One of the keys to correctly understanding the Egypt story is that God guided events from start to finish. In case we were hoping to blame the enslavement on human free will and attribute the salvation to God, the Haggadah forecloses that option, reminding us that God had promised Avraham that his descendants would wind up in Egypt for four centuries but that God would eventually rescue them:
בָּרוּךְ שׁוֹמֵר הַבְטָחָתוֹ לְיִשְׂרָאֵל, בָּרוּךְ הוּא. שֶׁהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא חִשַּׁב אֶת־הַקֵּץ, לַעֲשׂוֹת כְּמוֹ שֶּׁאָמַר לְאַבְרָהָם אָבִינוּ בִּבְרִית בֵּין הַבְּתָרִים, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: וַיֹּאמֶר לְאַבְרָם, יָדֹעַ תֵּדַע כִּי־גֵר יִהְיֶה זַרְעֲךָ בְּאֶרֶץ לֹא לָהֶם, וַעֲבָדוּם וְעִנּוּ אֹתָם אַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שָׁנָה – Bless the One who keeps His promise to Yisrael, blessed be He; since the Holy One, blessed be He, calculated the end to uphold what He said to Avraham, our father, in the Covenant between the Parts, as it says, “And He said to Avram, ‘You should know that your descendants will be strangers in a land not their own, and they will enslave them and afflict them four hundred years…’”
But if you think about it for a minute, this is faint praise at best. We rightly consider honesty and trustworthiness to be the basic decency we ought to expect and require from everyone we interact with, let alone the Creator!
What kind of praise is it to say that God keeps His word?
R’ Shlomo Farhi explains that the word doesn’t mean that God keeps His promise; it means God protects His promise – שׁוֹמֵר.
God had promised four hundred years in Egypt, but Rashi counts only two hundred and ten. The hundred-and-ninety-year discrepancy can be accounted for in different ways; perhaps the Jewish People suffered so egregiously that four hundred years of quantitative pain compressed to two hundred and ten years of the qualitative equivalent, or maybe they had stooped to the lowest depths of depravity and required emergency intervention. The missing years are alluded to in the words for calculating the end – חִשַּׁב אֶת־הַקֵּץ – because the word קֵּץ has a numerological value of the missing hundred and ninety years.
And yet, if the precise explanation for creative accounting is cutesy and whimsical, the fact of it is deadly serious.
In the state the Jewish People left, they were identifiable by fashion, language, and name only. In every other conceivable way, they had no semblance of Jewish identity. Hypothetically, if God had not acted at that moment and they would remain even a little longer, their condition would have further deteriorated, and perhaps only a tiny remnant might have been rescued. That could have been a plausible variant form of keeping the promise – saving what little was left.
But God didn’t do that. God did not abandon them to their fates and would not let them die or fail. Instead, every man, woman, and child walked out – even though they didn’t deserve to. Because God didn’t just keep His promise; He protected it – בָּרוּךְ שׁוֹמֵר הַבְטָחָתוֹ.
The Sfas Emes notes that our ancestors were confident in their tradition that they would be mired in Egypt for four hundred years, so much so that they refused to believe that Moshe was there to save them. Quite reasonably so – after all, this redeemer was two centuries early…! And yet, before any explanation, logic, or wordplay about how or why, the simple fact was that they were wrong, and it was time to go. Regardless of tradition, of what had been made explicitly clear by no less an authority than God’s own word, the time was now, and any analysis evaporates. Because God protects His promise – בָּרוּךְ שׁוֹמֵר הַבְטָחָתוֹ.
On the night we remember redemptions past, fueling our hope for redemptions to come, we ought to remind ourselves that God protects His promise, whatever it takes. We have rich and vast eschatological literature about what will happen at the end times of Mashiach; will it be easy or painful? Peaceful or tragic? Gradual or sudden? Six thousand years or tomorrow?
The Sfas Emes reassures us that whatever we convince ourselves, we have no idea. The qualitative strain of exile might stand in for a required quantity of years once again, or perhaps something else. Yet, in the final analysis, it’s entirely academic because even if our spiritual assets were completely exhausted of ancestral credit and merit, we can always count on the Creator’s bottomless wellspring of compassion; and the highly persuasive precedent for creative accounting when it comes to these things.
Because בָּרוּךְ שׁוֹמֵר הַבְטָחָתוֹ – God protects His promise.