Where Will the Past Go?

i
Two men of Israel fight in the Desert.

One of the men is of Egyptian descent. He blasphemes the Name of God.

*
The People has carried its Egyptian past, its past among heathens, all the way with it into God’s Desert. Yet now Israel has become the People of God.

So the People bears great contradiction: Israelite, Egyptian, heathen, holy; it is no surprise that such contradiction will emerge in struggle.

ii
Rav Soloveitchik says: sometimes our past is so sinful that we must entirely reject it. But at other times a sinful past can be transformed--can be redeemed--into the building-blocks of a new life.

iii
God commands that the blasphemer be put to death.

But God also says, You shall have one system of Law for the foreigner and the citizen alike.

One system for those born as Israelites, and for those born as foreigners.

One system for those born as Israelites, and for those born as heathens.

One system for those born into the new life, and for the people who have lived the past.

*
So that the unholy past and the holy present may be subsumed, together, into God’s new kingdom.

Comments

[Heilige Apikores]

Rashi on Aseret Hadibrot strangely remarks that 'Anochi' - rather than the more common 'Ani' - is actually, etymologically, an Egyptian word. The significance of starting revelation with a non-hebrew word (cf. Freud's Moses and Monotheism and its exploration in E.Said's book Freud and the Non-European)

S. Carlebach once said that on erev shabbat at Boi Kala, we turn around and face the back because we are facing our past: to confront the last six days we've endured and all the shit we've done and embracing that, we enter shabbos...

[Abraham Mezrich]

Thank you so much for sharing that, H.A. (and a wonderful screen name, I should add). Fascinating that, according to Rav Carlebach, we confront the past at the climactic moment of "Boi Kalah" (and not, say, just at the beginning of Kaballat Shabbat). I wonder if there's another parallel there: the Egyptian blasphemer appearing immediately after the conclusion of setting up of the Tent / Mishkan, but just before we embark through the Desert; our embracing our past week just at the end of Licha Dodi, but before we really enter into Arvit.

(Or is that the point you were driving at all along?)

Kol tuv, ~a