THE RABBI WRITES – April 1977
Passover.
Saturday night. April 2.
Seder. Haggada. Natsa. Wine. Haroset. Family together.
We tell the story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt.
The Torah is clear. About 3500 years ago about two million Hebrews were rescued from Egyptian slavery through the miraculous intervention of a god called Yahveh. This god used a man named Moses to be his human agent. Moses was a Hebrew shepherd who had been raised as an Egyptian prince. Representing Yahveh, Moses threatened the king of Egypt with divine punishment unless he released his Hebrew slaves. Convinced by ten plagues that Yahveh meant business, Pharaoh released his Jews and allowed them to leave his country. Relenting his decision, the king pursued the Hebrews to the Red Sea where Yahveh made his final statement by drowning Pharaoh and all his army. The Jews, now free moved eastward across the desert to reclaim the land of their fathers.
This story, in its longer version, is the traditional reason for the celebration of Passover. It is retold in the historic Haggada which is read before the Seder meal. Unfortunately, it is a myth. Modern archeology and the scientific criticism of traditional texts reveals a different tale.
About 1150 B.C. a small tribe of Hebrews lived on the eastern border of Egypt. They called themselves Levites and worshiped a fertility god named Nehushtan who took the form of a snake. They had originally come to Egypt as part of a large Semitic invasion. For several centuries the Semites had ruled Egypt. But the Egyptians ultimately rebelled against their foreign masters and either expelled them or enslaved them. The Levites were enslaved and were compelled to do public service. The leader and chief priest of the Levites was Moses, who, like many Levites, had an Egyptian name (a familiar form of assimilation). During a period of political turmoil he fled with several hundred members of tribe into the desert. In the desert were other Hebrew tribes. The largest desert group was Judah. Moses and the Levites linked themselves to the Jews in a military confederation and began to plan the invasion of southern Canaan. Northern Canaan was already in the hands of other Hebrews who had conquered the land some three centuries before.
But, even if this story is true, its message has the same limited moral message that the myth had. In both situations the Hebrews pass from one authoritarian situation to another. Moses is no less dictatorial than Pharaoh. Although his dictatorship is less offensive because he is Jewish, Moses issues laws in the name of divine authority, which provide neither for individual liberty nor for free inquiry. Conformity, humility and obedience are the virutes of the Torah system. Freedom, in any meaningful contemporary sense is absent from the scenario.
Certainly small-time Beduin tyrannies hardly provide the stuff out of which epics are made. Primitive, superstitions, snake-worshiping Hebrew shepherds cannot make Passover glorious.
What can?
Is there another exodus story that really celebrates freedom?
Of course.
When I was a child I was struck by an obvious irony. The immigrant Russian Jews who sat around my table chanting the Haggada myth were part of an exodus experience far more dramatic and far more significant in the revoluton of Jewish values than the flight from Egypt they were singing about. My parents and my grandparents had been part of a massive emigration from the pogroms of Russia which dwarfed all earlier emigrations in Jewish history.
The exodus of three million Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe to North America is the greatest and most traumatic exodus in the story of the Jewish people. And, unlike the departure from ancient Egypt, it involved Jews who are still alive today.
Here lies the irony. Jews who have experienced the ultimate exodus, sit around a table singing about an inferior emigration. Justice and good humor would suggest that singing about their own experiences would be more appropriate.
The exodus from Russia, unlike the itsy-bitsy Levite departure from Egypt, altered the whole face of world Jewry.
This exodus, shifted the center of Ashkenazic Jewry from feudal pious Eastern Europe to urban capitalistic secular North America. A century ago two-thirds of the world Jewish community lived in Russia and surrounding lands. Today half of world Jewry lives in the United States and Canada.
This exodus moved Ashkenazic Jews from an economic and social system of poverty and class rigidity to a bourgeois setting of affluence, technological luxury and social mobility. Never have so many Jews been so rich, so well-educated and so intellectually powerful as they are in contemporary America. Going from the opportunities of Egyptian slavery to Beduin poverty hardly compares.
This exodus was so powerful in its social consequences, that the Jewish life style of twenty centuries was replaced by a new one in a matter of months. The movie Hester Street revealed the power of the American environment. What twenty centuries of feudal persecution could not alter, urban seculer society changed in a flash of historic time. The life style of my Russian great-grandfather was closer to that of Hillel than to my own style and the style of my contemporaries.
This exodus was truly an exodus to freedom. Only in countries influenced by the political patterns of Western Europe have Jews experienced the opportunity of individual liberty and free inquiry. The humanistic value system of American Jewry was made possible by this traumatic emigration. The move to North America did bring personal freedom to individual Jews, not just collective freedom. The saga of underdeveloped ethnic groups striving for independence and unity is not the stuff out of which humanistic liberty is made. It is often the prelude to group tyranny. America liberated the Jew not only be rescuing him from antisemitic outrage but also by subverting the traditional communal institutions which held him prisoner.
This Ashkenazic exodus has its contemporary parallel in Sephardic history. Ever since 1948 the overwhelming majority of Oriental Jews have been transported from Muslim countries to the newly founded state of Israel.
The story of Yemenite Jews airlifted from medieval poverty to the Western democracy of the Zionist state – the adventure and terror of Iraqi Jews rescued from the feudal prejudice of Arab Baghdad to the secular environment of modern Israel – equal the Askenazic trauma and surpass the Moses rescued from the feudal prejudice of Arab Baghdad to the secular environment of modern Israel – equal the askkenazic trauma and surpass the Moses trip.
A truly relevant, honest and humanistic Haggada would include not only the story of shepherd Levites, but also the bold tale of twentieth century revolutionary migration.
I’m working on it.