Exodus and the birth of a nation

Geoffrey Stern: Well, welcome to another week, Rabbi, and I know you have a busy day today. You are involved with a conversion in the morning and a celebration of the conversion in the afternoon.

Adam Mintz: It’s nice in the middle of the day to be able to discuss the Parshah.

GS: To learn a little Torah. So as I said in the intro, we’re going to kind of review a book. Now I heard of this book on Daniel Gordis’ podcast, which is called Israel from the Inside. And he featured this author who he knew. The author is a professor at Emory University and it was in November, so we’re talking about just a month after the war started, and the book literally came out in October of 2023. So it’s a book on the Bible, on the origins of the Bible, the purpose of the Bible, and all that.

But it was interesting enough to Daniel Gordis to bring on to his very Israel-oriented, at these times, war-oriented podcast. And there’s a link to it in our notes. But he says that this guy, Jacob Wright, makes a really astonishing claim, which is that the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally formed around not a celebration of Jewish life, but around catastrophe. Catastrophe plays, he argues in that article, a central role to the way that we think about Jews and about ourselves and our place in the world.

So just that kind of piqued my curiosity, and as a result, I went ahead and bought the book, and I was reading it over the new year. So we are starting a new book of Shemot, of Exodus, And according to our right and according to my title, it’s really about a birth of a nation. And for us to see this in the Bible’s own text, we have to fast forward and jump to Deuteronomy. Because as you know, Rabbi, I love the Seder. I love the core Magid part of the Seder, where we recite the ancient formula of the Bikurim.

And there it says in Deuteronomy 26.5, the famous thing about my father was a fugitive Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there. But there he became a great and very populous nation. By Yehisham L’Goy Gadol Atzum V’Rav. And one of the things we’re going to focus on today, and Wright certainly focuses on, is that although the English word for the Book of Shemot is Exodus, you could easily make the case that less than the focus being on the leaving of Egypt the rebellion against the pharaoh, even the entry into the land, you could make the case that the book of Exodus, called Shemot, which is names, is really the story of the formation of the nation.

And so it becomes more of a story about who we are as a people than any particular activity or drama related to the story. And I think that’s actually Morris. You could even make the argument that the name Shemot, which has to do with our names of our people, is actually even a little bit more appropriate from this vantage point than the word Exodus. What are your thoughts on this?

AM: I think I mean, I think that’s good. I mean, you have to give credit to Exodus for a minute also. Exodus is not a bad name, because that is the story of the book, right? But I think, you know, but Shemot gives a whole different perspective. I’ll just say, and we’ll get there, that, you know, the rabbis have a different name from this book. They call it Volume 2, Sefer Hashemi, that it’s really the continuation of the Book of B’reishit, which is a whole other discussion, which is great.

GS: Well, but again, I think what you’re saying is really compliments what I’m saying, or at least what I said in the intro, that there is this Gordian knot between the book of Genesis, Bereshit, and the book of Shemot, because I don’t think they refer to the third book as the third book. They do not.

AM: They do not. Vayikra is separate.

GS: So I really like that. So the first thing we’re going to do before we get to this new book and this Professor Wright, who really looks at it from a much more, I guess, scientific and academic perspective, is we’re going to look at the classical texts because you know Rabbi, I always feel that as radical a scholar as you can find based on the most up-to-date scientific findings, typically they never say anything that the rabbis hadn’t already figured out on their own. It’s always true, Yes, so, the first, I want to make a few, I guess, parallels between verses in Genesis and Exodus.

And the first is the most obvious. Exodus starts, as I said before, Ve’elu shemot b’nei Yisrael. These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt. And in Genesis 46.8, which you could clearly make a case is just a segue, it says the same thing, ve’elu sh’mot b’nei Yisrael, ha’abai im mitzrayimu. But the Ramban, one of those classical commentaries, already says that there is a key connection, and you touched upon it by saying that Exodus is considered Book Two. He says that Scripture designs to reckon the subject of the exile from the time they went down to Egypt and link it with the story before.

