Finding the Joy · Parashat Bo
What the Table Remembers
What the Table Remembers
There is a falafel stand at Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem that changed a man’s life. Not because the falafel was extraordinary — though if you’ve been to Mahane Yehuda, you know it might have been. But because of what he saw when the fried chickpea balls came out of the oil. Round. Golden-brown. Warm.
David “Dugo” Leitner was fourteen years old in January 1945 when the Nazis marched him out of Auschwitz. Starving, freezing, wearing camp clothes in the Polish snow, he dreamed about his mother. She had promised him that in the Land of Israel, bilkelach — small, round bread rolls — grew on trees. She told him: “David, when you get to Israel, when you reach Jerusalem, you’ll never go hungry again.”
Most of the prisoners on that march died. Dugo didn’t. He made it to Israel in 1949, walked into the Jerusalem market, and saw the falafel — warm, round, golden — and his mother’s voice came back.
From that day forward, every January 18, Dugo ate a double portion of falafel. One for himself. One for the promise. This past Sunday, three years after Dugo’s passing at ninety-four, tens of thousands of Israelis lined up at falafel stands across the country for Operation Dugo, now in its eleventh year.
If that isn’t Jewish joy, I don’t know what is. Joy infused with sorrow and flush with food. Tradition. Eating. Laughing. Coming together.
The parsha this Shabbat is Bo. It contains the last three plagues, the death of the firstborn, and the Exodus itself. But the Torah spends remarkably little time on the drama. What the parsha lingers on, obsessively, is what comes after: how to remember it.
Four times in Bo, the Torah pauses to talk about children asking questions:
וּלְמַ֡עַן תְּסַפֵּר֩ בְּאׇזְנֵ֨י בִנְךָ֜ וּבֶן־בִּנְךָ֗ and that you may recount in the hearing of your child and of your child’s child
וְהָיָ֕ה כִּֽי־יֹאמְר֥וּ אֲלֵיכֶ֖ם בְּנֵיכֶ֑ם מָ֛ה הָעֲבֹדָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את לָכֶֽם׃ And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this rite?’
וְהִגַּדְתָּ֣ לְבִנְךָ֔ בַּיּ֥וֹם הַה֖וּא לֵאמֹ֑ר And you shall explain to your child on that day
וְהָיָ֞ה כִּֽי־יִשְׁאָלְךָ֥ בִנְךָ֛ מָחָ֖ר לֵאמֹ֣ר מַה־זֹּ֑את And when, in time to come, a child of yours asks you, saying, ‘What does this mean?’
Four questions. Four answers. The Haggadah later builds its famous four children out of these verses. But here, in the raw text, the repetition does something simpler: it insists. Tell them. When they ask, tell them. When they don’t ask, tell them anyway.
And notice what the Torah chooses as the vehicle for transmission. Not a scroll. Not a lecture. A meal. The memory lives in the food.
Dugo Leitner’s falafel wasn’t a symbolic choice. He didn’t sit down one day and decide that chickpeas would represent his survival. He walked into a market, saw something round and warm come out of the oil, and his mother’s voice returned to him. The memory chose the food.
The Torah understands this. Bo doesn’t say “write down what happened” or “build a monument.” It says: eat this, and when your child asks why, tell them.
Dugo’s great-grandson was born recently. His parents named him David Amichai — David for Dugo, Amichai because Dugo ended every family gathering with the same two words: Am Yisrael Chai.
Four times the Torah says: when your child asks. It doesn’t say “if.” It says “when.” The question is coming. The only thing the parent has to do is make sure there’s something on the table worth asking about.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham