To be honest, I don't remember exactly when this occurred, some time during college or shortly thereafter. I don't remember exactly where this happened, a group of us around a table at someone's home for a Shabbat meal or at a restaurant on a night out. But here's what I do recall, quite vividly: I looked around the table at my circle of closest friends, including my future husband, and suddenly realized that everyone there, myself included, was either an eldest sibling or an only child. That is, a first-born.
One implication of being a first born is that every year on the morning before first seder, my husband and I troop off to morning minyan at our synagogue (don't worry, this is not the only time in the year that one or both of us does so...). There, one of our rabbis, or another person in the community, will be prepared to complete a course of study - a volume of the Mishnah or Talmud, usually - so that the community can celebrate a "siyyum." "Celebrate" here means, as it typically does in Jewish contexts, eat food. Otherwise, according to tradition, the first born are expected to fast on this day. I've always had a rather ambivalent relationship to this fast, to this practice of getting my annual exemption from it at a siyyum. At the core of my personal discomfort is a set of questions: who are the first-born in this case, and why should they fast? The answer to one of these questions is predicated on the answer to the other, and vice versa.
The special significance of the first-born occurs in two different ways in our parashah this week. The more obvious of these is the tenth plague, the slaying of the first-born (announced in chap. 11:1-7 and 12:12-13, and executed in 12:29-30). So devastating was this plague, the Torah tells us, that "there was no house where there was not someone dead" (12:30). But it is also in this parashah that we first encounter the concept that all first-born in Israelite communities, both human and animal, are consecrated to God, in chap. 13:1-2 and 11-15. There are at least two things to be noted about this latter mention of the first-born in the parashah. First, this law that the first born must be dedicated to God (and thus sacrificed if an animal, redeemed if human) applies only to a) male offspring who are b) the first born to their mothers (this latter concept is symbolized in Hebrew by the phrase peter rehem, the opening of the womb; for inheritance, on the other hand, it is the first-born son of the father who holds special status). Secondly, the sacred status of the first born is directly related to the plague that killed the first-born of Egypt:
When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord slew every first-born in the land of Egypt, the first-born of both man and beast. Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord every first male issue of the womb, but redeem every first-born among my sons." (13:15)
The same connection between the sanctity of the first born (animal and human) and the tenth plague also recurs in Num. 3:13.
The inter-relation and/or contrast between these two themes in the parashah regarding the first-born, raises a critical question: just who among the Egyptians died in the plague, and who (correspondingly) among the Israelites was spared? The law of Ex. 13 (and also Num. 13) seems to suggest that the plague struck males in particular; thus, having spared the male first-born Israelites when their Egyptian counterparts were killed, God now has a special claim on them and their lives. But if this is the case, then Ex. 12:30 becomes problematic. Were there no families in Egypt where the eldest child was a daughter, none where the first-born son had not died sometime prior to the plague?
To answer this latter question, rabbinic midrashists posed a variety of inventive answers. According to an early midrashic collection, the Mekhilta (Massechet Pisha, 13), even in households where the first-born had previously died, icons the family had constructed in memory were destroyed that night, and dogs dragged the corpses from their graves; for those families it was as if their first-born had died again on that day. Another tradition has it that the Egyptians were wildly promiscuous. One man might impregnate ten women and each child would the mother's first-born. In addition, according to this source, not only mothers' but also fathers' first-born children were struck down. Thus, while a man might think that his first son was his second child, in fact that boy would be the first born son of the wife's adulterous lover (indeed, several children in the household might each be a first-born of a different father). In fact, this tradition tells us, female first-borns too died as a result of the plague. And finally, just to be sure there was devastation in every household, the head of each family unit, even if not a first-born, was also a victim of the plague. Only one first-born child of either gender among the Egyptians survived - Moshe intervened on behalf of his foster-mother, the daughter of Pharaoh (Pesikta d'Rav Kahana, 7:6). These solutions certainly resolve one exegetical problem, though it must be admitted that they do so in a way that perhaps exhibits a disturbing blood thirst against the Egyptians, maximizing the destruction and death inflicted on their families and society. But if the scope of the killing is expanded, then Ex. 13:15 becomes the problematic text in turn: why does God lay claim to only the males, first-born of the mother?