He talks about it as a story of exile, the first story of exile, and it is for this reason that he returns to the beginning of the subject stated in the book of Genesis, which is to connect this. This adds another element that I hadn’t touched upon. We talked about birth of a nation. Of a birth of a nation, it’s fascinating that that birth is in exile, that that birth is the result of a catastrophe, so to speak. So even that is kind of a giveaway in terms of what right comes at from a whole totally different perspective.

There is a weekly parsha, commentary from Hadar, and the rabbi there, Rabbi David Kasher, says that the Ramban, in his masterful fashion, manages to quickly both give a philosophical and a literary explanation for the repetition of the verse. Conceptually, he argues that the central problem in the book of Exodus is not slavery but exile. So it was the descent into Egypt in the earlier book that set the stage for the struggle the children of Israel will be contending with in this book.

As a matter of reading strategy then, he explains that the Torah uses the callback as a device to emphasize the interconnectedness of these two books. If the Torah wants us to remember the descent into Egypt instead of a lengthy exposition, it can use six words from a scene in Genesis. So he wrote, and there is a link in the Sefaria notes to his article, he goes out of his way to say that the Ramban and others are linking these two stories, and again he makes that distinction between slavery and redemption to exile and forming a nation.

So the the next verse that he brings is exodus 1 7 and there it says that Uber is el peru vi is suvi bovi at sumo bma odm od but the israelites were fertile and prolific they multiplied and increased very greatly and he links that to Genesis 1.28, the story of creation. And God blessed them and said to be, be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it. Peru or a u malu e aits I guess at the heart of this is we are dealing with texts, we are dealing with textual references. I guess you would have to be blind to not make that connection in terms of word choice, that whereas in Genesis we’re talking about the creation of humanity, of creatures, and them filling the earth, Here we’re talking about the young Israelites coming into Egypt and similarly the creation of this people.

Do you think they have a leg to stand on?

AM: Yeah, for sure they have a leg to stand on, but you know, this is also a description of destruction. So Peru vayisrtzu vyirbu veyatzumu b’maod, maod, v’timaleh Haretz, but those people are trying to be destroyed, while the story at the beginning of the Torah is about creation to make, you know, to make the world whole. So it’s actually the opposite.

GS: Well, I mean in Exodus when it says that they were greatly increasing, I mean from their perspective they were growing. To is from Pharaoh’s perspective.

AM: Right, that’s correct. It depends whose perspective you look at,

GS: But granted, correct. But in terms of the word choice, there’s no question that it’s paralleling the Genesis. He goes on in Exodus 2.2, it says and it’s talking about the birth of Moses. The woman conceived and bore a son and when she saw how beautiful he was, she hid him for three months. Well, the translation from JPS is not exactly correct. Because it misses out, misses the boat. It says, when she saw Oto Kitov hu, that he was good, and our good buddy Everett Fox, of course, says how goodly and handsome he was, and he says what is important is the Genesis connection.

The Birth of Moses and Its Connections

GS: So here, too, in Genesis, we have this word ma’od, tov and tov ma’od. And we’ve already seen even in the prior verse when it was talking about how they grew, they were growing ma’od, ma’od. And here you have ki tov. The Hadar Devar Torah that I referenced before, There he actually quotes the Talmud in Sotah. And the Talmud in Sotah asks why does it say Tov? So here’s a tidbit. This I had not known before. We all know Moses’ name given by him by the princess of Egypt. But what was his given name?

I just went to a Brit today over Zoom, and I heard the baby’s name. What was Moses called? So it is taught in a brighter, that Rabbi Meir says Tov is his, Moses’ real name, as it was given to him by his parents when he was born. Tuvia. Rabbi Yehuda said his name was Tuvia. I guess that’s like says they said he was good because they saw that he was fit for prophecy. Others say they say he was good because he was born when he was already circumcised. Now here’s what I really want to get at. And the rabbis say, at the time when Moses was born, the entire house was filled with light as it is written, and when she saw him that he was a goodly tov child, and it is the same as when God said in Genesis 1.4, and God saw the light that it was good.

