This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been dedicated by Rita Shumsky in memory of Elliot Rank.
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Parashat Bo opens with a divine utterance so familiar to us that the words conceal their political and theological depth:
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה בֹּ֖א אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֑ה כִּֽי־אֲנִ֞י הִכְבַּ֤דְתִּי אֶת־לִבּוֹ֙ וְאֶת־לֵ֣ב עֲבָדָ֔יו
The Eternal said to Moses: Come to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants. (Exodus 10:1.)
From this point on, the hardening no longer affects the sovereign alone; this hardening has overtaken Pharaoh’s advisors, as if Mitzrayim (מִצְרַֽיִם, “Egypt”) were constitutionally incapable of reforming itself from within and deliverance could never be the outcome of dialogue. In the thought of the Maharal of Prague (Gevurot Hashem, chapter 3), Egypt is not merely a political tyranny; it is defined as Metzarim (מֵיצָרִים, “the narrow places”), a condition in which existence is compressed by an imposed limit. For the enslaved, that limit is the limit of physical ability, in the sense that the human being is reduced to a motor function. Parashat Bo is one of the most powerful sections of the Torah precisely because it narrates the shattering of that frame.
The dialogue between Moses and Pharaoh amidst the eighth plague (locusts) exposes two opposing visions of humanity. In Exodus 10:8, Pharaoh asks, “מִ֥י וָמִ֖י הַהֹלְכִֽים” (“Who are the ones who will go?”). “בִּנְעָרֵ֥ינוּ וּבִזְקֵנֵ֖ינוּ נֵלֵ֑ךְ בְּבָנֵ֨ינוּ וּבִבְנוֹתֵ֜נוּ” (“We will go with our young and our old, with our sons and our daughters”—Moses’ answer in the subsequent verse constitutes a manifesto of radical inclusion. In Exodus 10:11, Pharaoh pushes back though: “לְכֽוּ־נָ֤א הַגְּבָרִים֙” (“Go then, you men”). The term הַגְּבָרִים֙ (haggevarim, “[you] men”), derived from גֶּבֶר (gever, “man”), does not simply denote “men” but vital force, virile potency—such as in the terms גִּבּוֹר (gibbor, “hero”) or גְּבוּרָה (gevurah, “might”). In his commentary on Pharaoh’s retort, the French rabbi Rashi (c. 1028–1105) notes that Pharaoh thus conceives divine service as the affair of the men alone—truly, warriors, able-bodied men. In the pharaonic logic, the body that does not produce—the child, the elder, the disabled body—is a hostage who guarantees Egypt the return of their labor force. Such a non‑productive body has no place in the sacred or the political sphere.
This exclusion echoes the concept of the “normate” developed by the philosopher Dr. Rosemarie Garland‑Thomson in her 1997 book Extraordinary Bodies: the figure of the ideal subject—necessarily male, able-bodied, autonomous—who defines social normativity by excluding what it deems deficient. Moses, by insisting on the presence of the elders and the children, dismantles this state‑sponsored ableism. Rather, Moses opposes to this prejudice the vision of an organic peoplehood who can celebrate a divine festival only when the community at large embraces the most vulnerable persons. Encountering God is not the privilege of the lucky few.
This logic continues in the gesture of placing blood on the doorposts:
וְלָֽקְחוּ֙ מִן־הַדָּ֔ם וְנָ֥תְנ֛וּ עַל־שְׁתֵּ֥י הַמְּזוּזֹ֖ת וְעַל־הַמַּשְׁק֑וֹף
They shall take from the blood and place it on the two doorposts and on the lintel. (Exodus 12:7.)
Dr. Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, in her 2001 book The Particulars of Rapture, sees in the blood at the doorposts a phenomenology of the threshold and the womb. The blood applied to the lintel and the posts transforms the house into a liminal, almost uterine space. This is not the blood of conquest but the blood of birth. In the Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 11b, Rabbi Avvira asserts that deliverance occurred “בשכר נשים צדקניות” (biskhar nashim tzadkaniyyot, “as a reward for righteous women”). The blood on the door answers the blood of the newborns cast into the Nile. The domestic sphere—so often devalued by patriarchal structures—becomes the site of the highest political resistance. The exodus thus takes the form of a national birth, with the doorway functioning as a uterine cervix.
This dynamic of inclusion intensifies with the mention of an עֵ֥רֶב רַ֖ב (erev rav, “mixed multitude”) who, according to Exodus 12:38, accompanied the Israelites when departing Egypt. Often viewed negatively in certain traditions as a source of corruption, even as the instigators of the Golden Calf (as per the medieval rabbinic anthology Yalkut Shim’oni on the Torah, 643)—the Erev Rav in fact represents the surpassing of particularism, an opening toward the universal. Writing in 19th century Italy, the scholar Samuele Davide Luzzatto noted in his Torah commentary on this verse that this erev rav joined Israel out of conviction. The erev rav consists of Egypt’s marginalized: slaves of other nations, outcasts, people whose bodies or identities did not fit the rigid categories of pharaonic purity. By accepting them, Moses breaks the logic of genealogical purity. The Israelites are no longer a family by blood, and redemption is not a closed club for perfect bodies; God’s deliverance gathers the maimed throughout history. The exodus becomes an cross-sectional movement in which Israel’s liberation is authentic only if it draws with it all those whom an exclusionary system has rejected.
