Shemot
Exodus 1:1-6:1
Isaiah 27:6-28:23, 29:22-23
Who knows how to raise remarkable children?
The storied leaders of ancient tales tend to have dramatic and auspicious childhoods. Marked from their birth, if not earlier, for greatness, they stand distinct from ordinary children. As they continue their lives, surely their educations match their promise, so that their deeds of heroism appear as continuations of their remarkable beginnings.
Students of folktales and mythology can identify typical signs of a great hero. Often someone has foretold this birth. Sometimes the parents rank as more than mere humans. Signs and wonders may attend the moment of birth. Often the newborn has powerful enemies, anxiously trying to prevent destiny; sometimes, also, special friends protect the baby. Growing up, the baby exhibits precocious abilities that foreshadow great feats to come.
Moses, our teacher, fits parts of this pattern, though the extraordinary factors in his origin seem an interplay of natural, rather then supernatural, forces.
He has distinctly human parents, as introduced in this week’s reading, “A man from the house of Levi went and took as a wife the daughter of Levi” (Ex. 2:1). The baby has a powerful, but still human, enemy at the time of his birth: Pharaoh has decreed that “male babies born to the house of Israel, you shall throw into the river” (Ex. 1:22).
His defenders seems less powerful: His mother, when she cannot conceal him any longer, leaves him in a basket among the reeds of the river, while his sister watches over him; the Pharaoh’s own daughter, coming to the river to bathe, feels sympathy for the helpless baby” (Ex. 2:2-6). As often in the Bible, the seemingly accidental acts of various individuals combine to accomplish the will of the concealed One.
The end result of the scene by the river: Yocheved, mother of Moses, serves as his nurse and raises him, presumably among the Israelites. Eventually, Moses must return to the palace to grow up among the Egyptian princes (Ex. 2:6-10). How many princes does Egypt have? Has the Pharaoh’s daughter adopted any others sons? Should we think of Moses as uniquely powerful, or one member of a numerous caste?
In those formative years among the Israelites, we do not know how well other Israelites know the story. Perhaps only a few know that Yocheved has given birth to this Moses. Among the other women, certainly, lived some whose own sons had been killed during the time of Pharaoh’s decree. Do they share Yocheved’s joy as she watches her son, thinking that at least one baby boy had survived the horror, or do they envy Yocheved, whose son lives while theirs have died?
Eventually, though, Yocheved has to give up her son to the daughter of Pharaoh. Moses learns to become an Egyptian prince. We do not know at what age Moses experiences this transition. That makes a difference. Does he find it hard to become an Egyptian prince, after so many years as an Israelite boy, or does he find it hard to remember his brief origin as an Israelite, after years of socialization as an Egyptian prince? Does he ever feel “bicultural”?
In any case, this childhood seems designed to teach a young man alienation but perhaps sympathy as well. He would have to choose whether to belong among the Egyptians or among the Israelites, or not to belong to either group. Whatever choice he would make, somewhere, his shadow-self could run alongside of him, living out in his imagination the life he could have had.
Finally, of course, he became Moses the adult, leader of the Jews, first among the Prophets. No educational program suffices to “explain” the phenomenon of a man like Moses, and yet I find it fascinating to draw connections between the odd upbringing and the unique adult. People who think about education try to design safe programs to allow students to grow emotionally, spiritually, culturally, artistically and intellectually. I wonder what percentage of the truly great among us got their education in some radically dissonant way.