ספר שמות

Exodus 11,4. “Moses said: ‘thus has the ‎Lord said, etc.;’” we have to understand why the ‎expression ‎כה‎ was used here to introduce Moses’ ‎prophecy when we had learned that whereas all the ‎other prophets introduced their prophecies with this ‎word, Moses prophesied by using the vision he ‎referred to as ‎זה‎, “this,” i.e. as a clear vision.‎We gain the impression from this preamble to the ‎prophecy of the plague of the death of the firstborn ‎that Moses had not been granted to see this vision as ‎clearly as he had seen other visions, and that he had ‎attained the level of seeing visions described as ‎זה‎, only ‎at the revelation at Mount Sinai. In Exodus 19,1 we ‎read ‎ביום הזה באו מדבר סיני‎, “on this day (first of Sivan) ‎they arrived in the desert of Sinai.”‎The words of that verse help us understand the ‎formulation of the question in Deuteronomy 6,20, ‎attributed in the ‎ Haggadah shel Pessach to ‎the “smart” son, ‎מה העדות והחוקים והמשפטים‎, “what are the ‎testimonies, the statutes and the social laws, etc.?” The ‎Torah there should have written: ‎על מה‎, i.e.” why were ‎these laws given,” not “what are these laws”, seeing ‎that the questioner had demonstrated that he was ‎familiar with these laws already!‎Looking at this verse purely from the ‎‎p’shat,, the “smart” son appears to enquire for ‎the reasons underlying these various types of ‎commandments in the Torah. He does not address the ‎commandments themselves. Seeing that this is so, he ‎should have asked: ‎על מה‎, “why or what for”, did G’d ‎command these different observances? Not only do we ‎find the formulation of the questions difficult to ‎understand, but, at least in the Haggadah shel ‎Pessach, [as opposed to the answer given ‎in the written Torah, Ed.] how does the ‎answer of ‎אין מפטירין אחר הפסח אפיקומן‎, “one must not eat a ‎dessert after having consumed the meat of the ‎Passover offering,” answer the question?The ‎proper answer to the smart son’s question is that G’d ‎took us out of Egypt using all kinds of supernatural ‎miracles in doing so, and that this redemption was not ‎a temporary redemption subject to being reversed, but ‎that it made of the Jewish people a free people, a ‎people never again to become enslaved collectively. ‎Not only did the Egyptians “let us go,” but they tried to ‎‎“expel” us out of fear that more of their number would ‎die if we stayed on their soil a minute longer. The ‎answer that the author of the Haggadah shel ‎Pessach suggests that the father give to this ‎‎“smart” son seems to leave out the principal reasons ‎for the legislation by concentrating on something of ‎secondary or even still lesser significance.‎