Post by Rabbi Neil on Apr 6, 2023 18:13:31 GMT
What if the Exodus never happened? I mean historically speaking, what if the Exodus never actually happened? To many Jews, the question is intolerable. We celebrate Pesach every year as a re-enactment of the Jews leaving Egypt so if the Exodus didn’t actually happen historically, it might seem like we had been duped. How can you re-enact something that never happened.
Being a Reform Jew means living firmly with modernity and tradition yet increasingly the voices of modernity speak very differently to the voices of tradition in terms of the Exodus narrative because more and more, archaeologists question the historicity of that narrative. If we take the census data from later in Torah, and if we translate it in the traditional way, there are around 600,000 men who leave Egypt. Including women and children as well, that would mean around 2,000,000 people leaving the country in one go. How could it have been possible for so many people to have left Egypt without leaving any record of the demise of Egypt? One might say that the Egyptians would not want to record such a negative event, but realistically if a slave workforce of 600,000 men suddenly disappeared, Egypt would have totally collapsed. Even without considering the economic and political ramifications for Egypt, how could so many people practically have existed in the Wilderness? I’m not talking about food sources because God provides manna for them. I’m talking about the literal number of people. One archaeological opinion suggests that the number of people suggested is so large that the column of Israelites would have been so long it would have stretched from Egypt to Syria! What most archaeologists are certain about is that there weren’t even two million people in the entire region, let alone just amongst the Hebrews who left.
For a while, there was talk of evidence of our people in Egypt through references in Egyptian texts to groups of people known as Habiru, a name which sounds surprisingly similar to the word Hebrew. But the Habiru were brigands, robbers and were more likely a social class than an actual social grouping. Using American vernacular, perhaps the closest term would be white trash, but even that doesn’t cover the criminality inherent in that group.
So there seems to be little to no archaeological evidence of the Israelites actually being in Egypt and there are very many questions about the Exodus from Egypt. So, it seems appropriate to ask what does this mean for us as we celebrate Pesach?
I think that the very act of considering the historicity of the text shows that we’ve lost sight of the relevance of the Exodus story. It’s not true because it historically happened, if for no other reason that Torah clearly isn’t a historical text, and to assume it is ignores the reality that history as we understand it as the recording of events that actually happened in as accurate a way as possible, did not exist until fairly recently. Torah tells a religious story, not a historical one. It’s real because it describes our story, not history. Joseph Campbell wrote (Myths to Live By, p. 10) that “it has always been on myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded.” The Exodus narrative isn’t essential for us because of what actually happened in Egypt thousands of years ago, it’s essential for us because it is the basis for the unique Jewish ethical code. No other people anywhere in the world boasts a creation narrative in which they start as slaves. Our entire religion is predicated on the necessity of liberation. Peter Berger wrote (Sacred Canopy, p.19, 25) that society is a world-building enterprise in that it is an ordering activity. Religion in particular is, he says, “the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religious is cosmization in a sacred mode.” Religion, he writes (p.28), is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.” He adds (p.100) that “one may say… that religion appears in history both as a world-maintaining and as a world-shaking force.” That, I believe, is exactly what the Exodus narrative is about. It establishes our world order in that it leads us from Egypt straight to Sinai and to the giving of the law, and it is world-shaking in that it challenges every oppressor, every dictator, everyone who would oppress another. The Exodus narrative isn’t about history, it’s about morality.
What does the Exodus narrative mean to us? Everything. It means everything. It sets up our world. It makes it clear that we are not so great that we cannot be enslaved, and it therefore warns us to beware even today of what enslaves us. It calls to us to seek freedom not just for ourselves but for all people. It sets up a religious vision that is certain that the wicked will not prosper in the end. That is why we re-enact it, because every year we’re reaffirming the same message, the same understanding of the universe, the same moral values. We celebrate our freedom to remind us that we must work to free others so that they might experience the same joy. So, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not it happened in history, because it happened…. it happens... for us. That’s why we’re obliged to tell the story as though we are leaving Egypt – because religious stories do not tell us what happened in the past, they tell us how we view the world today. As soon as we interact with something, with literally anything in this world, we read it in a certain way. It reminds me of the ancient Buddhist narrative of blind men who encounter an elephant – one touches the trunk and believes it to be a snake, another touches its ear and believes it to be a fan, one touches its leg and believes it to be a tree trunk, one touches its side and believes it to be a wall, one touches its tail and believes it to be a rope and one touches its tusk and believes it to be a spear. Everything that we encounter is read through the lens not only of our experience but also of the myth around which we read the universe. Whether that myth is based in history really isn’t anywhere nearly as important as what that myth means to us today.