So here we have in the Talmud itself this kind of correlation between the story of the birth of the world and of light, and here the birth of Moses, who we now know was originally possibly called Tuvia, and it makes the connection between the verses. The final connection is that Moses is then hidden and put into a wicca basket. The t kahlo tivat gome vita in Heu. The wicker basket is called a little ark. Tevat Noah saved the world. In this case, Tevat Moshe saved Moses and you could make the argument again that that this was the beginning of saving the Jews, but also making the Jews.

So, I think it is kind of fascinating, this connection. And again, I’m just so thankful that you referenced that Sefer Shemot is called Book Two, because it really does make them into a close sequel. But if you look at all of these texts, it really opens up your eyes to a larger degree how you study the story of the first three chapters of Shemot. Because we talk about the people of Israel growing, we talk about a new pharaoh, and we talk about an evil decree, and we all of a sudden start to gather the names.

Reinterpreting the Torah

If you read this book by Wright, and you read it from the higher textual analysis, he starts to pick apart the verses in a fascinating way. Where, you know, when Moses is born and he’s considered good, there’s really no reference to this decree of that he should be killed. And when Miriam appears, and then later when at the burning bush, God makes reference to Aaron, it’s kind of almost as though a cast of characters is being formulated as we speak. Putting this Moses into context, you really can see if you start looking at the verses as they’re written, that there are kind of, like, sometimes hard to understand introductions of different characters.

Some things don’t drive. And before I get to some examples, what he’s getting at, obviously, is that he is a proponent of this concept that the Bible was written, or at least edited, much later in time, from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, after the country of Israel the united market monarchy was ended and there was a civil war and then after the exile and what they were trying to do was to create a narrative that the people of Israel could use to become one and whole. And I just find it fascinating that the way he tracks that is a similar way to the way you see the classical commentaries here, where in a sense, when they’re making these connections between Genesis and Exodus, in a sense, they too are constructing with glue and rubber bands, a connection between these almost disparate stories.

Does that make any sense to you at all?

AM: Yeah, I mean, I like that a little bit, you know, how they pull together stories that don’t seem to connect to one another, right?

GS: Yeah, yeah, I mean, his whole point, and this is where the beauty of his book, which I can’t recommend enough, is that basically I had always read the Torah from a perspective of the Jews went chronologically from Leich Lecha to the patriarchs to going down into Egypt and then the Exodus and conquering the land of Israel, and then they kind of fell off into a monarchy. And we’ve all in previous episodes talked about how there’s these discussions, why do you need a king when God is your king?

And then ultimately, where they fall apart is in the land of Israel. So it’s almost like a rise and then a decline. And of course, that’s because when I and I would suggest most of us read the Torah, we’re reading it chronologically, from the beginning, the middle to the end. And what he does, it’s almost a paradigm shift. He says, if you believe that Ezra and Nehemiah were pretty much at a much later date, responsible for collecting these narratives and putting them all together, after the catastrophe of losing it all, in a sense, it’s a different way of looking at the whole story.

You look backwards, and you say, what threads are they? What is the story? What is the story that they are creating? Why would they make this connection between the Teva and the Ark of Noah and the Ark of Moses? Why would they try to connect these people going down, 70 individuals at the end of Genesis, to a new nation beginning in Egypt? And his whole premise is they’re trying to create a narrative that’s going to help the Jewish people survive when they don’t have a temple, when they don’t have a king, and to show them that they were created, actually, in an exile, and they were created from all of these disparate elements.

I just think it’s a fascinating way of looking at it,

AM: Well, that last point is a super interesting point, and that is it prepares the Jews for their life later in exile. It means it knows that Jewish history is going to be a Jewish history of exile, and therefore the stories in the Bible are stories to help the Jews deal with that exile. Now, that’s not a very traditional way of looking at it, because in tradition, you’re not supposed to believe that we’re a people of exile. You’re supposed to believe that we’re a people in the land, but we didn’t deserve it, so we were sent into exile.