And what does any of this have to do with ta'anit bekhorot, the fast of the first-born - or my discomfort with observing it, albeit by the back-handed means of negating it through attending a siyyum? The issue for me is not the legal fiction by which we avoid actually fasting, and unless you'd like to eat up or throw out all your leavened goods before Passover instead of (temporarily) selling them this coming spring, I'd recommend against any over-zealous bias against legal fictions more generally. Rather, the question of who was struck down by the plague is, or ought to be, directly related to who is required to observe (or cleverly evade the obligation of) the fast. More particularly, it speaks to the question of whether women who are first-born children, women such as myself, should be obligated. As Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, author of the code known as the Tur, observes, the intent of the fast is commemorate having been saved from the plague, so those who would have been saved would logically be those who are obligated to fast.
Thus, when it comes to women's obligation, the great codifiers and commentators of the Jewish legal tradition struggle over this question, pretty much for the reasons already set up here. The Shulhan Arukh, which even in its very printing style reads as a dialogue between its original author, Rabbi Joseph Karo, and its most significant commentator, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, encodes the tension (Karo's text is in regular type and Isserles' in italics):
The first-born fast on the eve of Passover, whether the first-born of the father or the first-born of the mother. And there are those who say that even a female first-born fasts. (But this is not the custom)... (Orah Hayyim, 470:1).
In trying to understand this law - not only the question of whether women are included but also the certain inclusion of males who are first-born to eitherparent - other commentators cite the midrashic tradition summarized above. But if one does so, then it ought to follow that women too are obligated, since the midrashic tradition clearly includes first-born daughters among the victims; how then to account for Karo's rather non-committal ruling on the matter ("there are those who say...") or Isserles' statement that this not the general practice? To explain, the commentators must revert to women's exclusion from the status of first-born for any other legal purpose. In the words of Rabbi Israel Meir Ha-Kohen, author of the halakhic commentary/guide, Mishnah Brura - who himself cites the midrash to explain why all first-born males, paternal or maternal, must fast - "The Torah did not grant to women any holiness of the first-born for any matter." This is, in its way, the tension of Ex. 12:30 and 13:15 all over again: if women were among the Egyptian victim and the Israelites who were passed over, why aren't female first-born children consecrated to God (and in need of being redeemed)? If first-born daughters are not consecrated to God, a command explicitly connected to the plague, why should we assume that women were among the victims?
As a Jewish feminist, I myself am perplexed with how to resolve this tension. I am, on nearly every other occasion, disturbed by the preference shown for males over females in Torah and Jewish tradition, and the exemption if not outright exclusion of women from large portions of Jewish devotional practice historically. A major aspect of the feminist revolution in Judaism, especially in the Conservative Movement, is women claiming equal religious obligation and responsibility alongside men. elatedly, feminist readers have tried to bring female characters, and women more generally, out of the shadows of the biblical and midrashic narrative, reclaiming and reshaping our understanding of the foremothers, Miriam and her well, Serach bat Asher, the midwives in Egypt, the women who refused to participate in the making of the Golden Calf and were given Rosh Hodesh as their own special time in reward, etc. But in this case, do I really want to insert women victims into the suffering of Egypt, so that I can feel equal in my experience of redemption or my sense of being consecrated to God alongside my husband and other first-born men? Another lesson of Passover, after all - one that is embodied in such practices as spilling out a bit of our wine at the seder to mark the destruction inflicted through the plagues or leaving out some of the verses of the psalms in Hallel in memory of the Egyptian soldiers drowned in the sea - is sympathy for human suffering even among our enemies. And so, year after year, I struggle within myself and with my heritage. But that too, I'd say, is part of what it means to be a Jew in this modern era, or in any era.
Shabbat shalom.