I'm sitting in an airplane at 38,000 feet and young children are crying from rows in front and in back of me. If the Exodus was this loud, I might have stayed in Egypt. What would it have been like to be part of that mass, that throng of people? And their animals? And their camels?
I got into trouble once as a graduate student for writing a paper that took Lewis Mumford too seriously when he wrote that we could not really understand the minds of human beings across the millennia. It was different for them, he argued, because they knew only one existence, that of being part of a human machine whose sole purpose was to build, whose sole guidance was the slave-master’s whip.
My little exodus from the Sonoran Desert takes me to New Jersey to celebrate the Passover holiday with my family. The story of the Exodus from Egypt, which Jews commemorate on Passover, is related over the seder dinner by reading from an account of the event in the Hagaddah. The Hagaddah is filled with Bible verses, rabbinical commentary and, often, modern additions to help make the connections with our ancestors that Mumford thought so difficult. That connection is crucial, you see, because the Hagaddah instructs that every individual must celebrate the Passover as if he, as if she, had personally come out of Egypt.
The Hagaddah hints that the Hebrew slaves were not merely the flesh-and-bone cogs that Mumford theorizes. They loved their families, had sympathy for their fellow slaves, and attempted to keep the Sabbath (which was their connection with their past and the freedom prior to their bondage). But we also know from the Hagaddah, or likely more melodramatically from Cecil B. DeMille (and Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Yvonne De Carlo, John Derek, Edward G. Robinson and a cast of thousands…including camels), that the Hebrew slaves had as much psychological difficulty leaving their slavery as they did logistical difficulty. Mumford was right in this sense. Bricks and bondage were all they knew, and leaving the mud pits and passing through the desert for only the promise of a land of milk and honey was a wrenching decision.
This, of course, is Moses’s second great achievement. After persuading Pharaoh that the Hebrews should leave Egypt, he has to persuade the Hebrews that they really want to leave. And, he has to persuade them again and again.
One of the crucial moments, cinematically for DeMille but psychologically for the Hebrews, occurs on the banks of the sea. The waters block their progress and the army of the Pharaoh, who has changed his mind, too, blocks their return. Here, the Hagaddah says, Moses parted the waters, but only after one former slave, Nachshon ben Aminadav, leapt into the sea first. DeMille is rightly famous for visualizing what comes next: the waters soar in fountains away from the sea floor, creating a path for the Hebrews. Propelled by his wrath, Pharaoh’s army pursues them. But as the Hebrews complete their passage, the world’s most powerful army – with its bronze swords and its chariots – all drown in the water’s return to its level.
DeMille shows us what happens next. Pharaoh returns, broken but not dead. The Hebrews continue, persuaded but not convinced. The Hagaddah also tells us what happens next in Heaven. The angels sing songs of praise to the Almighty for the miracle below, but the Almighty rebukes them: “My children are drowning in the sea, and you sing songs?!”
If we have a hard time mustering sympathy for the hesitance of the Hebrews in leaving Egypt, how much harder must it be to have sympathy for their oppressors and pursuers?
The lesson is clear:
Change is hard.
Progress has costs.
Even if you’ve risen from under the bite of the whip, remember the cost of your ascent – the cost of progress – to those who have not partaken in it.
