Most of this series is about specific concepts in Jewish ethics, but like the last one I recorded I want to talk here about something foundational, namely the Exodus story and how it generates so much of Jewish ethics.
Sometimes when we say “Exodus” we’re talking about the part we focus on during Pesach, the festival of Passover, from enslavement by Pharoah to liberation by the Divine. This Exodus is known in Jewish terminology as the Going-Out from Egypt, Yetziat Mitzrayim.
There is a book of the Torah called Exodus, or Shmot in Hebrew. The book of Exodus takes the story further, toward Mt. Sinai where the people experience Divine revelation, enter into a covenant, and receive many specific laws and teachings. It includes the story of the Golden Calf, the first major challenge to those teachings. Shmot ends with the people contributing from their own materials toward the building of the Mishkan, a sacred tent where a cloud of Divine presence comes to rest.
And sometimes when we talk about the Exodus, we mean actually everything that happens in the Torah after Yetziat Mitzrayim, including the whole forty-year journey through the desert and all the challenges and insights of that journey, all the way to the doorstep of the Promised Land.
Here are some ways that Yetziat Mitzrayim shapes Jewish ethics.
First, the Exodus extends the idea that human beings are created in the image of the Divine, B’tzelem Elohim. God pays attention to a people who as outcast as a people can be. A people exiled from their home, feeling abandoned by their God -- indeed, living in a deep valley far from the heavens. A people demonized by a ruler, feared by him and then mocked by him. A people covered in the mud in which they worked as they made bricks for Pharaoh’s works. This is the people the Divine chose as the vehicle for bringing Torah into the world. This is the way the Divine chose to reveal something of God’s essential nature, by showing the Israelites and the world that no one is beyond the reach of Divine attention.
Second, and related, the book of Exodus presents this as though it were a heavier lift for God than even creating the heavens and the earth. Requiring even more Divine energy, metaphorically speaking. It takes many more chapters to make liberation happen than it does to create the universe. In Genesis the Divine creates against a backdrop of formlessness, but in Exodus there is an active and powerful enemy in Pharaoh who calls himself a god. It’s in proving God’s-self against Pharaoh that God shows the measure of Divine strength and greatness.
Third, the opening chapters of Exodus show different people pulled toward connections to others and their responsibilities to them, motivated by more than group solidarity. The first people we meet in the book of Shmot include midwives who serve Israelite mothers but might themselves be Egyptian; Pharaoh’s own daughter, who decides to override her father’s decree of death for Hebrew babies when she is face-to-face with one herself; Moshe, who when he first encounters slaves we’re not sure if he knows he’s an Israelite or if they do either. These stories force us to ask how it is that people decide whom they are connected to, reconcile different sources of authority, reconcile law and compassion, reconcile public identity and conscience.
Fourth, the experience of Yetziat Mitzrayim shows up in all kinds of specific Jewish ethical teachings. The most obvious is the one labeled over and over by the Torah itself: Do not oppress or abuse or defraud someone who is “other” (ger) in your society, because that was you in the land of Egypt. The Torah’s business and labor ethics are meant to be the opposite of Pharaoh. The prohibition against verbal abuse and fraud is a response to Pharaoh. Even the importance of returning lost objects to their owners is an echo of the Divine restoring us, a lost people, to our place and our dignity.
Some of these sorts of things are of course in other systems of ethics too. But in Judaism, we are guided to see ourselves and others always in the light of the Exodus. Not only as a past experience, but as an essential drama taking place on a daily basis. We are always trying to be aware of when we slip into the habits of Pharaoh in our own domain, and whether there is someone near us who might need the same outstretched arm we did in Mitzrayim.
Comments