He’s kind of saying that exile is, it was kind of known from the beginning that we would be a people of exile.

GS: So, the only thing that I would add to that and embellish that with is I think he switches the word from exile to maybe catastrophe is a strong word, but what he claims makes the Bible such a unique document and one that has inspired so many people for millennium is that it was the 1st scribal [molding of national narrative]. He spends a whole chapter or two on the book of Eicha, of Lamentations, where the loss is what is that defines us. And he claims that there were no other empires or great nations that would try to fix things by focusing on what was wrong and what was bad.

And so the case that he makes, I think, has less to do with exile and return and more to do with So you’ve lost something. So you lost what you think made you important and what made you distinct, but alert, that’s not what made you distinct and unique. And it’s only through identifying that and going back and reconstructing it that the Jewish people were able to find their mojo. And their mojo was that what define them, and again, I would say less the word exile, but more that the glue that bound them had nothing to do with what would be the most obvious.

Borders, a monarchy, leaders, even ritual and temple. What made them unique was that they shared this common heritage, what we call nation building, what we call a joint, a shared narrative, and that’s ultimately the whole point of this book.

AM: See, that’s a very important point, this idea of shared narrative, right? Isn’t that important that we, you know, that’s what everyone always looks for now is a shared narrative.

GS: Yeah, yep. And this, he argues that the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, is the first and possibly most glorious attempt to create that. Now, he doesn’t, just like I quoted the Talmud, he quotes other places in the Bible. So, for instance, in Isaiah, 2nd Isaiah, he quotes chapter 40, where Isaiah says, did you know, have you not heard, have you not been told from the very first? Have you not discerned how the earth was formed, how the earth was founded, so its inhabitants seem like grasshoppers who spread out the skies like gores.

He goes on and he starts then talking from Genesis. He talks about the power of the storm and the world. Who created this? The one who sends out their host to count. He calls them each by name. Not a single one fails to appear. Who do you say, O Jacob? Why declare, O Israel, my way is hid from God? He makes this transition from creation to the people of Israel, And what the argument is, is that you have God. So, you know, when I say and when you say a shared narrative, you can’t overlook the fact that the shared narrative has to do with a shared narrative in terms of a belief in a God who has given the people a mission.

But the point that I made before, that that mission still either is not limited by boundaries or transcends boundaries, transcends walls, transcends a temple, transcends a king, that is the point that he says that they are trying to make. He says, the breathtaking poetry of Second Isaiah features the major themes of the biblical narrative, creation, the patriarchs, matriarchs, the exodus. Many of the poems date to the time of the Persian Empire, which conquered Babylon in 539 BC.

And what he’s trying to put together by combining this and lamentations And all of the other more prophetic writings is that they were creating something that had never been created before. They were creating a national identity, a familial slash a nation identification that transcended so many other things that everyone else, including the participants, probably thought were required. And that’s why he says that the scribes of Ezra and Nehemiah, and even has a whole chapter on how scribes became kind of came to the fore with the editing of these texts, were able to craft this amazing narrative.

The Significance of Jewish Narrative

And I just found it, I guess to me, what was fascinating is the paradigm shift between reading the text from beginning going forward and reading them of how would you have read them looking back. And therefore, if you’re a classical traditional Jew, you go how brilliant that this story had within it, the glue and the connectors. That enabled it to create this narrative going backwards. And if you’re more of an academic and you look at a kind of a documentary hypothesis where these texts were put together, how brilliant they were in constructing this whole thing so that, I mean, he gets into the southern kingdom, the northern kingdom, how each one added and had their own stories and felt kind of related to different players, different places, and how it was all kind of woven together, sometime with great fluidity, sometimes a little bit of a jumpy ride, but it was put together to create this narrative that would enable the people to not only survive but to flourish.