The ninth plague deepens this critique. God declares in Exodus 10:21, “וִ֥יהִי חֹ֖שֶׁךְ… וְיָמֵ֖שׁ חֹֽשֶׁךְ” (“Let there be darkness… and let the darkness be palpable.” The plague of darkness is not a moral allegory but a harmful physical transformation of the environment into an uninhabitable world. As Exodus 10:23 relates it, “לֹֽא־רָא֞וּ אִ֣ישׁ אֶת־אָחִ֗יו וְלֹא־קָ֛מוּ אִ֥ישׁ מִתַּחְתָּ֖יו” (“no one saw his brother, and no one rose from his place”). These verses juxtapose two fundamental conditions of social life: recognizing the other as אָח (ach, “brother”) and the possibility of moving through space. Our recalling this plague does not invite us to distort the reality of deprivation as a metaphor for disability; such a reading would reproduce the very ableist gesture that instrumentalizes disability as a symbol of moral or spiritual deficiency. The crux of this plague lies elsewhere. Our text depicts a world rendered uninhabitable by any alteration of the environment. Egypt’s uninhabitability is not an arbitrary punishment but a revelation of the regime’s structural truth: Pharaoh does not merely demand labor; he shapes an environment in which the most elementary relation—encountering one’s loved ones—becomes suddenly impossible. Deliverance, therefore, does not consist in repairing individuals but in reconfiguring the social milieu.
וּֽלְכׇל־בְּנֵ֧י יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל הָ֥יָה א֖וֹר בְּמוֹשְׁבֹתָֽם
For all the children of Israel there was light in their dwellings. (Exodus 10:23.)
In this context, light is not an ornamental reward but an environmental advantage, a condition of access. Contemporary critical disability studies consistently shift the focus from “individual defect” to the material conditions that render a life livable or unlivable. The Torah sketches an analogous gesture: it contrasts, on the one hand, a world in which shared space becomes unusable against, on the other, a world in which a group possesses effective conditions of visibility and circulation. This is not a “lesson about disability” but a critique of power that configures the environment to produce inaccessibility; that calls, in response, for a politics of freedom as the reconfiguration of the milieu.
The paschal ritual itself, enjoined in Exodus 12:11, carries forth this critique. The term פֶּסַח (pesach, “Passover”) refers to both ‘passing over’ (פָּסַח, pasach) and ‘limping” (פִּסֵּחַ, pisse’ach). The exodus is a march of the limping. The God of Israel, who ‘limps’ over the houses of Israel, identifies with the impeded gait of the enslaved. The blood on the door transforms the house into a symbolic ‘womb’ (רֶֽחֶם, rechem). The exodus is a birth. The blood is not the blood of war but the blood of life and genealogy. It is an homage to the invisible labor of the midwives, Shifra and Puah, who initiated a resistance against Pharaoh in Exodus 1:15–21. By requiring each family to consume the lamb inside the home, the Torah centers the gravity of holiness—not in a distant temple or a battlefield—but in the domestic sphere, where fragile bodies are fed.
Introduced in Exodus 12:8 to accompany the pesach, the matzah (מַצָּה), the ‘unleavened bread’ of urgency, which had no time to rise, the bread of incompletion, symbolizes bodies that do not need to be ‘raised’ to be worthy of freedom. A ‘valid’ body according to Pharaoh is a ‘finished,’ perfect body, like a statue. The body of the exodus is a matzah: flat, rough, unfinished. Eating matzah is celebrating our own finitude. It is accepting that freedom does not require a perfect body but a body ready enough to interact with the real world. Dr. Nancy Eiesland (1964–2009), in her 1994 book The Disabled God , speaks of a “disabled God” revealed in brokenness. Celebrating Passover is celebrating the victory of the human rhythm—with its pauses, its slowness, its need for assistance—over the mechanical and implacable rhythm of Pharaoh’s industrial slavery.
Parashat Bo teaches that to leave Egypt, one must accept leaving the “norm.” Freedom begins when we refuse to let haggevarim depart alone. It culminates when the erev rav—the women, the children, and the limping—form a multitude in which vulnerability is no longer a flaw but the very cement of the covenant. To leave Mitzrayim is to abandon the fantasy of sovereign autonomy and embrace radical interdependence. It is to understand that Moses’ voice, despite his stutter, is more powerful than Pharaoh’s decrees, for it carries within it the echo of all oppressed bodies that, at last, begin to move.
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