Good Enough

Ordinary People Save the World

“The woman conceived and bore a son; and she saw that he was good, and she hid him for three months.” —Exodus 2:2

At the time when Moses was born, the entire house was filled with light, as it is written here: “And she saw him that he was good [tov]” (Exodus 2:2) and it is written there: “And God saw the light, that it was good [tov]”(Genesis 1:4). —Talmud Sotah 12b

The Torah uses the same language to describe the birth of Moses and the creation of the world. Just as God sees that the world is good, Moses’s mother sees that her son is good. The Midrash intensifies the parallel, imagining the birth of Moses as a moment literally akin to God’s own moment of witnessing the power of God’s words, “Let there be light.” Each human life is a cosmos.

The Book of Exodus begins with a cruel decree mandating the infanticide of all Israelite boys. It’s not personal—no Hebrews are named in the decree. It’s a policy of population control. The individuals affected by it are not named. Nobody is singled out. The new king of Egypt has forgotten Joseph, which is to say, has forgotten the person. Shemot, the Hebrew word for Exodus, means names. The book begins, ironically, with a decree predicated on the erasure and diminishment of the name. When we meet Moses’s parents they are unnamed, but referred to by tribal affiliation: “A man from the house of Levi, a daughter from the house of Levi.” It hardly matters who they are. They could be anyone. Likewise, Moses, a protagonist of the Torah’s next four books, is not introduced to us by name. He is simply called a son. He could be any boy. In the Egyptian dystopia that initiates the Book of Exodus, names are dangerous. You only name something to which you are attached. Why name something disposable?

The birth of Moses is described, at first, generically. It is the banal, yet miraculous experience of any mother who has gone through labor and delivery. Of course, Moses’s mother sees that it is good, that her son is an embodiment of goodness. Who wouldn’t? One might read thousands of stories of other Israelite mothers that begin this way.

But in a society in which birth has been transformed into a death sentence, seeing the goodness of creation is not straightforward. Who wants to bring a child into a world that is dangerous and dark, where evil reigns? The woman’s declaration of goodness is thus a kind of triumph over pessimism and misanthropy.

The birth of Moses is both unremarkable and extraordinary. To the extent that Yocheved—Moses’s mom—is a reflection of God, Moses’s birth a recapitulation of the Creation of the World, we are granted a new theology: God’s decision to create the world is a kind of triumph over God’s own fear. What could God fear? Well, perhaps God knows the world is a difficult place. Perhaps God knows that we all eventually die, and that we certainly suffer along the way. In that sense, what’s the point? We don’t need a cruel king of Egypt to feel the pain of the question, “All this effort—and what does it amount to?” There are always good reasons—if one is looking for them—not to bring life into the world.

Moses’s origin story has a magical quality to it. Being placed in a basket in the Nile strains belief. It is the kind of act that has a light quality when rendered surrealistically, as in a Wes Anderson film. But it might just as easily be read more darkly as a kind of “exposure.” That the ending is a happy one only raises questions. What happened to all the other boys placed in baskets in the Nile? Surely, their mothers also loved them. Surely, their sisters also ran along the banks to see if they would be OK. Where was Pharaoh’s daughter then? One imagines the Nile turning red with blood during the first plague as if in demonstration of all the death it has witnessed, its basin filled with empty baskets of those whose stories never made it in.

Midrashic stories about baby Moses emphasize his Herculean qualities, his innate prophetic capacities, his specialness. But the Biblical text itself emphasizes something else. Moses is not described in any awesome terms. He is simply a life that made it, a survivor, who was loved enough to be saved from reasonable destruction. Moses was born to an oppressed woman, yet raised in the halls of her oppressor. He was given over to the enemy so he could enjoy a better life. If Moses is light, he is a fragile light that must be saved at every turn; he is a light that owes his existence to those in his life who could recognize (his) goodness.

Supposedly Kafka wanted to have all of his writings burned, at least this is what he wrote in his “last will.” But thankfully for us, his editor and friend, Max Brod, refused to honor his request. Some creators struggle with writer’s block—getting the words out on the page. But Kafka’s struggle—if he is to be taken at his word—was not with creation, but with retention. The perfect editor is so concise she whittles all speech down to silence, for what word could withstand scrutiny? What editor-God would let the imperfect world stand as it is? What editor would not find flaw in creation, if given time? To keep Moses, Yocheved must find goodness, but not perfection. The meaning of Creation is transfigured through its retelling in Exodus 2 as Max Brod’s act of saving Kafka’s work. It is the act of finding a moderate goodness in a world that, too often, people want to see as either entirely good or entirely evil. The light which fills the home upon Moses’s birth is not a light that abolishes the world’s evil, but a chiaroscuro that makes black-and-white thinking untenable. It is the light of “good enough.”

When Pharaoh’s daughter sees Moses and adopts him, she continues the theme of resisting black-and-white thinking. The love she feels for the child is at once anti-political and hyper-political. It is a love that cuts uncomfortably across ideological boundaries, reminding us that relationships follow a different law than that of either self-interest or group loyalty. The light of relationships complicates the lines of partisanship and creed. It is common to imagine Pharaoh’s daughter as someone who did not believe that the Hebrews were the enemy, who disagreed with her father. But it might be even more powerful, if unsettling, to consider that she remained, at the level of speech and thought, an “antisemite,” but simply couldn’t bring herself to look away from the boy’s goodness.

In her story of escape from Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt describes the kindness of a guard who helped her. This man was not necessarily part of any resistance, and might have gone on, in another context, to participate in atrocities. He was an ordinary German. But people are complicated. In the moment that he helped Arendt, they enjoyed a feeling of friendship and mutual respect. He was not so thoughtless as Eichmann, who, in Arendt’s telling, was totally disassociated from himself, thoroughly brainwashed by ideological talking points. The man who helped Arendt, at least for a moment, did not see things in black and white. He saw the light in Arendt’s face, that it was good. Arendt, meanwhile, found light in his. Experiences of this nature led her to claim that totalitarianism spreads in cultures that over-simplify, replacing the individual with groupthink. To find the light and see that it is good, one must resist the tendency paint in broad strokes, to be a systematic solutionist. One must remember the name, one must see the face, and not simply hide behind first principles. The world appears to those who regard themselves and others as more than an algorithm to be executed.

Creators don’t just make good things, they look for goodness where it would be easier not to. They look for reasons to affirm, not just reasons to oppose.

One of the great tragedies of oppression is that people can come to define themselves on the terms of their oppressors. In a Jewish context this means one can end up being Jewish not because one finds joy in the covenant, but to spite Hitler. Judaism endures simply because of antisemitism, void of any content. One might come to make Auschwitz and not Sinai the meaning of Judaism (as David Hartman describes). One might come to be machmir (strict) about Emil Fackenheim’s 614th commandment—“Thou Shalt Grant Hitler No Posthumous Victories”—and mekil (cavalier) about everything else. But Moses’s mother didn’t keep her child to spite the Egyptians. She wasn’t trying to topple anything. She was an ordinary person who saw that something was good. It was this seemingly minor discovery that proved most fateful in the history of the Jewish people, and by extension, the history of the world. Perhaps the Torah is suggesting that liberation originates not from our rejection of evil, but from our observation of goodness. Yes, it will take plagues and willpower and supernatural help to confront and defeat Pharaoh. But first there must be something to live for, to defend. God does not appear in the first chapters of Exodus. Moses’s mother does not obey a divine law. She is, rather, more like God’s messenger, God’s surrogate, God’s emissary. The birth of Moses is not the discovery of any principle of dignity or human rights, but the radiance of a new face.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

P.S.—Here is my new mega thread on Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

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