Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. The reason for the feast is the Exodus itself — this very day. The specificity of the calendar connection — same day, annually — ties the liturgical calendar to historical memory. The phrase your divisions reappears: Israel leaves Egypt not as a scattered group but as an organized people with tribal and family structure. The phrase for the generations to come appears for the third time in this chapter: the Passover instructions are designed to be transmitted, to outlast the generation that first observed them, to create a community that shares a memory across millennia. Deuteronomy 26:5–9 commands every Israelite to recite the Exodus story at the firstfruits offering: a wandering Aramean was my father...

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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