Every home carries invisible signs.
Those signs may appear in our habits, which flow into our way of life. They are also in the memories we create and the values we protect.
We often take these signs for granted. After all, they are invisible. Yet at certain moments it becomes important to notice them and to ask what truly makes a home ours. What do we believe? What patterns shape our days? Is this the life we want our home to reflect? Are we creating the memories we hope will one day define it?
This question stands at the heart of Parashas Bo, when we encounter the mitzvah of the korban Pesach and the command to mark the doorposts with blood.
The Torah tells us some of the intricacies of the korban Pesach:
When slaughtering the lamb or kid for the korban Pesach, the blood must be collected in a basin. Some of that blood is then placed on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses in which the korban will be eaten. The Torah explains how the blood will serve as an os, a sign that protects the Jewish homes from makas bechoros. Only homes used for dwelling require this marking.
Rashi explains that the blood was placed on the inside of the houses, not on the outside, as it served as a sign for those within, not for those passing by. The marking of the doorway required a conscious step toward redemption, even while internal doubt may have remained.
The Alshich1 develops this idea further. The blood, he writes, was not meant to help God identify Jewish homes as some say that it helped the “pass over” process. God doesn’t require any signs, so clearly the blood was meant for the people.
It was placed where the people would see it, so that they would absorb a difficult moral truth. By the strict letter of the law, their own blood should have been spilled, for they had worshiped the lamb. In mercy, Hashem offered a substitute, the blood of the korban in their place. The sight of that blood forces the recognition, “This should have been me.”
This, the Alshich explains, is the psychological core of teshuvah. The korban speaks to the person standing beneath the lintel. The point was inward impact, not public signaling.
Rabbi Yonah Sklare2 raises a further question. If the blood did not serve as an external marker for God, but rather as a mitzvah for the people within the home, why did it need to be placed on the house at all?
He explains that the korban Pesach represented a sanctification of the Jewish family. The act elevated not only the bricks and mortar, but the entire rhythm of family life that unfolds within the home. Even the most ordinary affairs of Jewish living became suffused with holiness.
The home itself became the mizbeach of the korban. It is perhaps for this reason that the mizbeach weeps when a home is torn apart.
Later in the parashah, the Torah returns to the blood. It gives further instructions for how it should be applied, and it repeats that Hashem will pass over any home marked with it, in the merit of that blood.
The emphasis is striking as the Torah returns to the blood with unusual insistence.
The last time blood appears so prominently in the Torah is at the very beginning, when Kayin killed Hevel. That blood cries out from the ground in a story of violence and rupture. Here, the blood protects and redeems.
Why does blood play such a central role in the story of Yetzias Mitzrayim?
We see in the Midrash3 that the blood of the bris and the blood of the korban Pesach together serve to avert Hashem’s din from striking us.4
The Midrash states:
Hakadosh Baruch Hu said to Yisrael: I am engaged in capital judgment, and I hereby inform you how I can spare you with mercy, through the blood of the korban Pesach and the blood of the bris milah. I will grant atonement for your souls, for the passage that I will make is severe, as it is stated, “I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night”.5
The message is unmistakable. Blood is the price of redemption.
The Noam Elimelech explains that the blood represents mesirus nefesh, complete surrender to Hashem. When that blood is placed on the doorposts, Hashem grants special attention, and the mezuzos themselves become a call of zaz maves. The very word mezuzos (מזוזות) can be rearranged to read zaz maves (זז מוות), “death moves away.” The blood protects because it announces total allegiance and surrender to Hashem.
The mesirus nefesh itself is explained by the HaKesav VeHaKabbalah. This was a public confrontation with Egypt’s religion. The “sign” wasn’t the paint on the house, rather it was Bnei Yisrael’s willingness to risk backlash by slaughtering, carrying, roasting, and eating Egypt’s deity, and then marking their homes with its blood in full view.
