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Reading the Exodus Story Today’s parashah is about a struggle for liberation, a struggle with which, on the whole, we can all identify, yet also a struggle involving at least some elements that we might find disturbing. For example, there is the issue of collective punishment, raised by Morris in his dvar torah. Was it in fact necessary to carry the struggle between the Egyptian regime and the Hebrews into the homes of each and every Egyptian? Was it necessary to turn all of the water in Egypt red? Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to contaminate the water supply leading to the Egyptian equivalent of the Pentagon? Why were there, in fact, “frogs here, frogs there, frogs jumping everywhere?” Another issue is the disturbing notion that God sought to “harden Pharaoh’s heart.” Of course, a careful reading of the text reveals that at first, Pharaoh hardened his own heart, and only later did God harden his heart. But still, why was there a need for Pharaoh’s heart to harden at all? Why not allow the struggle to be resolved sooner, rather than later? There’s also the notion that, in addition to liberating the Hebrews, God seems to have another goal in mind: namely, the personal defeat of and humiliation of Pharaoh. A strong undercurrent in the story is cutting Pharaoh down to size. Why is this necessary? Why isn’t it enough, for our classic story of liberation to be pragmatic? Why must it veer off to the side in these distracting, possibly distressing ways? Why can’t it be an entirely sympathetic tale with which none of us could quibble? One answer is that this is not a journalistic account of a political struggle between two peoples; it’s not the story of a dispute that can be resolved through respectful negotiation, it’s not a mere rescue story. This story dramatizes the confrontation between two civilizations that stand for two very different things. This story describes and helped create a revolution in thinking, not just a political rearrangement. Pharaoh is a nameless, faceless leader in this story. He is the representative of Egypt as a culture and as a civilization—and he therefore must be made to suffer the fate of the nation as a whole. Depicting him as stubborn makes sense: he is a symbol of the stubbornness, the hardheartedness of his entire nation. As a literary feature, that makes sense. It also makes sense that the plagues strike all of Egypt. For there is no sense of individuality among the Egyptians. Yes, we have a few kindly women, but no kindly men. This is a tale of a cosmic struggle, between the forces of good (led by God) and the forces of evil (led by Pharaoh). There are no grays in this story. As far as humiliation is concerned, if the chief issue in the story is the struggle between God and Pharaoh; if the chief issue is that the people understood Pharaoh to be divine, and that Pharaoh understood himself to be a god, then it’s necessary for Pharaoh to be cut down to size. It’s necessary, for example, for Moses and Aaron to catch Pharaoh bathing in the morning at the waters of the Nile—a pose that a true God could hardly require—and it is necessary to humiliate him, in order for the Egyptians and the Israelites to lose faith in him and to realize that they must abandon his ways. So, given its larger-than-life, epic nature, all of the elements of this story make sense. The problem, of course, is when we seek to draw on this story to face the challenges of today. I don’t think that we should abandon this tale. We can and we should draw on it: after all, it’s magnificent. Less than a week ago, we celebrated the anniversary of the birth of a man who drew on this story to inspire an entire generation of African Americans to throw off the chains of oppression, the residual marks left by a century or more of slavery in this country. And the notion that God was not on the side of their oppressors was a source of tremendous strength in the civil rights struggle in this country. But we might also recall and marvel at the fact that Martin Luther King was judicious in the way in which he drew on the Exodus story. Yes, he promoted resistance. But non-violent resistance. Yes, he stood up to and spoke truth to Power. Yet, he never threatened fire and brimstone. He never threatened, personally, the lives of political leaders in this country. He appealed to the common humanity within all of us, seeking white as well as black support for his agenda. For him, the notion of collective punishment was abhorrent. Sadly, in today’s world, conflicts are rarely waged with such devotion to fine principles. We see before our very eyes conflicts that seem to degenerate to the basest level rather than reaching for the highest heights. Recently, the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was hanged. Anyone with a computer and access to YouTube can see not one, not two, but many versions of that hanging. There were many distasteful elements in that event. First, there’s the question of whether Hussein should have been hanged in the first place. Then there was the question whether he should have been put to death while one of his trials was still going on. Leaving those questions aside, should he have been subjected to the taunting and humiliation that was heaped on him during his last moments? Now, Hussein was no more a saint than Pharaoh, or Haman, or Antiochus, or any of the enemies we’re familiar with in our tradition, so it is not out of respect for his humaneness that I raise these questions. It’s out of concern that sometimes, it seems, we embrace the worst elements of a story like the Exodus rather than the finest ones. The struggle in Iraq, even if it began as a good-faith effort to liberate the oppressed, has certainly gone far beyond that. The country has dissolved into near-chaos, with bloodbaths taking place daily. It’s gone far beyond the issue of collective punishment. It is hard to see a way out of the mess. Would that there was the kind of clarity that Martin Luther King saw in the Exodus story! Would that we could identify clearly the good guys and the bad guys, and would that common rules of humanity governed the conflict. Would that, if the war in Iraq is indeed a battleground in a war of civilizations, it would be clear who the two sides are and what they represent! Would that we, the American people, were not stuck in the mud of Mesopotamia, bleeding blood and treasure daily. There’s yet another aspect of the Exodus story that makes it a dangerous tale to draw on in trying to understand contemporary reality. The story of the Exodus has an inexorable quality to it. God knows exactly what’s going to happen. He sets the stage, He prepares the scene, He even tells the characters how to behave, and then He allows it to play itself out. The conflict in Iraq is not like that at all. Or if it is, one thing is clear: our leaders are not God. They don’t have God’s power to predict the future, and/or to make it come out the way they’d like. Who would have believed that less than a month after the hanging of Saddam Hussein; who would have believed that the very next public execution authorized by the Iraqi government, would have been as grotesquely flawed as it was? There’s a lesson there. There are plenty of people in responsible positions, people upon whom we are relying, who aren’t particularly competent. Much is out of our control. And so, yes, let’s read the Exodus story. Let’s learn from it that God abhors suffering; that God finds enslavement to be intolerable. Let’s learn from it how inevitable is the march to freedom. These are important lessons. But let’s learn one more lesson. The lesson we can learn from Moses’ personality as it is depicted in this story. Moses did amazing things: he slew an Egyptian taskmaster, he negotiated with Pharaoh, he led his people out of Egypt, he spent forty years working with them on nation-building in the Wilderness. And yet, the one quality that comes to mind when we think of Moses is humility. Moses was the most humble of all men. That’s what the Bible says. Let’s learn from that. However lofty our aspirations, let’s be humble. Particularly when self-interest is a factor—as it most certainly has been in our involvement in Iraq—let’s be cautious about imagining ourselves in the role of God, or one of His angels, in attempting to liberate the enslaved. Let’s always remember that, like Moses, like any other prophet or political leader, we are merely human. That is the essential first step we must take if we are truly to emulate Moses and seek to promote liberation and freedom in the world in which we live. |
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