Weekly Dvar Torah By Rabbi Yitzchak Gettinger

Besides the general national census that takes up most of the Parsha, there was an additional census taken of just the firstborn males, and the subsequent mitzvah given to redeem those firstborns by giving a Kohen five skekel coins per firstborn. Why was the redemption price set at five shekels?  Rashi explains that this was commensurate to the price of the sale of the firstborn of Rochel, Yosef, which was set by his brothers at twenty silver pieces. (four silver pieces equals one shekel) Although the Torah explicitly states that the reason for Pideon Haben is because the firstborns were saved in Egypt, Rashi perceived the redemption as also being a form of spiritual “correction” for the sin of Yosef’s sale.  However, upon examining the mitzvah, there seems to be an inherent flaw of logic in this assertion.  Levi, in collaboration with Shimon, was the ringleader in perpetrating the crime of selling Yosef.  How can it be that a firstborn from the tribe of Yosef, the innocent victim of the crime, should be obligated to give five shekel to a descendant of Levi to correct the sin that Levi committed against Yosef?  Irony seems uncannily at play here in reversing the victim and the assailant! 

The Meshech Chochma has a novel interpretation of the meaning behind this connection between Piedon Haben and the sale of Yosef.  He notes that the true catalyst that began our descent to Egypt was the sale of Yosef that planted the seeds in Egypt for the long and arduous time the Jews would spend there.  The last event that transpired in Egypt was the plague of the firstborns during which the Jewish firstborns were skipped over and chosen by God.  The sale of Yosef and the saving of the firstborns are therefore the two bookends of the Galus Mitzrayim, and when we are recalling the last miraculous event of Makkas Bechoros by the implementation of Pideon Haben, we give five shekels specifically because that recalls the other bookend of Egypt that was the story of how we got there in the first place.  Mental “amnesia” is a powerful issue that human nature grapples with; we truly have a difficult time seeing ourselves in anything but our current way of life.  Every present moment has a deeper past that it is connected to, as life is a series of continuous “cause and effect” whose connection is perhaps the meaning in our lives.  Moreover, it is only through connecting the dots that a person is capable of stepping out of his tough surrounding bubble to appreciate God’s message and how he prods us along in life.  According to the Meshech Chochma, the significance of the five shekel amount was so that, in celebrating our Emancipation from Egypt, we will always have the sale of Yosef and the roots of our original decent in our minds as well.

Exploring this connection on a deeper level, we see that the descent to Egypt was because of internal struggles within the Jewish people that were present in the form of sibling rivalry.  Moshe Rabeinu echoes this theme in Parshas Shemos, when upon witnessing two Jews fighting and threatening to hurt him as well, exclaims “Achen Noda Hadavar”-a statement that Rashi explains that now Moshe understood why the Jews were suffering such a harsh Galus.  It was ultimately the ability of the Jews to truly come together as a unified force that enabled them to be freed from Egypt and to forge themselves as a nation.  This is why we find that the mitzvah of eating the Korban Pesach has a specific requirement that it cannot be fulfilled alone, but rather with the company of a “chabura” who joins together to fulfill the mitzvah jointly.  A national census is in general a way of highlighting solidarity, and particularly the Jewish way of counting where each person donates the same ½ shekel that emphasizes equality and likeness.  Pideon Haben furthers this theme in deciding a fixed worth for each firstborn, implying that despite all individuality and uniqueness that each person has, they still can accord to the ideas of equality and the chances to unite with others.  We do this all while remembering that the inverse of this, rivalry and the ranking between brothers, was the dominating theme behind the sale of Yosef and the very reason how and why we arrived at these lessons to begin with.