Weekly Message

22 January 2026

In this week’s parashah, Bo, God assigns us our first mitzvah as we prepare to leave Egypt:  “This month will be for you the beginning of months.” From now on, we are to begin our calendar from Nisan, the month of our liberation.

Rabbi Yitzhak Meir of Ger noted that, in nature, there are no beginnings. Natural time is cyclical, without start or end. The moon goes through its phases, then repeats them. There is no first month.

What, then, did God mean by telling us that Nisan would be our first month?  According to Rabbi Yitzhak Meir, God meant to teach us a lesson about the power of mitzvah, of sacred obligation. We create beginnings — we make ourselves new — when we transcend the circularity of nature by doing what is not natural, when we commit ourselves to a higher cause. What made Nisan new is that, in that month, we left Egypt to perform a higher kind of service than service to Pharoah. Instead of work that leads in circles, we chose work that takes us –and the world – forward.

May we be privileged to make many such beginnings through the power of mitzvot.