It was about a whole new way of counting time itself.
Think of it this way. Shemot Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic teachings on the Book of Exodus, offers a beautiful analogy to explain this idea. Imagine a king whose son is captured and held captive for years. The king mourns, time stretches on, marked only by the son's absence. But then, the son is finally redeemed! Does the king continue counting the years from the boy's birth as before? No! The day of his redemption becomes a new birthday, a fresh starting point for celebration and reckoning.
That's precisely what happened with the Israelites in Egypt. Before the Exodus, their time was measured by the weight of their enslavement. We read in Genesis (15:13) that God told Abraham his descendants would be strangers in a foreign land for four hundred years and that they would be enslaved there. Every day brought them closer to an unknown, but certainly difficult, future.
But once they were freed, once the Holy One, blessed be He, performed miracles on their behalf, everything changed. "This month shall be for you the first of months," God declared (Exodus 12:2). As Shemot Rabbah 15 points out, their timeline shifted. Their redemption became their new beginning. They stopped counting down to some distant, uncertain liberation. Instead, they began counting up, building a future filled with promise and divine purpose.
It’s a powerful reminder, isn’t it? That even after periods of darkness and hardship, we have the capacity to redefine our lives. To choose a new starting point. To celebrate the moment of our own personal redemptions and let them shape the way we experience time. What "new birthday" can you celebrate today?