פרשת בא Parshat Bo

בס״ד

My local shul’s post-kiddish class on Chassidut has been studying weekly teachings on the parsha from Art Green’s “To Dwell Within Them”.

This week for Parshat Bo most of the class focused on the plague of darkness accentuated fittingly by the class’s insistence on leaving the lights off and opening the window covers. To end on a lighter note (pun totally intended)… we wrapped up our learning with the following text:

“בא אל פרעה “Come to Pharaoh (10:1).” All the commentators ask why the text says “Come” rather than “Go.” A brief Hasidic comment from the Me’or ‘Eynayim: Bo is spelled bet aleph. Only when you see the One (aleph) hidden behind the mask of “twoness,” duality (bet) will you have the courage to deal with Pharaoh.

This implies, at least, that Y-H-W-H, Source of all, is present in Pharaoh as well. Approaching him, as is true of every other situation in life, is a coming close to Y-H-W-H.” (Green)

Reading about the bet and aleph brought to mind an illustration of a bet inset within an aleph in R’ Aryeh Kaplan’s commentary on the Bahir.

Figure 3 (Kaplan 7)

Bahir 15 states “… if not for the Bet on the Alef, the world could not exist.” (Kaplan 7)

Now, this text in Bahir is talking about the Divine, humans, and the creation of the world… but as in all good Kabbalistic metaphors, I found another connection between Green’s text above and Bahir 15 that I found both interesting and meaningful in light of recent personal events. 

Green continues with a teaching from the Ba’al Shem Tov:

“Pharaoh’s words quoted in the Song at the Sea: אמר אויב ארדוף אשיג אחלק שלל – “The enemy said: I shall pursue, catch up, divide the spoils.” These five words in a row beginning with aleph – found only here in the Torah – teach us that Y-H-W-H, the Cosmic Aleph, is to be found everywhere, even behind the most grotesque masks of evil.” (Green)

I won’t take the duality of good and evil quite as far as Green and the other participants in today’s class. For me, the metaphor transformed into a reflection of good and bad, happy and sad in a more mundane way. 

We learn here from Green (and elsewhere in Kabbalah) that the letter aleph (א) represents the Divine. I take comfort in this turbulent period of life I find myself wading through with this mental image: that the bet - the unfortunate, difficult, and often unchosen events in our life - is contained within the Aleph.

Ein Od

Works Cited

Green, Arthur. “BO. (Exodus 10-1-).” 26 Jan. 2023.

Kaplan, Aryeh. “15.” Sefer HaBahir, Jason Aronson Inc., 1995, p. 7.