Peoplehood: The Rejoinder to Amalek
Covenant Requires Mixed Company
Moses replied, “We will all go—regardless of social station —we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds; for we must observe יהוה’s festival.” But [Pharoah] said to them, “The Lord be with you—the same as I mean to let your dependents go with you! Clearly, you are bent on mischief. No! You gentlemen go and worship the Lord, since that is what you want.” And they were expelled from Pharaoh’s presence. (Exodus 10:9-11)
The festival Moses and Aaron spoke about was the holiday of Shavuot, the day the Torah would be given. (Rabeinu Bahya)
An overlooked detail in the Exodus narrative is that Pharaoh momentarily agrees to let some of the people go, just not all of them. He agrees to let the adult men leave, but seeks to retain the women and children as hostages. By splitting up the families and keeping the weak behind, Pharaoh—we can speculate—hopes to ensure that the Exodus is only a vacation from Egypt, not a permanent departure. He suspects mischief if the entire people leaves, and he isn’t wrong.
Moses’s original pitch is that the people want to go worship God in the wilderness (7:16). Moses leaves out the part that the destiny of the people is to found their own civilization in the land of Canaan. Since the wilderness is no place to live, Pharaoh might infer that the people merely seek to make a pilgrimage. The interruptions to his slave economy aren’t great but they can be accommodated. On the other hand, a slave uprising and mass exodus of a permanent underling caste is disruptive in its own right, but even worse for Egypt as a matter of honor and precedent.
But the Torah encodes a deeper teaching in the exoteric back and forth between Pharaoh and Moses: everyone must leave because everyone must experience the Exodus and everyone must stand at Sinai. While Pharaoh distinguishes strong from weak, Moses refuses to accede to this distinction. The covenant includes every Jew, regardless of social rank or intellectual ability. More than this, the range of ages and social experiences enables the longevity of the covenant. Transmission requires friction and viewpoint diversity. While Pharaoh seeks to destroy the family unit (a pattern that begins with the edict against the male children), Sinai promises to save and elevate it. Where Egypt treats its slaves as interchangeable, thereby destroying history, the wilderness event (Sinai) says that every person is unique and inalienable, thereby creating it. Pharaoh’s war is a war against the family. Pharaoh, channeling the monastic tradition, says “Go worship God, but leave behind your attachments to spouse and children.”
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, a lone philosopher leaves a cave of illusions then fights his community trying to get them to follow suit. In the Exodus, an entire people leaves a society of illusions and makes the difficult, incomplete journey through a desert to a Promised Land. The Platonic tradition offers redemption to philosophers. Israelites offer it to an entire people, a nation of philosophers, a family of philosophers. The core idea here is not simply that the covenant is inclusive of non-elites, but that the elitism of the Jewish people, in contrast to the elitism of the Egyptians, consists in the positive view it takes towards family life. This emphasis culminates in the central meta-teaching of Passover night, namely, that the Exodus occurred so that we might teach it to our children. At Greek and Egyptian dinner parties, one leaves one’s children at home. At Jewish symposia, the party revolves around the children.
Pharaoh’s proposed compromise echoes in Amalek’s attack on the weak, the stragglers. Their viciousness in deliberately preying upon the vulnerable also possesses a kind of Talmudic hava amina, a challenge to the Jewish people to which we must respond: Will you carry on without the stragglers, sacrificing them to Amalek, or will you insist that the integrity of the covenant requires not just the front ranks but the back ranks, too? Amalek, like Pharaoh, offers us a test. The litmus test of the people is not how much Torah its elites study or observe, but how committed it is to the Jewish life of the median Jew, and even the proverbial “bottom-quartile” Jew. A person of modest intellect (the simpleton, tam) or simply low literacy and opportunity (the one who doesn’t know how to ask, she’ayno yodeah lishol) are not required to be great scholars. It is enough to sit at the table and take in what they can. But the rest of us have a duty to become chachamim, sages, and to do so, not by leaving the company of the wicked child, the simple child, and the one who doesn’t know how to ask, but by sitting with them. That mixed company is the revelation of chochma, wisdom, and the ultimate counter to both Egypt and Amalek. “Let my people go” should be heard with an emphasis not on go, but on people. We rise and fall as a people. All of us are obligated to experience the Exodus.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins