Parashat Bo
23rd January 2026
Week of 18 -24 January 2026
Torah portion : Exodus 10 :1-13 :16 ; Haftarah : Jeremiah 46 :13-28
This Shabbat, Parashat BO (בא), marks two important moments in the history of the Jewish people in Egypt: firstly, we read the account of the last three plagues against Egypt: the locusts, darkness, and the death of all the firstborn of Egypt.
As we saw in relation to the seven previous plagues, there is a crescendo in intensity from the first plague to the last. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart so that He can show His greatness. However, each time God, through Moses and Aaron, presents Pharaoh with the possibility of avoiding the next punishment: letting his people go free to serve Him outside the land of Egypt, and Pharaoh resists in an attempt to prove that he is stronger, that he has the power.
With the locusts, God destroys the wealth of Pharaoh’s empire: there is no more food for the people. With the darkness, God presents himself as the Lord of light, and Pharaoh becomes completely powerless before the phenomenon of nature, and the last plague destroys Pharaoh’s continuity: the son who would signify his continuity is dead. We learn that the great power and strength of this world, represented by Pharaoh, is completely dominated. These descriptions teach us God’s pedagogy: by showing his greatness and power before Pharaoh, He reveals himself to the Jewish people, his people, as the One who performs great wonders and that He is the Unique God, the Creator of all things, and outside of Him there is no other.
The second aspect of this Parasha is the establishment of the Pesach festival. The liberation of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom. The account describes the reason for and manner of celebrating Pesach, establishing the commandment to remember this act of God in favor of his people. However, what is striking is that the Torah establishes as a commandment the teaching of the story and its transmission to the child. The most challenging aspect is that Judaism is based on this act of telling the story from generation to generation, answering the child’s question: there is the newcomer who wants to learn and there is the one who has the experience of the past and has the duty to tell the story.
Let’s look at the following quotes to see how the act of leaving Egypt unfolds:
– “And when your children ask you, what does this ceremony mean to you? then tell them, it is the Pesach sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when He struck down the Egyptians “ (Ex 12: 26-27)
– “On that day tell your child, I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt “(Ex 13:8).
– “ In days to come, when your child asks you, what does this mean? say to him, with a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex 13: 14).
It’s practically the constitution of Jewish identity, as it says in the Haggadah of Pesach: “Every Jew is as if he left Egypt”. Levinas, the great contemporary Jewish philosopher, says: “The trauma of my enslavement in Egypt constitutes my very humanity”, (Emmauel Lévinas, Encyclopaedia Universalis, Dictionaire du Judaïsme, Albin Michel, 1998, p. 408). He is stating that his being a person (Jewish) is a result of the trauma he experienced in Egypt.
That is, this reality of slavery remains in the Jewish being from generation to generation, it constitutes the Jewish being, but in the same way the reality of being liberated by God remains. Suffering is followed by liberation wrought by God. Israel witnesses the suffering caused by the power of the world and at the same time witnesses the power of God who liberates his people and overcomes the power that the world represents.
It is in this sense that the Mishnah teaches that the pedagogy for telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt must begin with the human reality of suffering and conclude with God’s liberating action: “The parent should teach according to the intelligence and personality of each child. Begin with describing the degradation and culminate with the liberation” (Misnhah Pesachim 10, 2).
This week’s Parasha Commentary was prepared by
Elio Passeto, NDS,Jerusalem–Israel, Director
[Copyright © 2026]
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