Passover on the Move

Israelis have a catch-all Hebrew word for what’s been going on in the country since October 7, 2023 — four days before I made aliyah. The word is matzav. What’s a matzav? It’s a “situation.” (Etymologically, the Hebrew word is more of a “stand-uation” than a “sit-uation,” but never mind.) The current matzav is that everything is “normal” except that hundreds of ballistic missiles have been launched at us.

Our ancient ancestors, finding themselves freed from slavery and wandering through an uninhabited desert, had a matzav as well. The more I think about it, the more I realize one aspect of their matzav resonates with ours.

As I write, we’re in the middle of Passover, and there’s one place in the Torah that tells both about Passover and about the matzav. That place is Numbers 9, which we’ll be reading at the end of May as part of the annual Torah cycle. The beginning of the chapter offers instructions for observing Passover, but the end of the chapter describes an alert system not unlike the Home Front Command app that alerts us to missile strikes.

The Israelites are instructed to offer the Passover sacrifice “on the fourteenth day of this month [Nisan], at twilight, at its set time; you shall offer it in accordance with all its rules and rites” (Num 9:3). There is no longer a temple, so nowadays the “rules and rites” mean conducting a Passover seder — which, all these thousands of years later, we indeed just did. Then follow some instructions for a make-up Passover, a month later, for those who missed the first one.

At that point the chapter returns to the previous story in Numbers: the inauguration of the Tabernacle. What it describes is almost exactly the same matzav in which Passover was observed this year in the land of Israel. To get a sense of what it’s about, you have to remember the end of Exodus, when the Tabernacle is first assembled. The text briefly explains that the Cloud concealing the atomic brightness of God’s Presence — his kavod — covers the Tabernacle, which is filled by the kavod. Then it adds this brief notice:

^{Exod 13:36} When the Cloud would lift off the Tabernacle, the Israelites would go on the march, for all their travels. ³⁷ But if it did not lift off, they would not march until it did.

Our chapter, Numbers 9, picks up on this notice, as I’ve explained elsewhere, and expands on it:

^{Num 9:19} When the Cloud stayed over the Tabernacle for a long time, the Israelites would keep the obligation imposed on them by YHWH and not march on. ²⁰ But sometimes the Cloud would stay over the Tabernacle for just a few days. At YHWH’s command they would camp, and at YHWH’s command they would march. ²¹ Sometimes the Cloud would just stay overnight and lift off in the morning, and they would march; or it might stay for a day and a night and then lift off, and they would march.

How do the Israelites — going about their daily lives — know when the Cloud is on the move? There’s an app for that! The priests blow the horns that are supposed to “alert the community and start the camps moving” (Num 10:2). The sirens we hear in Jerusalem are broadcast from the same “instruments” that tell us (at least here in Jerusalem) when the Sabbath is starting.

Think about it: With no advance notice, whenever the Cloud lifted, the Israelites would have to break camp and march after it, whether it was two days or a month or a year. Imagine that you are camped in the middle of nowhere (that’s what midbar means in Hebrew, not a desert like the Sahara but a deserted location) and at any moment, for 39 years, that Cloud lifts and you’ve got to get moving right away.

Those of us in Israel were in exactly that matzav this Passover, and we have been for the last month. At any moment — two minutes, two hours, or two days after the previous alert — the app and the sirens go off and we must head for our “protected spaces.” At least we don’t have to chase after our Protected Space the way the Israelites did. But the unpredictability of the alerts is no different.

Some people see photos of people sitting in cafés or shopping and think that life in Israel these days is perfectly normal. In fact, it is really imperfectly normal. Yet — attribute it to epigenetics or the pintele yid or what have you — imperfectly normal is the normal Jewish situation, and it has been since the very beginning. As ordinary as things might seem at first glance, we are on edge, just as our ancestors were, waiting for the Cloud to lift off the Tabernacle.

Our freedom from slavery began with a 40-year-long matzav, and the current matzav isn’t all that different. The more things change, the more they stay the same.