Fit for Redemption? The Human Context
Israel and Egypt: The Mosaic Distinction
The exodus from Egypt marks the birth of the Israelite nation and religion. It marks the basic separation between cultures: a distinction between true and false in religion: "The space severed or cloven by this distinction is the space of Western Monotheisn".[^1] Underlying the issues of truth and falsehood, the Mosaic distinction, in its most profound ethical dimensions, attributes psychological and spiritual value to each figure. The stakes of redemption, of birth to a full selfhood, are large: the issue is related to all that makes individual and collective life fruitful or sterile.
Questions as to the inner meaning of redemption generate a construct of Egypt as the world of constriction, paralysis and silence. Egypt(Mizrayim)is often associated with straits (meitzarrim). Egypt becomes a country of the spirit, constricted and, in a real sense inescapable. This is the fundamental issue of the Exodus: how to be redeemed when Egypt, that enervating soulscape, has one in its pincer grip? From such a perspective, Israel cannot be redeemed.
The peculiar suffering of the such inertia&mdah;"No slave ever escaped from Egypt"—prompts the questions as to what makes release possible? Or what makes the people fit for redemption? What is the turning point of this unarticulated misery . And finally, what is the secret of redemption?
"And they swarmed... —Blessings or Critique?
Exodus, the book of Exile and Redemption[^2], begins with a list of names. (Exod 1:1-6). These are the names of the dead; listed to tell the reader that they are no more. The reference is clearly to the names of the children of Israel, those individuals who, in a moment in history, went down to Egypt and died there.
What follows on this meticulous listing of the dead, is an explosion of life, an almost surrealistic description of the spawning of a nation:
And the children of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them. (1:7)
Nameless, faceless, these too are the "children of Israel". There are two possible understandings of this anonymous fecundity. On the one hand, this is a celebration of fullness, of life burgeoning and uncontained. This reading would be a fulfilment of God's promise to Jacob: "Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation" (Gen 46:3)[^3] The redundant expressions of fertility have been read as denoting multiple births, healthy development, absence of fetal, infant, or adult mortality.[^4] There is a miraculous, almost whimsical sense of the outrageous victory of life over death: these take the six expressions of fertility (they were fruitful; they swarmed; they multiplied; they increased, very very much) to indicate that each woman gave birth to sextuplets ("six to a belly")[^5]
The affirmation of life contained in these pounding synonyms intimates, in its very excess, a transcendent order of meaning: "Even though Joseph and his brothers died, their God did not die, but the Children of Israel were fruitful and multiplied..."[^6] Here we decipher the cascade of births not only as a blessing but as the "survival of God." The generation that connects with the meaningful past is all gone. But in some way that is not fully explained here, God expresses His undimmed vitality in the language of physical fertility.
An alternative reading of the passage could take is cue from the ambiguous expression vayishretzy—"they swarmed." This can mean the blessing of extraordinary increase;[^7] but it connotes reptilian fecundity, which introduces a bizarre not in a description of human fertility.[^8] In this view, vayishretzu is a repellent description for a family fallen from greatness.
Seforno articulates this reading most clearly. At first, he writes, there were individuals, named, highly evolved persons, who went down to Egypt. Immediately upon their deaths, names cease. What we have is masses of unindividuated "insect-like" conformists, whose whole effort is to assimilate to their surroundings, and whose unconscious drive is for lemming-like suicide.
After the seventy original immigrants had died, they inclined toward the way of the sheratzim, of reptiles (an uncomplimentary reference to the pagan nations, whose concerns are entirely this-worldly). They ran through their lives in a headlong rush towards the abyss (a play on sheratzim/she'ratzim = "those who run.")(1:7)
An existential failure is marked here: the grandchildren of Jacob have already lost their distinctness, their names, their sense of purpose.[^9] They have assimilated themselves to the surrounding culture. One significant detail that reoccurs is that the Israelites in Egypt stopped circumcising their children.[^10] This drive to assimilate is, in effect, a dish wish. However, the Israelite assimilation project backfires, {as it did in Nazi Germany!} as it turns Pharaoh against them. Having abandoned their tradition and individuality, they at least share the blame for the fact that Pharaoh no longer recognised them as Joseph's kin. Seforno tells a tale of justified persecution—not to exonerate Pharaoh, but to ground events in the history of a people who have, in two generations, lost their claim to their own names, and whose swarming is not a token of blessing, but a symptom of alienation from that true self that even a Pharaoh will acknowledge.
