Bo

The sicha for parshas Bo is in Sefer Hasichos 5751.

The parsha begins with “bo el Pharaoh” where G-d says to Moshe “come to Pharaoh”. The parsha of Bo is unique, in that it describes yetziras Mitzraim. The parsha before, parshas Va’era speaks about the preparation for yetziras Mitzraim. The one after, parshas Beshaalach, talks about what happened when the Jews had already left Mitzraim, and were on their way to Matan Torah.

But parshas Bo is the parshas in which the actual going out of Mitzraim is described. So the essence of parshas Bo is yetziras Mitzraim. And yet we find that the name of the parsha is “bo el Pharaoh” which seems to imply a strength, an authority to Pharaoh, where Moshe has to go to Pharaoh, and convince him to let the Jews go. Also, instead of starting with the actual yetzira, the exodus from Mitzraim, it starts with the last three makos. It would seem to make more sense for all ten makos to be described in one parsha, and then have the new parsha begin with the actual exodus. Why have three makos described in the parsha of yetziras Mitzraim?

The Rebbe quotes a Zohar on parshas Bo. The Zohar says why does it say “bo el Pharaoh”, come to Pharaoh, and not lech l’Pharaoh, go to Pharaoh? The Zohar says that Moshe was afraid to go because Pharaoh was so powerful, the kelipah of Pharaoh was so strong that G-d had to say to him, come I will go with you, We will go together to Pharaoh and wage war against this kelipah in order to complete destroy it.

This explains why in this parsha where it says bo el Pharaoh, it is not followed by any message. In parshas Va’era, where it also says bo el Pharaoh, there it is an introduction to what Moshe is supposed to say to Pharaoh; “bo el Pharaoh, v’dibarta elav…”, go to Pharaoh and say to him…, whereas in this parsha bo el Pharaoh is not followed by any message. Instead G-d says come to Pharaoh, I will harden his heart. What is Moshe supposed to say? There is no message.

So this is an independent, separate event, that G-d says to Moshe, bo el Pharaoh, come to Pharaoh, that itself is the event. As the Zohar goes on to say, G-d took Moshe into chamber within chamber, idrim bosar idrim, getting closer and closer to the core, to the strength and to the permanence of this kelipah of Mitzraim, of Pharaoh, in order to break the kelipah at its source. Not only did G-d take Moshe into the palace, into the house of the king, but he went into the innermost chamber, where the king is most secure, in his dwelling place and there he was nullified.

We see how the Torah describes this bitul, when the Torah says, v’yakom Pharaoh lila. Pharaoh got up in the middle of the night, which is already a disturbance of the order in which kings live – it is not normal for a king to get up in the middle of the night and as Rashi says, he ran around from house to house among his servants to wake them up. Then he went from door to door asking where is Moshe, where is Aaron. All of this shows that the permanence, the security and the established reality of the kelipah of Pharaoh was so disrupted and disturbed that he had to run around – the opposite of security and strength – from door to door looking to save his own existence, to save his own life. As it says in the end, Pharaoh asked that he shouldn’t be among the first born who were going to die. He was literally afraid he was going to die.

We see the emphasis here is that while Pharaoh is in his strongest position, when the kelipah is at its most powerful, that’s where Moshe has to go to destroy him, and that’s why Moshe hesitated. So G-d said, bo el Pharaoh, come with Me, We will go together, not a messenger, not a malach, but G-d Himself will go to destroy the power, source of this kelipah. Therefore the purpose of these makos, these plagues were not only to prevail on Pharaoh to let the Yidden go. In addition to getting the Yidden out of Egypt, there was also this project, this need to destroy Mitzraim,  to  break the  kelipah  until  Mitzraim  itself  starts  to  recognize
G-dliness. And where does that have to happen? It has to happen in the core, at the strongest fortified position of the kelipah.

We find that the whole story of Mitzraim, including the coming out of Mitzraim, began when G-d promised Avraham that Eretz Israel would be the Jewish land. In order for this to happen, G-d wanted that we should go through a process by which through our effort and not only as a gift from above, we should make “eretz” an earthy unholy thing, into Eretz Israel, a holy land, turning earthiness into heavenliness.

So  right at the beginning of  the promise of  the inheritance of  Eretz Israel,
G-d says to Avraham, you should know that your children will be enslaved by a foreign nation, and that then I will judge that nation and they will be punished, and then your children will come out with a great wealth and then this land which I am promising you will become theirs and they will settle in the land.

This means that part of yetziras Mitzraim was a preparation for coming into Eretz Israel, of turning Eretz Israel into a holy land. And not only Eretz Israel itself, but also that eventually Eretz Israel will spread throughout the whole world so that all the lands will become holy. In all the lands we will be able to see G-dliness, see the Creator affecting His creation, as it says that not only Jews in Eretz Israel will see G-dliness, but that G-d will be revealed to all flesh.

