NOTES for Exo 13:1-22
When setting out on a journey, even before a long-awaited vacation, a person is still anxious. How will things turn out, how will I get there, and how can I leave everything here? Leaving Egypt, leaving with a scandal and not peacefully, each person leaving was clearly experiencing not just anxiety but fear. What will happen tomorrow? It is bad here, but there lies the unknown. Where are we all going, and who knows what awaits us? And how will pharaoh react to our departure?
To abandon everything, even if it is little, even if it is bad, yet still all one's own, and to go nowhere, where there is nothing yet. Entrusting oneself only to the faith of the fathers and to a persistent, tongue-tied man.
What does the head of the people say to his fellow tribesmen? What should they take for the road? Where are they going? How will they go? What awaits them ahead? He says that every year, for many hundreds and thousands of years, the same thing will happen: everyone will remember the departure from slavery.