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Exodus 10:1-13:16
Jeremiah 46:13-28
It’s an old joke in the rabbinical school world that if you don’t know the answer to a question you should answer “yetziat mitzrayim” — the Exodus from Egypt — and nine times out of 10 you’ll be right.
Why do we observe Shabbat? To remember the Exodus from Egypt. What about the three major pilgrimage festivals? To remember the Exodus from Egypt. What’s the reason for mezuzah and tefillin? To remember the Exodus from Egypt. And what reason does the Torah give us for the 36 times it commands us to care for the orphan, widow and stranger? Because we were slaves in the land of Egypt.
In a very real sense, the experience of slavery and the Exodus from Egypt, stories which reach their climax in this week’s Torah portion, make up the master story of our people. By this I mean that the Exodus is the fundamental story we tell ourselves to explain who we are, what our relationship is with God and the world, and what our purpose as Jews is meant to be. It is our guiding vision.
It is possible to read the master story of the Exodus as making redemption — characterized by God’s direct, personal intervention in history — the central motif of Jewish thinking. The Spanish kabbalist and commentator Nachmanides, commenting on the final verse of the parashah, argues that the supernatural miracles of the Exodus are the foundation of belief and of our duty to perform mitzvahs. The Exodus becomes the model for the messianic ideal: God’s willingness to miraculously transform the world in order to bring about the promised redemption of Israel.
For the post-Holocaust generations, traumatized as they were by an incomparable level of personal and national suffering, the creation of the state of Israel and the ingathering of the diaspora awakened new messianic passions modeled on a new reading of the Exodus.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel in the Mandate period, taught that the Zionist revolution was part of God’s redemptive plan. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, a brilliant light of American Orthodoxy, wrote “that Israel is being subjected to severe trials in its formative years does not negate the miraculous manifestations of Divine favor which have been showered upon the State.”
In the heady days following the Six-Day War, the rabbinate in Israel, emboldened by what they perceived to be the Divine hand (and the Israel Defense Forces) working through history, characterized the state as “reishit tzmichat geulateinu” — the beginning of the flowering of our redemption — and added this phrase to the prayerbook.
Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, son of the first chief rabbi, expanded his father’s teachings by suggesting that God’s redemptive intervention in history requires settlement of the entire land, thus providing the messianic ideology of Gush Emunim, the religious settler movement in Israel.
God’s miraculous participation in the history of Israel was now demonstrated not in plagues but in the expansive green Israeli lawns of Gaza, Judea and Samaria. For these ideologues, the disengagement from Gaza was nothing less than a rejection of God’s redemptive plan.
At this moment of grave instability in Israel, with Prime Minister Sharon critically ill (may he be granted a complete healing!), the recent Palestinian elections and the looming Israeli elections, one has to wonder: Is the messianic fervor rampant in Israel the path to carrying out God’s hope and plan for the people of Israel? Perhaps, instead, we might celebrate the Exodus as a model of how we, as Jews, must promote freedom for ourselves and others not through miraculous means (which belong to God alone) but through a spiritual and moral politic.
The purpose of the Exodus was to prepare us to become “a holy nation.” Messianism might point us in the right direction, but the achievement of the goal lies in the difficult work of creating a safe, just and compassionate society.
Rabbi Lavey Derby is spiritual leader of Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon and founder of the Neshama Minyan.