What would you command Israel? What core values would you want to instill in Israel as the basis for this new phase in Israelite life?: Belief in God? Following the Laws of God? Treating others correctly? Living a moral and ethical life?
No. None of the above.
The first commandment God gives after Egypt is to abandon the solar calendar and to establish a lunar calendar. It almost sounds like a Public Service Announcement – we are now on Jewish Solar Time.
Upon examination, however, this commandment is not so simplistic. It is much more complex, because it requires an entirely new way of thinking – and an abandonment of the world view that Israel had lived under for 400 years in Egypt. Egyptians worshipped the sun as a primary god – if you made the Sun-god happy, good things would happen to you. Likewise, they worshipped the Nile, the source of fertility. If the Nile-god was happy, it would flood when it was supposed to, and there would be no famine.
What’s in it for me? That was the basis of Egyptian worship.
But the moon reflects the light of the sun to a world in darkness. By establishing a lunar calendar, Israel was accepting that, just as our relationship with the moon is not based on what we can get from the moon, our relationship with the Divine is not based on what we can get from God. Rather, our Jewish religious view is based on the relationship we develop with the higher elements of our world. We are partners with God in the creation and recreation of the world.
In Egypt religion was based on what we could get. Once we left Egypt, it became based on what we could give. That, in fact, was God’s first commandment to Israel once we were freed from Egyptian bondage: to give is better than to receive.
B’Shalom
Rabbi Stanley Halpern