Shabbat Ha-Chodesh (Jason Bryer)

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Shabbat Shalom.

Today is Shabbat Ha-Chodesh, which is the Shabbat before Rosh Chodesh, or the beginning of the month, which will be Nissan. Nissan is significant because it was originally the first month of the year in the times of the Bible. In honor of Shabbat ha-Chodesh, we read a special maftir, the portion from the second Torah, from Sh’mot chapter 12. My maftir aliyah, which comes from Parashat Bo, is set when God is about to unleash the tenth plague: death of the first-born. God tells the Children of Israel to slaughter their best lamb and take the blood to smear on the doorposts, since that will be a sign to God that the plague should skip over their houses. 

When reading my maftir, one pasuk stood out:

“For that night I will go through the land of Egypt, and strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, I will mete out punishments to all the gods of Egypt, I the Lord.”

God is saying that this is the tenth plague: he will go through the nation of Egypt and kill every first born of any living being. He will sabotage the Egyptians gods because He is God and because He is the highest deity.

But wait: are there other Gods?

Are there other gods out there besides HaShem who are mighty and powerful, who have followers?

I have been taught to believe that there is one God, HaShem, and that He is the only God and we should worship him, but in this text and other texts like the 10 commandments, it never specifically states that there are no other gods besides HaShem – in fact, it does acknowledge other gods.

Rashi; an eleventh century commentator, who wrote commentaries on the tanakh and Talmud, says that when God says that he is going to execute judgments on the other gods, he means that he is going to rot the wooden idols and dissolve the metal ones.

In the 10 commandments, it says that you shouldn’t worship other gods, and also, you can’t say that God means idols instead of gods because the third commandment says that you should not worship idols like you worship Hashem. In the ten commandments, Rashi says that you cannot call them “gods” because they are not equal to Hashem and that Hashem is before all of the other “gods”

In this Pasuk it says that God is going to execute judgments on these other “gods”. I believe that we should acknowledge that other gods exist for people who practice other religions, but, we as Jews should only believe in, and worship Hashem.

So when we sit down at our Passover Seder, we should remember that God brought us out of Egypt and kept our ancestors safe when he slayed the first born Egyptians and executed judgments on their gods. May we give thanks for this and think about how God continues to help us today.

Shabbat Shalom.