In order for this to happen there first has to be the golus Mitzraim. First the Jews have to come down to a land that is not theirs, a land that doesn’t belong to G-dliness. On the contrary, it fights against G-dliness. And being that it is the lowest and the most corrupt of lands, it is lowest of the low. And even  so, as the  Jews  come  down  into Mitzraim,  the  Jew   remains
G-dly. “Vayechi Yakov”, the true life of Yakov was possible even in Mitzraim.

However that doesn’t change Mitzraim. So beyond that, we also have to affect Mitzraim, by bringing a birur, a purification of Mitzraim, and that comes in two general forms. In every kelipah, there are sparks of holiness that have fallen into the kelipah. So the first stage of birur, of purification of anything that is unholy, is that we release the G-dliness that is there. How do we see this concerning Mitzraim? It says that when the Yidden left Mitzraim, that there was an eruv rav, the wise people of Mitzraim, who converted and went with the Yidden out of Mitzraim. So the good part rose and separated from the evil, leaving Mitzraim along with the Jews. Those were the sparks of holiness that came out with the Yidden.

The same is also true with physical objects. Using all the wealth of Mitzraim, all gold and silver that they took from Egypt, to build the Mishkan, that also was taking the useful, taking the potential G-dly and raising it up to where its G-dliness is released from the kelipah and can express itself in a G-dly way, to be used for a G-dly purpose. That’s the first stage of refining the kelipah.

The second stage is, those parts of the kelipah that cannot be used, cannot be elevated to holiness, have no potential function in the world of holiness, then the positive resolution of this kind of kelipah is that it is destroyed and broken, that dissolving it and destroying it increases holiness in the world. As it says concerning in Tzur, Tyre, that when Tzur is full, Yerushalayim is empty, so that Yerushalayim can’t be complete until Tzur has been destroyed. Tzur grew through the destruction of Yerushalayim. In order for Yerushalayim to be complete, Tzur has to stop existing. In order for kedusha to be in its full strength, the kelipah has to lose its strength completely.

We find also in the makos themselves, these two aspects. The purpose of the maka was in order to prevail on Pharaoh that he should send the Jews out of Mitzraim. In other words, whatever goodness Pharaoh has should come to the surface, and he should not only allow Jews to go but send Jews out of Mitzraim. But then there is another function of the maka, and that is to break Mitzraim until Mitzraim says that there is nothing left of the kelipah of Mitzraim that resists G-d but instead that they will know that G-d is G-d.

After this we have yetziras Mitzraim – after the kelipah is broken, then there can be a true exodus from Egypt, a true leaving of Egypt because there is nothing left to Egypt that should be again interfere with holiness, or with Yidden. And then from the land of Mitzraim, metzar meaning constriction, narrowness, we go to Eretz tova u’rahava, the opposite of metzar, of restriction, to a land that is open and wide, a true freedom. And that is when Eretz Israel becomes a dwelling place for G-d.

Now we will understand why the name of the parsha, which describes yetziras Mitzraim, is bo el Pharaoh, including also the end of the parsha where the parsha speaks about the mitzvah of tefillin which didn’t really become a mitzvah until the Jews came into the land of Israel. Yetziras Mitzraim, leaving behind, getting out of that condition that resists holiness, in its truest and fullest form, can only come about when the opposition to holiness is completely broken. Not so much when you take the holiness out of the unholy – the first part of the birur – but more in the breaking of that part of the kelipah that can’t be used for holiness – the useless part.

And this is hinted at by naming the parsha bo el Pharaoh, to tell us that the essence of yetziras Mitzraim, the main part of true exodus, is the breaking of Pharaoh that is the useless part of Pharaoh. And that’s why it is “bo el Pharaoh” come to Pharaoh, Pharaoh in his strength, in his security. There wage war against him, not in order to get him to let the Jews go but in order to break the kelipah itself.

As the Rebbe will give an example later, when a person has a tivah, a passion to sin, in that passion there are two parts. There is the passion itself, the fact that the person is passionate and enjoys pleasure, and then there is the particular kind of behavior that he imagines will bring him pleasure. Concerning the tivah itself, that is neutral and it could be used for holiness. You could be passionately good or passionately holy. But the form, the particular expression of pleasure that the person is imagining which is sinful, that is useless and has to be rejected and destroyed completely that there should be nothing left of it. A person however should not destroy his capacity for pleasure.

So what brings the true geulah, the true exodus from Mitzraim? Not so much the fact that the Mitzraim could be good on occasion but that that part of Mitzraim that can’t be good is completely removed and destroyed.

