NOTES for Exo 13:1-22

When getting ready for a trip, even a long-awaited vacation, a person always worries. How will everything turn out? How will I get there? And how can I leave everything here? Leaving Egypt--leaving amid scandal, not peacefully--each one who left experienced not just worry, but fear. What will happen tomorrow? It is bad here, but there is uncertainty there. Where are we all going? Who knows what awaits us? And how will Pharaoh react to our leaving? To abandon everything, little though it may be, miserable though it may be, but still one's own, and go nowhere, where there is nothing yet, trusting only the faith of the fathers and a persistent, tongue-tied man.

What then does the leader of the people say to his fellow tribesmen: what to take on the road, where we are going, how we will go, what awaits us ahead? No. He says that every year, for many hundreds and thousands of years, the same thing will happen: everyone will remember the departure from slavery.