AM: First of all, that’s amazing, but I would add one piece to that. You see, he could only write this book and make this argument about the story of the Exodus because the story of the Exodus became our fundamental text because it’s the text of the Seder. Meaning that’s the text that Jews go back to every single year. There’s no other text in all of our writings that we go back to in the same way. You might say the Book of Esther, but it’s not the same thing, right? I mean, the Seder somehow kind of frames the whole Jewish year.

And so, therefore, all the points he makes and when he takes it to Isaiah and all of that, but you have to keep in mind the fact, and we still do this today by sitting at the Seder and telling the same story. That’s what v’hi sh’amda means. That’s, I mean, I don’t know if he brings that as a proof, but v’hi sh’amda shebachol dor v’dor omdim aleinu l’chaloteinu, which means in every generation they try to kill us, means it’s the experience of exile that’s the most important experience.

GS: You know what I love about what you just said is that I was thinking lately, you know, we all know that the canon of the Bible was closed at a certain date, and then we had maybe the Talmud and the Mishnah, but where did Jewish creativity and writing continue? And I think, first and foremost, it’s in our liturgy. I mean, even today, you as a rabbi, whether it’s taking a prayer that maybe is not normally said on a given Shabbat, and saying this Shabbat merits that we say this, or a piyut, and I think what you just touched upon is that yes, when the rabbis wrote the Haggadah, and of course the Haggadah is still being written, we all know that from our series on the Haggadah.

AM: You’re the expert on that,

GS: Right? This is exactly what we’re talking about, that even the most classic and traditional Jew can understand, that how these texts were used, that I started by quoting in Deuteronomy, where it says, Ve’he sheamda ub’chol dor v’dor that this is the story of the birth and the creation and the nurturing of our people, that is what ends up in our highest liturgical moment and experience, which is the Passover Seder. The fact that it says in every generation, they will come and destroy us, not so much from a negative, because I think that’s the real takeaway from what this guy’s rights book is about, that it might come out of calamity, but calamity almost becomes like a cleansing moment, where you get to throw away all of the peripherals, all of those unnecessary elements that you thought were critical for what it means to be a nation, and say that’s not what binds you.

It’s something much more profound and powerful than that. And I think that is really, at the end of the day, the combined message of whether it’s an academic work at the level of Wright, or it’s us just kind of surveying and reviewing the rabbinic literature, looking at how Isaiah kind of ties these different stories together, how they were used. And I think I started by saying that I discovered this book on a podcast from Daniel Gordis that clearly is Israel from the inside. It’s talking about this moment.

And I think that the only thing that we can all agree about this moment is that it’s a moment created by an unbelievable, unfathomable disaster, catastrophe. And it’s going to hurt, and it continues to hurt, but I think it offers some solace to know that the brilliance of our people actually were created from catastrophes. That when we look back now at our narrative, we can look back to the biblical narrative, we can look back to the 75-year narrative of the Jewish state. What we’re going to have to do is to, through rubber bands and glue and sometimes very elegant maneuvers, and sometimes not so much create a joint narrative that comes out of this.

And if we do that, I think we can be so much stronger. And while we can never be thankful for the catastrophe that caused this, I think we can do it justice. And not let it go to waste. And that’s why I found not only this book so inspiring, but the fact that Gortys brought the book and saw in it the insight that it can provide us at this moment and put it into the context of Jewish history and Jewish text writing.

AM: I think that’s really the appropriate way to end this discussion. And that is to say that, you know, the events of October 7th and the events of the war, they’re terrible, but they’re part of a Jewish narrative. And we need to see everything in terms of part of that Jewish narrative.

GS: Amen. So- Very good. Have a good week,

AM: Everybody. Shabbat shalom. Enjoy Parshat Shemot. This was an amazing, you know, thought-provoking topic, and we look forward to seeing everybody next week. Shabat Shalom.

GS: Shabbat Shalom. And we found out today what Moses’ name really was. It was Tuvia, it was good. I found out the name of my new nephew, Levi Akiva. We should all have children that give us the light and make us survive and flourish. Shabbat shalom, and I’ll see you all next week.