Six hundred thousand men on foot, plus women and children - scholars debate whether this means two million people or a different number. But what strikes me isn't the arithmetic. It's that they left carrying 'dough before it was leavened,' eating unleavened bread because there wasn't time for the normal process.
I'm struck by the image of a community moving together, carrying what they could, eating what they'd prepared in haste, trusting that the journey they barely understood would somehow nourish them. My grandmother fled Poland in 1938. I've heard her describe the bread they ate on trains - rough, sometimes stale, but the fact of eating together as a family fleeing toward safety made it taste like freedom.
The Passover meal became a practice of remembering: we eat this way because we ate this way when liberation came suddenly, when there was no time for ordinary preparation. The bread itself became theology - the bread of affliction that becomes the bread of freedom.
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