What does Seforno gain by making the story one of guilt and punishment, within the evolving sense of the Jewish people? Surely Pharaoh is the unmitigated villain of this piece? A story of unwarranted, fantastical malice and cruelty against a people whose only sin is their fertility? ("Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they many not increase; else in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and leaven the country"[1:10}]).
Lawrence Weschler, in his study on the nature of modern totalitarianism, Calamaties of Exile, notes that a position that insists on asserting one's own responsibility for a given situation "has heuristic value: it makes possible a future politics that otherwise might become lost in a bottomless sense of victimisation and despair[^13] Concentrating on responsibility for one's own predicaments creates an emotional world in which inner growth becomes imaginable. Seforno through his narrative, invites us to reflect on the ways in which slavery, persecution, alienation—even when they are functions of a divine "edict"—are generated by human beings, in the freedom of their own narratives.
Anonymity and Silence
The names that begin—and entitle— the book are a marker for loss, as the narrative begins to speak of the nameless. Moses' parents are conspiciously unnamed at first mention—a "man from the house of Levi" and a daughter of Levi." Pharaoh's daughter is likewise anonymous. A world is composed where even the heroes have a faceless, unindividuated quality.
Another feature of the "anonymity" is the silence of all the voices but Pharaoh's. Implicit in the "swarming" modality is a vision of a primal, pre-linguistic stage of evolution, of masses of proliferating, reptilian creatures, who utter no response to Pharaoh's scheme, but move in a compelled surge towards the abyss. Language has failed; even the suffering, the harsh labour, the bitterness of their lives elicits on protest, not even an audible groan—no expression of awareness, of memory, outrage or hope.
In this silence, the paradox of fertility is emphasised: "the more they were oppressed, the more they increased (ken yirbeh) and spread out, so that the Egyptians were sickened by the Israelites" (1:12). To the Egyptians, there is someting repulsive about the silent fecundity of the people. Contrary to normal behaviour patterns, harsh treatment, exhaustion, the unbearable weight of Egypt's burdens only serve, apparently, to make them reproduce more rapidly. Human language, Pharaoh's monologue against live, is challenged by the unheard word of God, working through unconscious flesh.
The Midwives Rebellion
Emerging from the anonymous, silent masses, ambiguous in their identity (midwives to Hebrew women, or Hebrew midwives), they are the first to speak back to Pharaoh. They stand up—to pharaoh—and thus are named. What compells them to speak is their disobedience to Pharaoh's decree. "When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birthstool. If it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, vachaya—"let her be, let her live" [1:16].) This is a gezera, an edict: unequivocal, surgical in its categorization of possibilities. The pivotal verb is "look". The Pharaoh commands them to see difference, to analyse the situation at the very thrust of birth. This kind of seeing—boy/girl; death/life—is essential to the mode of gezera, edict. It is rooted in the verb "to cut", as in separation, difference, analysis.
The midwives disobedience is described with an idiom that has never before appeared in the Torah in this form: "they feared God." Abraham is called a God-fearing person (Gen 22:12). The midwives, however, enact fear of God: the "do" it. It conveys the sense of a moral act, "not to do what the Egyptian king had told them; they let the boys live" (1:18). This active "fearing God" is a refusal to see as Pharaoh sees, to "look" differently. It is a classic, heroic response to tyrants. The very extremity of the edict forces a new moral vision upon the midwives, a radical choice between life and death. Disobedience to Pharaoh becomes more than merely a refusal to kill, it becomes a total dedication to nourishing life. The narrative has conveyed, in mid-flight—the very moment of "fearing God"—its free assumption of responsibility.
Pharaoh then reproaches them, not with negligence, but with preserving life. This is the point at which the first words of resistance in Exodus are spoken. Against the absurd reproach of the Pharaoh ("Why have you done this thing...?") against the unself-conscious brutality of the Pharoah's implicit question: "Why life?", they answer: "They (the Hebrew women) are vigorous"—chayoth, lively. "The women are alive. Before the birth-aide can arrive, they give birth".
Some radical, irreducible confrontation is marked in these first words against Pharaoh. To speak against the gezera is, in a real sense, impossible. The only appropriate response is silence. To utter words is to create an alternative world, a world of undifferentiated life. This is the claim of the midwives: the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women. An alternative realm to Pharoah's "Egyptian" realm is sketched in their words. In this realm, life and birth happen irrepressibly.