During the Introduction to Reform Judaism course last Sunday, I shared that freedom on Pesach isn’t actually freedom from but is freedom to. Andrés Spokoiny writes (https://www.jfunders.org/passover-5778) that Judaism understands “that true freedom is not the absence of bondage, but the presence of justice and purpose.” As Spokoiny writes, the myth - and I mean myth as a story that grounds us as a people, not as in something untrue – the myth of the Exodus from Egypt is not just that freedom is better than slavery, but that collective freedom is essential and not just individual freedom. He adds that “Judaism realized that freedom without responsibility means slavery to one’s basest impulses. When Moses confronts Pharaoh in God’s name, he doesn’t say just “let my people go”. He adds “so that they may serve Me”. In other words, freedom has a goal, a higher purpose than just being able to do what we please. That higher purpose is what we can do for others, the responsibility we take for society as a whole…. Only when I comprehend and embrace my responsibility towards the other I can be truly free.”
David Hoffman adds an important extra element. Our freedom is not just to serve the human other. Hoffman writes (https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/freedom-through-torah/) “… Freedom (Passover) without Shavuot (Torah) is incomplete; and Shavuot (Torah) would be impossible without Passover—the holiday that gave us the freedom to enter into this relationship with God. A life of Torah is not a life of freedom. Freedom is not an absolute value for the Rabbis, or for the Bible. Freedom is utilitarian. The freedom of Pesach gives us the opportunity to enter into relationship with God.” Part of the myth of our people is that there is a God. How we define that God and the role that God still plays in our lives today has developed enormously over the millennia but it is, ultimately, a religious myth and not a secular one. Our freedom to serve others is intimately connected with our freedom to live a Godly life.
We can now return to my original question – what if the Exodus never happened? Whether or not it happened historically is, for us, actually fairly irrelevant. On a religious level, not only did the Exodus happen, but it does happen. It is a contemporary mythic narrative that acts as the overriding structure of everything that we do. It connects our religion, our relationship with the Divine, with personal and communal freedom. It shows that Judaism is a hopeful religion that believes in the possibility of a better future, and whose God commands us to work toward it. And it reveals profound compassion for the oppressed in the world, as well as an ethical imperative to relieve their suffering. So, I know that the Exodus happened, because I was at a Seder where it happened… again, just as it did for my grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents and every generation before them.
This Pesach, may we all hear the lessons of the Seder, may we embrace our extraordinary myth that frames the way that we view the world and may it guide us not only to a deeper spirituality but also to a better world, and let us say, Amen.
Being a Reform Jew means living firmly with modernity and tradition yet increasingly the voices of modernity speak very differently to the voices of tradition in terms of the Exodus narrative because more and more, archaeologists question the historicity of that narrative. If we take the census data from later in Torah, and if we translate it in the traditional way, there are around 600,000 men who leave Egypt. Including women and children as well, that would mean around 2,000,000 people leaving the country in one go. How could it have been possible for so many people to have left Egypt without leaving any record of the demise of Egypt? One might say that the Egyptians would not want to record such a negative event, but realistically if a slave workforce of 600,000 men suddenly disappeared, Egypt would have totally collapsed. Even without considering the economic and political ramifications for Egypt, how could so many people practically have existed in the Wilderness? I’m not talking about food sources because God provides manna for them. I’m talking about the literal number of people. One archaeological opinion suggests that the number of people suggested is so large that the column of Israelites would have been so long it would have stretched from Egypt to Syria! What most archaeologists are certain about is that there weren’t even two million people in the entire region, let alone just amongst the Hebrews who left.
For a while, there was talk of evidence of our people in Egypt through references in Egyptian texts to groups of people known as Habiru, a name which sounds surprisingly similar to the word Hebrew. But the Habiru were brigands, robbers and were more likely a social class than an actual social grouping. Using American vernacular, perhaps the closest term would be white trash, but even that doesn’t cover the criminality inherent in that group.
So there seems to be little to no archaeological evidence of the Israelites actually being in Egypt and there are very many questions about the Exodus from Egypt. So, it seems appropriate to ask what does this mean for us as we celebrate Pesach?
