.

Thirty-two hundred years later, the beginning of that journey, the Jewish home, is still the secret both to why we are still here, as well as to what we have to offer the world.

Shabbat Shalom.

Columnist@TheJewishStar.com