When God Could Not Wait – Parshat Bo

“What would you grab if your house was on fire?”

It’s a classic icebreaker question, the kind asked at youth groups and dinner parties to reveal what people truly value. We imagine ourselves making rapid calculations – photos, heirlooms, the irreplaceable. We think we know what we’d choose when seconds matter.

On a cold erev Shabbat in 2021, my house actually burned down. I took nothing.

Not because I’m some enlightened minimalist who had transcended material attachment. I took nothing because there wasn’t time. Real haste, the kind where flames decide your timeline, doesn’t allow for the orderly prioritization we imagine when the question is hypothetical. There’s no neat narrative of grabbing family photos and passports on the way out the door. There’s only the desperate scramble to ensure everyone gets out alive, and then standing on the lawn watching everything else disappear into smoke.

That night taught me something: when there is no time, there is no agency. You get rescue, not redemption. Something that happens TO you, not transformation that works THROUGH you. This is the haste of exodus. This is חיפזון. This is also the story of the Jewish people.

Parshat Bo culminates in the dramatic exodus from Egypt, an event so central to Jewish identity that we are commanded to remember it daily. At the heart of this narrative lies this defining characteristic: haste. The word “בחיפזון” (in haste) only appears three times in Tanach.. In Parshat Bo, we are commanded to eat the korban Pesach “בחיפזון,” “in haste.” In Devarim (16:3), we recall “כי בחפזון יצאת מארץ מצרים” – “that we left Egypt in haste,” thusly becoming the reason we even eat matza on Passover. However, the final use of this term appears in Yeshayahu’s prophecy regarding the ultimate redemption, and here something remarkable happens. The Navi, Yeshayahu, promises “כי לא בחפזון תצאו” that we will not leave in haste. While our ancestors fled Egypt in desperate urgency, the final redemption will unfold with the measured pace of a people who finally have time, slowly, deliberately, with dignity rather than panic. If God hastened to redeem us from Egypt, but promises to walk with us in the future, what does that tell us about where we stand today and what we must do to complete the journey from slavery to freedom?

The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael (Tractate Pischa 7:2-4) presents a fascinating three-way disagreement about whose haste the Torah describes when commanding us to eat the Pesach offering “בחפזון.” The Egyptians, terrified of more plagues? The Israelites, afraid Pharaoh would change his mind again? Or, perhaps most strikingly, Abba Channan says: the haste belonged to God.”

God wanted to redeem us from Egypt and He wanted to do it fast.

This seems counterintuitive. After all, our ancestors endured over 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Where was the haste in that? The haste of the Shechina refers not to the timing of when redemption would arrive, but to how it would unfold once the moment came. The Mechilta teaches that even though the Jews were destined to be in Egypt for over 400 years, when the predetermined time finally arrived, God did not delay redemption by even a single moment.

Rav Kook in Olat Re’iya explains that haste reveals something essential about this redemption. “Natural processes unfold gradually, subject to the flow of time. But Israel’s redemption transcended nature. It operated on a supernatural plane, above and beyond temporal constraints. The haste demonstrated that this was not a normal, historical development but a Divine intervention that compressed what should have taken generations, into a single night.” 

That being said, the haste of this redemption suggests that it was also incomplete. Just as we know that the Jewish people did not have time to even let the dough rise into bread, the people themselves did not have time to metabolize their impending redemption. This was not an orderly evacuation. Not a planned departure. Not a thoughtful gathering of belongings. This was: desperate, Divine, rescue. This redemption happened TO them, not THROUGH them.

This incomplete internalization isn’t just ancient history, but also our current struggle. Thought leader and International Vice President of Educational Strategy for Taglit-Birthright Israel, Dr. Zohar Raviv, shares that the danger of redemption born from haste is that it cannot be adequately internalized. He articulates this challenge in his critique of Jewish identity formation when he says that, “we cannot sustain a healthy people on a perpetual diet of external crisis.”

When identity is forged in reaction to threat rather than proactively cultivated from within, we become defined by what happened TO us, rather than by what we are building THROUGH us. Raviv insists that identity must emerge “based on the inner mechanisms of Jewish life, rather than based on external threats to Jewish living.” The hasty exodus from Egypt, necessary and miraculous as it was, created precisely this predicament. The Israelites had no time to internalize their liberation, no opportunity to develop the spiritual infrastructure that would make them active agents of their own freedom. They emerged from Egypt with unleavened bread and an identity rooted in escape, in slavery, plagues, and Divine rescue, but without the inner preparation that transforms rescue into genuine redemption.

With this understanding, the final use of the word “בחיפזון (in haste) in Tanach becomes more striking. When Yeshayahu says of the final redemption of the Jewish people:

 “כי לא בחפזון תצאו ובמנוסה לא תלכון כי־הלך לפניכם יהוה ומאספכם אלהי ישראל”    

“For you will not depart in haste, nor will you leave in flight;

For God is walking before you. The God of Israel is your rear guard.”

We are meant to understand:

You will NOT depart in haste: NOT in panic, NOT in flight, NOT snatching unleavened bread as you run.
For God is WALKING before you:
walking, not running,
walking, not rushing,
walking, because finally, there is time.

Returning to Abba Channan’s insight about the haste of the Shechina, we can now appreciate a deeper dimension. In Egypt, even God could not wait. But the prophecy of the future redemption promises that God will walk before us – walk, not run. The ultimate redemption allows for a measured pace because each of us is contributing to the work of preparation.

We live in the space between these two redemptions. We are both the inheritors of the haste of Egypt and still working toward the completion of the future. The haste of our redemption from Egypt pulled us from a spiritual abyss before we descended too far, but it also left us with work to do, the same work that Dr. Raviv challenges us to embrace. Standing on the lawn that erev Shabbat in 2021, watching my house burn with nothing in my hands, I was defined entirely by what had happened TO me. But the work that followed – rebuilding, choosing what to create rather than merely replacing what was lost, that happened THROUGH me. This is the invitation before us as a people: to move beyond an identity forged solely in reaction to crisis, trauma, and external threat, and instead to proactively cultivate who we are from within.

We are tasked both as individuals and as a nation to put in the labor of building, growing, and developing our spiritual lives and our society, not because antisemitism demands it, not because history requires it, but because this is the essence of being Jewish. When we do this work, when we root ourselves in the inner mechanisms of Jewish life, rather than merely responding to external threats, we inch closer to Yeshayahu’s vision. Parshat Bo reminds us to celebrate the haste: the passion, urgency, and Divine intervention that created us, but also to anticipate with hope the day described by Yeshayahu, when redemption will be complete and permanent, when we will walk out, not in panicked haste, but with the dignity of a people who have arrived home at last.