I think that the very act of considering the historicity of the text shows that we’ve lost sight of the relevance of the Exodus story. It’s not true because it historically happened, if for no other reason that Torah clearly isn’t a historical text, and to assume it is ignores the reality that history as we understand it as the recording of events that actually happened in as accurate a way as possible, did not exist until fairly recently. Torah tells a religious story, not a historical one. It’s real because it describes our story, not history. Joseph Campbell wrote (Myths to Live By, p. 10) that “it has always been on myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded.” The Exodus narrative isn’t essential for us because of what actually happened in Egypt thousands of years ago, it’s essential for us because it is the basis for the unique Jewish ethical code. No other people anywhere in the world boasts a creation narrative in which they start as slaves. Our entire religion is predicated on the necessity of liberation. Peter Berger wrote (Sacred Canopy, p.19, 25) that society is a world-building enterprise in that it is an ordering activity. Religion in particular is, he says, “the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religious is cosmization in a sacred mode.” Religion, he writes (p.28), is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.” He adds (p.100) that “one may say… that religion appears in history both as a world-maintaining and as a world-shaking force.” That, I believe, is exactly what the Exodus narrative is about. It establishes our world order in that it leads us from Egypt straight to Sinai and to the giving of the law, and it is world-shaking in that it challenges every oppressor, every dictator, everyone who would oppress another. The Exodus narrative isn’t about history, it’s about morality.
What does the Exodus narrative mean to us? Everything. It means everything. It sets up our world. It makes it clear that we are not so great that we cannot be enslaved, and it therefore warns us to beware even today of what enslaves us. It calls to us to seek freedom not just for ourselves but for all people. It sets up a religious vision that is certain that the wicked will not prosper in the end. That is why we re-enact it, because every year we’re reaffirming the same message, the same understanding of the universe, the same moral values. We celebrate our freedom to remind us that we must work to free others so that they might experience the same joy. So, it doesn’t actually matter whether or not it happened in history, because it happened…. it happens... for us. That’s why we’re obliged to tell the story as though we are leaving Egypt – because religious stories do not tell us what happened in the past, they tell us how we view the world today. As soon as we interact with something, with literally anything in this world, we read it in a certain way. It reminds me of the ancient Buddhist narrative of blind men who encounter an elephant – one touches the trunk and believes it to be a snake, another touches its ear and believes it to be a fan, one touches its leg and believes it to be a tree trunk, one touches its side and believes it to be a wall, one touches its tail and believes it to be a rope and one touches its tusk and believes it to be a spear. Everything that we encounter is read through the lens not only of our experience but also of the myth around which we read the universe. Whether that myth is based in history really isn’t anywhere nearly as important as what that myth means to us today.
During the Introduction to Reform Judaism course last Sunday, I shared that freedom on Pesach isn’t actually freedom from but is freedom to. Andrés Spokoiny writes (https://www.jfunders.org/passover-5778) that Judaism understands “that true freedom is not the absence of bondage, but the presence of justice and purpose.” As Spokoiny writes, the myth - and I mean myth as a story that grounds us as a people, not as in something untrue – the myth of the Exodus from Egypt is not just that freedom is better than slavery, but that collective freedom is essential and not just individual freedom. He adds that “Judaism realized that freedom without responsibility means slavery to one’s basest impulses. When Moses confronts Pharaoh in God’s name, he doesn’t say just “let my people go”. He adds “so that they may serve Me”. In other words, freedom has a goal, a higher purpose than just being able to do what we please. That higher purpose is what we can do for others, the responsibility we take for society as a whole…. Only when I comprehend and embrace my responsibility towards the other I can be truly free.”
David Hoffman adds an important extra element. Our freedom is not just to serve the human other. Hoffman writes (https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/freedom-through-torah/) “… Freedom (Passover) without Shavuot (Torah) is incomplete; and Shavuot (Torah) would be impossible without Passover—the holiday that gave us the freedom to enter into this relationship with God. A life of Torah is not a life of freedom. Freedom is not an absolute value for the Rabbis, or for the Bible. Freedom is utilitarian. The freedom of Pesach gives us the opportunity to enter into relationship with God.” Part of the myth of our people is that there is a God. How we define that God and the role that God still plays in our lives today has developed enormously over the millennia but it is, ultimately, a religious myth and not a secular one. Our freedom to serve others is intimately connected with our freedom to live a Godly life.
We can now return to my original question – what if the Exodus never happened? Whether or not it happened historically is, for us, actually fairly irrelevant. On a religious level, not only did the Exodus happen, but it does happen. It is a contemporary mythic narrative that acts as the overriding structure of everything that we do. It connects our religion, our relationship with the Divine, with personal and communal freedom. It shows that Judaism is a hopeful religion that believes in the possibility of a better future, and whose God commands us to work toward it. And it reveals profound compassion for the oppressed in the world, as well as an ethical imperative to relieve their suffering. So, I know that the Exodus happened, because I was at a Seder where it happened… again, just as it did for my grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents and every generation before them.
This Pesach, may we all hear the lessons of the Seder, may we embrace our extraordinary myth that frames the way that we view the world and may it guide us not only to a deeper spirituality but also to a better world, and let us say, Amen.