Only in Israel!
Recently I was privileged to attend a truly unique and inspiring gathering in the pastoral setting of Park Ayalon, the “Central Park” of our neighborhood in Ramat Beit Shemesh Aleph.
More than a thousand people were in attendance, most of them children brought by their yeshivot. The occasion? A rare performance of the mitzvah of pidyon peter chamor, the redemption of a firstborn donkey.
This mitzvah, primarily related to remembering our deliverance from Egypt, is referenced twice explicitly and once implicitly in the Torah, including Shemos 13:13: “You shall redeem every firstborn donkey with a lamb; if you do not redeem it you must break the back of its neck with an ax; every firstborn person among your sons you should redeem [at the cost of five biblical shekalim].”
The procedure for this mitzvah is to give a pedigreed kohen the payment of a lamb (or its financial equivalent), which releases one’s firstborn donkey from its status of assur b’hana’a – not being permissible for any use or benefit.
In our case, it was an actual lamb, and the receiving kohen was the venerable Rabbi Simcha HaKohen Kook, chief rabbi of the city of Rechovot.
We all watched the adorable donkey (30 days old), along with his lamb substitute, both bedecked and decorated for the occasion to the delight of everyone, especially the children. As the presentation of the lamb took place we all recited, together with Rabbi Kook, the relevant berachah and Shehechiyanu. The blessings were followed by joyous singing and dancing.
Reflecting on the event, I was intrigued by two questions:
1) Why did the verse we quoted above specifically link the redemption of a firstborn donkey and the redemption a firstborn Jewish son, the more commonly known ceremony called pidyon haben?
2) Why would the Torah demand that a donkey that is not redeemed be beheaded in a rather cruel fashion?
The Rambam and the Sefer HaChinuch count as a mitzvah the beheading of a donkey the owner refuses to redeem with a lamb or its equivalent in money. The Ra’avad decries the Rambam’s words in Mishneh Torah (Laws of Bachorim, chapter 12, halacha 1):
“Thus sayeth Abraham, by my life this is not a proper derived teaching, and it’s also completely illogical to think that there would be a positive command to behead this donkey; rather, it is a sin and destruction, and the perpetrator should be called a destroyer of the wealth the kohen is entitled to.”
In answer to my first question, Rashi offers two explanations of this Divine decree, one of which is that according to our tradition, no Jew left Egypt without many donkeys laden with the silver and gold of Egypt. The Jewish firstborn sons left with donkeys laden with riches, while the Egyptian sons were destroyed. Therefore, in this verse our remembrance is twofold: the destruction of the Egyptian firstborn in contradistinction to the spectacular redemption of the Jewish firstborn leaving Egypt not only alive and well but with vast wealth.
On a deeper level, one can understand that wealth and worldliness are specifically what the bondage in Egypt was all about. Pharaoh forced the Jews to build him treasure cities, pitting the acquisition of immense wealth against the destruction of the very lives of the Jewish people. The Midrash recounts that Pharaoh decreed that if the quota of bricks for his treasure pyramids were insufficient, the gaps would instead be sealed with the bodies of Jewish infants.
The message seems clear: wealth dedicated to the service of Hashem and mankind is holy, arising out of impurity and helping to building a sacred world, symbolized by the Mishkan that would eventually be assembled from the gold and silver the donkeys carried on their backs out of Egyptian defilement and bondage
It’s interesting to note that the word chamor (donkey) in this verse is spelled without a vav, which means it can be read as chomer, or material. The donkey used for work and transportation symbolizes the quest for material wealth. Indeed, the Rambam suggests in The Guide to the Perplexed that this mitzvah pertains to donkeys specifically because they were the animals everyone used for basic transportation and work, as opposed to horses and camels, which were not as commonly owned.
The donkey is the symbol of the tribe of Yissachar, those who devoted their lives to Torah study, supported by their business partner, the tribe of Zevulun, in a classic partnership known as Yissachar-Zevulun.
The answer to our second question flows from the first answer. One can suggest the Torah is teaching that a person’s refusal to link chomer to support the cause of kedushah (not giving the kohen a gift to redeem his donkey) renders the donkey assur b’hana’a, symbolizing the type of unholy material wealth no one should aspire to.
Several weeks ago we all heard about another “tail” of deliverance, also related to Egypt, when American Pharoah won horseracing’s greatest prize, the Triple Crown. American Pharoah (for some reason the horse’s name is misspelled as “Pharoah” rather than the correct “Pharaoh”) is owned by a Sabbath-observant Egyptian-born American Jew.
It was widely publicized that on the eve of the third and final Triple Crown race, the Mexican jockey who rode the horse to victory went to pray for success at the gravesite of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Queens. It was touching to see a non-Jew placing his faith in the sanctity of a kohen-like tzaddik. Needless to say, his prayers appeared to have been answered.
I learned afterward from my good friend Nelson Obus of Princeton, New Jersey, who visited Israel soon after the race, that horseracing experts he knew had expected American Pharoah to fail miserably in the third race for a variety of reasons – its tender age, the longer distance involved, and the horse’s own solid but unspectacular racing history.
American Pharoah not only triumphed but in the final furlongs outperformed by a full second every other horse in Belmont history save one, including the famed 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat.
I was inspired to learn that this was something of a miracle performance. Both “tails” strengthened my conviction that attaching ourselves in our material quests to kedushah and tzaddikim can bring both redemption and deliverance.