Dear {{first_name}},
The Haggadah instructs us בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאלו הוא יצא מן מצרים/in each and every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as having gone out of Egypt. This declarative statement is a way of demonstrating the enormous obligation each of us has on Passover. We have to not merely read about the Exodus, we have to put ourselves in the narrative and live the Exodus. Doing so is not an easy task and requires us to take a moment and live outside of the present. This concept of seeing ourselves as having gone forth from Egypt is part and parcel of the Jewish belief in our collective history and the role it plays in our lives today.
When I was in college, I studied in Israel for a summer on an archaeological dig. From time to time the lead archaeologist would take us around the site and explain what we were seeing. He would explain the different tools that were discovered and how they were used and he would explain how different buildings functioned. I would sometimes ask him, how did he KNOW this to be the fact. He was’t there… there were no captions or explanations for items he was describing… how were we to take this be factual?
This was my introduction into a certain angle of seeing the world where all we claimed to “know” were things we had empirical evidence of which we accepted as fact. We cannot KNOW the weight of the sun or the moon but mathematics can help us to determine what we believe to be the weight with the best tools at our disposal and we accept it. The same is true of the past. We do not KNOW what the world was like prior to our having been born, and ultimately prior to our having had clear cognition of everything around us. We have evidence, and that evidence is good and strong, and we can deduce what we think it was like.
Over the years, the Jewish people have gathered to tell their story of their mass exodus of about 2,000,000 (the Torah says 603,550 adult males left Egypt… you do the math) of our ancestors from bondage in Egypt thousands of years ago. That story has been preserved in our Torah and in our tradition. With the advent of modern research and methodologies of historical study, we’ve been able to attempt to dig deeper into the narrative in the Torah and to attempt to corroborate the story as told in Exodus. That attempt proved to be devastating to those of us who sought “proof” of this foundational story of our people. Research seemed to tell us time and again that the answer was that no exodus of our ancestors ever took place. It was assumed the absence of evidence meant the proof of no event. It was against this background the gifted biblical scholar, Richard Elliott Friedman, of our very own University of Georgia, wrote his book: The Exodus: How it happened and why it matters (2017). This book was a step in his own journey around the subject as he recaptured his faith in the story of our exodus. I won’t go into details as I believe each of us should read this great book, but he makes a very academic and rigorous argument for a robust belief in the Israelite/Hebrew/Jewish exodus from Egypt to the land of Israel. While not every word of the narrative recorded in the Torah needs to be authentically what happened, the core is true and vital to the continued thriving of the Jewish people. Again, I encourage everyone to read this great book.
When I asked those questions of the lead archaeologist all those years ago, it was not meant to say I don’t believe in the science or study of archaeology… in fact it was quite the opposite. I BELIEVE in those studies and take their findings to be supported by relevant data that leads us to see the world through the eyes of the experts we have today. On the other hand, I do assert this is not fact but rather the best attempt we have at recapturing the past. The evidence is good, and for that reason, it’s important we accept the hypothesis as being our understanding of a world that is no longer. The same is true of the exodus from Egypt. Proof it didn’t happen doesn’t exist and proof it did happen isn’t all that abundant. That means we have the choice to either believe or not. I believe with all of my heart that we as a people were slaves in Egypt and that we did leave servitude and encounter God in the wilderness. I believe this, and that’s why each year, I’m able to sit down at my Seder table and see myself as having gone out of Egypt and retell the story.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Hearshen
