Lenten Reflection 4a: Joshua 5:9-12

Joshua 5:9-12
5:9 The LORD said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
5:10 While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho.
5:11 On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain.
5:12 The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

Comment
Rosenzweig describes Jewish liturgical practice as a circular repetition – the Torah scroll is unrolled, rolled, read, re-read the same way, year by year – this is what situates Jews already in eternity. Eternity is brought into the moment, an infinite now, by this repetition. But how? "There is only one way out," says Rosenzweig, "the moment we are seeking must, since it has flown away, begin again already at the same moment, in the sinking away it must already begin again; its perishing must be at the same time its beginning again (307).

In the text from Joshua, Israel, finally on the far side of the Jordan, undertakes the first repetition of the Passover. The initial meal was not yet liturgical, it was singular, the (violent) act of divine liberation: the manifestation of God’s unrivaled power and deep solidarity. It was the event that finally lead Pharoh to (provisionally) concede and release Israel from bondage. Now, in this first repetition the experience of Egypt is both maintained and erased – we might even say it undergoes a sort of Aufhebung or sublation. Such a repetition is enacted in order to serve as a reminder to this generation and those that follow: “And when your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this observance?' you shall say, 'It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.'" (Exodus 12.26) the memory is retained in the practice of repetition. But, it is retained in a particular form: not as the melancholic reliving of the trauma of slavery, but as the perpetual announcement of liberation. The event is repeated, but the “disgrace of Egypt” effaced in the very reenactment.

There is another shift that is named here and it too has to do with food and a different temporal existence. Much like the liturgical practice of Passover is a movement from singularity to repetition – which is its own form of singularity – the shift from manna to the produce of the land is a change from the miraculous, singular, appearance of manna each morning – which is its own form of repetition – to the repeated cycles of agricultural practice. In each case the life of this community is bound up with a certain type of temporal existence. We have two models of time here, two modes of faithful existence. What Derrida says with respect to the spatiality of the desert and the promised land – that they are both aporetic places – applies, it seems to me, temporally as well -- they are both aporetic times. That is, both times -- the time of repetition (which is its own singularity) and the time of sigularity (which is its own repetition) -- are not the coincident with chronological time: the one breaks regular time open in its aleatory irruption, the other exceeds common time in its junction with eternity.