NOTES for Exo 13:1-22

When preparing for a journey, even for a long-awaited vacation, a person still worries. How will things turn out, how will I get there, and how can I leave everything here? Leaving Egypt amid conflict rather than peacefully, every departing person obviously feels not mere anxiety but fear. What will happen tomorrow? Things are bad here, but there lies the unknown. Where are we all going, and who knows what awaits us? And how will Pharaoh react to our departure? To abandon everything—little as it may be, poor as it may be, yet all one's own—and go nowhere, to a place where nothing yet exists, trusting only in the faith of one's fathers and an insistent man slow of speech. What, then, does the leader of the people tell his fellow countrymen? What should they take on the journey? Where are they going? How will they travel? What lies ahead? He says that every year, for many hundreds and thousands of years, the same thing will happen: everyone will remember the departure from slavery.