Even when the sign functioned inwardly, it required outward courage. That fearless break with idolatry became evidence of complete repentance and cleaving to Hashem. It aroused mercy, and the destroying plague passed over them.
The Beis Yaakov6 develops this idea further. Blood, he explains, symbolizes the human willingness to place something of oneself into the world: effort, cost, self-limitation, real work. The core purpose of olam hazeh, is that reality should be built through human toil rather than through free and overpowering Divine light.
As we have learned, that light was diminished through the process of tzimtzum. Yet the remaining light can leave a person feeling as though everything is accomplished alone, without the help of Hashem. It was perhaps this light that enabled us to see during makas choshech.
Using this light properly requires mesirus nefesh. A person must labor to discover that light and learn how to use it in the right way.
Avraham was the first to recognize this. He passed through his nisyonos in order to learn how to live in a world filled with light. This path continued with Yitzchak and Yaakov. As we have seen in earlier essays, the light became more difficult to access, until we learned that we are meant to live in a state of concealment.
Yet even in that state, we remain capable of mesirus nefesh. We remain capable of drawing the light. We can still reach the Ohr HaGanuz, we simply need to try.
That is why we need a sign that allows us to see our own effort. We need a symbol that testifies that we struggled, that we labored, that we worked to find the light.
The Beis Yaakov explains that Chazal teach that the signs of one who descends from Avraham are bayshanim, rachmanim, and gomlei chasadim. These are not mere character traits. They are modes of spiritual perception.
Bayshanim: even in private, a person feels an inner presence and a quiet shame before Hashem.
Rachmanim: a person senses an inner connectedness to another and can feel another’s pain as his own.
Gomlei chasadim: a person gives outwardly because inwardly he is tethered to God. He is no longer bound to his ego.
When a family gathers together and connects to Hashem in the path of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, it shows that we are trying. We are no longer sanctifying ourselves for ourselves. Instead, we are sanctifying the home, so that it can once again become a mizbeach.
NBA star Marvin Phillips once said, “The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.”
That umph is the mesirus nefesh that Hashem asks of us. Redemption, connection, and success all require persistence. They require the refusal to surrender, even when the path feels impossible.
As R’ Joey Rosenfeld writes, “Avodas Hashem is an endless process of trying and trying and trying until you realize that the trying itself is the goal, and then you try even more.”
When a person tries, he fulfills the purpose of creation. When Hashem brings judgment into the world, He passes over those who are still trying.
Rav Moshe Dovid Vali writes7 that one of the purposes of the blood on the doorposts was to awaken the middas ha-chesed to protect those who fulfilled the mitzvah from any destructive force. The force of destruction, he explains, cannot distinguish between good and evil.
He adds further8 that even after the danger passed, we continued to bring the korban Pesach, and later to eat the afikoman each year on Pesach. Nowadays, we don’t have a destroying plague moving through the land as there was in Mitzrayim, yet the chesed of that night remains.
Rav Tzadok writes9, “I heard in the name of my teacher, the holy rabbi of Lublin, [the Chozeh of Lublin], of blessed memory, who said that Shabbos Parashas Bo is like the first days of Pesach.”
He explains that every Shabbos carries its own distinctive holiness that is connected to the parashah of that week. Each Shabbos is a renewed reading. On this Shabbos, we read the story of Yetzias Mitzrayim. Therefore, this Shabbos becomes a time of chesed and of being spared from din.
The blood on the doorposts was meant to remind our nation that trying still matters, effort still awakens mercy, and a home built with struggle and longing will become a mizbeach.
Perhaps the question we all must answer is this:
What kind of sign are we leaving on our homes’ doorposts today?
Shemos 12:13
The Breathtaking Panorama, chapter 3
Shemos Rabbah 15:12
Targum Yonasan writes this as well
Shemos 12:12
Bo 46
Bris Olam 12:13
Bris Olam 12:24
Pri Tzadik, Bo 11