During the Persian Gulf war, the Rebbe said a similar idea concerning the security, strength and well-being of Yerushalayim - how it is dependent on the destruction of the security and well-being of Hussein and Iraq. When Hussein had to go hiding and leave the palace, and go from one bunker to another, that was like Pharaoh running around from door to door, trying to find Moshe and Aaron, which was the destruction of his security, which took away the very core of his strength.

And that’s why the parsha ends with the mitzvah of tefillin. The mitzvah of tefillin represents all mitzvahs and all mitzvahs we will fulfill properly and fully when we are settled into the Eretz Israel, the palace of the King, HaKodesh Boruch Hu, in Yerushalayim, in the Bais HaMikdash, and then we will be able to fulfill all the mitzvahs in the fullest way, the way G-d really wants.

Concerning our golus today the Rebbe says that in avodah, the lesson we get from the parsha is that Eretz Israel is different from all other lands, Mitzraim, Bavel and so on, in that Eretz Israel is holiness, and other lands are hol, weekday, secular, and the idea is that we have turn the secular into holiness, bring the holiness of Eretz Israel to every other land. In addition to doing mitzvahs wherever we go, doing what is holy even in a land that is not holy, there is also the avodah of taking that which is secular, weekday, and using it in such a way that it too becomes holy. Through that we turn every land into an Eretz Israel.

Mitzraim also refers to those lands that restrict us from kedushah, and Bavel to those lands that confuse us, Bavel meaning confusion. Those parts of Mitzraim and Bavel that cannot be used l’shem shamayim, for a mitzvah, the only way to correct them, is by nullifying them, as for example as mentioned before, a person who has the capacity for pleasure but takes on a negative form of pleasure – finding this pleasure in a sin. So the capacity for pleasure itself you have to turn into good, to rechannel it, whereas the particular sinful image or picture that the desire is looking for, that has to be destroyed completely. That unholy thought, that sinful possibility has to be removed from the world and from the person’s mind and heart completely, like the burning of the red heifer, until there is nothing left but the ash, a natural substance. The ash itself is neutral as is the capacity for pleasure. It can remain but the form that it took on was unholy – that form has to be burned and destroyed.

So a sinful thought should never happen again but the pleasure behind the thought now has to be channeled into holiness. Similarly with the avodah of breaking and removing completely the evil that we learnt from “bo el Pharaoh” where G-d takes Moshe to chamber within chamber in order to wage war against Pharaoh. This tells us that right from the start we have to attack the unholiness where it is strongest, in its most secure position. As a result, if we can break that, then all the details and all the rest of the kelipah will fall away by itself. And so concerning our own avodah, improving ourselves, the first thing we have to do is to completely break the complacency, the security, that part of the unholiness within us that is strongest and when we break the stronghold the rest falls away.

It is possible that if we try to attack the unholiness in its most fortified position, we could be intimidated and afraid. To this G-d says to the little bit of Moshe that is within each other, “bo el Pharaoh,” G-d takes us, He doesn’t just send us, He says come, let Us together wage war against the kelipah, G-d Himself comes to take us out of this kelipah, out of Mitzraim.

Now this Mitzraim and Bavel, the restrictions and the confusions that a Jew might have are different for each person. There is the person for him the restriction and the confusion expresses itself in his Yiddishkeit, in his mitzvahs, in his avodas Hashem. Then there is another person for whom the effect of golus is on his physical life. He is restricted and confused because of his physical conditions – he doesn’t have peace of mind, he doesn’t have parnassa. Since we are all G-d’s children, and it is the nature of a father that when he hears his child cry even if he is crying over insignificant, unimportant things, and that’s because he is a child so he does get upset about insignificant things, yet the father hastens to fulfill the child’s desire before he tries to reeducate the child to be concerned with more important things.  The same is true when a Jew feels restricted or confused because he is lacking what he needs in the physical, G-d rushes to fulfill that desire and to remove the restriction and the confusion, so that the Jew can serve G-d through contentment and comfort. As it says, G-d opens His hand and provides for all living things what they want. Each person according to what it is that he wants.

And if this is true concerning those things that we ask of G-d that are really not so important, it is certainly true when the son demands of his father that which is valid and true and that is that we demand that G-d take every Jew and G-d Himself, the Shechina, out of golus. Then it is certain that G-d will hasten to fulfill the child’s demand, the demand of every Jew, of all generations, to take us out of golus permanently, that there should never be another golus, and even if we are not yet on the highest level of G-dliness, we find that G-d takes Jews out of all of their problems, and after He has solved their problems, then He will solve our spiritual problems – He will take us away from sin. So we don’t have to wait until every Jew is a tzaddik, G-d should take us out of our suffering immediately and then we will correct our sin and do the proper tshuvah.

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