BY: JOSH HALPERN
Awe-inspired by the drama of the ten plagues, the Jewish people leave Egypt in a euphoric frenzy. Yet, with the Egyptian army in pursuit from the rear and the Sea of Reeds serving as a barrier in the front, the Jews want nothing more than to return to slavery and its guaranteed psychological and material security. Thus, the people call to Moses in desperation: “Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness?’”[1]
Despite painful memories of persecution, the Israelites go “berserk” and long for slavery but ultimately, find salvation in divine intervention. Come Passover, Chazal obligate every Jew to internalize and “re-experience” this perplexing and miraculous narrative. The predicament of the modern Jew when confronted with this expectation is twofold: first, within the narrative itself, the fickleness of Jewish people in their commitment to God seems utterly irrational in light of the endless miracles God performs in Egypt. Second, the perpetually tyrannized, exilic Jew has drawn from a deep basin of shared experience in order to empathize with ancient Israel’s affliction. Yet, to the modern Jew, enjoying the benefits of democracy, the experience of subjugation is a foreign one and a closed chapter in Jewish history. In the eyes of modern man, the war against slavery has long been won! Therefore, I turn to the humanistic (and quasi-existential) psychology of Erich Fromm to breathe fresh life into the Israelite struggle for freedom.
While under Egyptian rule, the Israelite’s experience never extended beyond the confines of the pyramid he was ordered to construct. As long as the Jewish slave proved healthy enough to work, he found his niche in the stability and consistency of social hierarchy. Sustenance, housing, and employment were all provided and practically predetermined, severely limiting the range of Israelite freedom. In apotheosizing the authoritarian rule and bowing subserviently, the Jew was offered a haven from the “perils of uncertainty.” Thus, the abolition of Israelite slavery threatened the Israelite’s security and self-conception. In an analysis of the breakdown of the medieval hierarchy, Fromm cuts to the crux of the freed slave’s psychic experience:
[Man] is freed from those ties which used to give him security and a feeling of belonging. Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world… the world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life.[2]
Rocked in the psychological cradle of slave labor, the Jew was subservient to the Egyptian monarchy. However, via the plagues, God exposes the flimsiness of the Egyptian empire’s social structure thereby undermining the source of Jewish security. In shattering Egyptian authoritarianism, God conveys to the world that they must dispose of the inequalities deriving from social hierarchies.
Yet when confronted with a choice between the uncertainty of ethical freedom and a security lying at the lowest rung of the social ladder, Jewish autonomy disintegrates. Fromm eloquently depicts the tragedy of the desert Jew: “Evil is man’s loss of himself in the tragic attempt to escape the burden of his humanity,” [3] Fearing the multitude of psychological and material challenges inherent in the experience of freedom, Israel commits an act of “evil” in longing for slavery (in their minds a “paradise lost”). Israel’s desire to return to their preexisting hierarchy is a dramatic attempt to regress existentially to a state of “pre-individualism”. In Fromm’s terminology, the regression is labeled as an incestuous symbiosis, where “the symbiotically attached person is a part and parcel of the ‘host’ person. He cannot live without that person, and if the relationship is threatened he feels extremely anxious and frightened.”[4] The fundamental psychological tendency underlying this phenomenon is man’s desire to completely shed his individuality and the responsibility it entails. The “crime” of the enslaved Israelite was that he evaded individuality by lodging his self-definition firmly in the pyramid of an Egyptian hierarchy.
Liberation from the hierarchy has brought the Israelite to the bank of the Sea of Reeds, and presented him with freedom’s most fundamental challenge – an absolute choice: to take the plunge into the abyss of an unpredictable freedom or to passively submit to Egyptian rule. In the mind of the Israelite, the desert journey symbolizes freedom’s inherent mystery. Fear of the unknown subsumes Israel, and once again God extends “supernatural benefits” to his adolescent people in splitting the sea.
Further, the splitting of the sea and the Israelites’ passage through it can be interpreted through the prism of Fromm’s thought. In Frommian psychology, incestuous symbiosis finds its purest form in the mother-child relationship. The mother’s relationship to the child during pregnancy, the apex of a mother’s symbiotic attachment to her child, and the raising of the child is defined by the tension between dependency and cultivation of a child’s autonomy. The passage through the Yam Suf symbolizes the beginning of Israel’s “rebirth” and severance of their symbiotic tie to Egypt. The need for God’s undying unilateral grace and the constant complaints and spiritual shortcomings of the wanderers in the desert indicate to the reader that Israel has failed to mature into a free and independent people and undo the imprints of slavery.
Yet, while the desert wanderers failed to shed their slave mentality, servitude has sensitized the historical Jewish community to the dehumanizing pain underlying subjugation to the other. Fromm’s methodology points to man’s insecurity and fear of change as the psychological foundation upon which the societal hierarchy rests. In an attempt to marginalize human freedom and potential change, the hierarchy predetermines man’s social function. Man begins to view a contingent social construct as an absolute structure upon which man’s very self-definition is reliant. Only after reflecting on the miseries born from the deification of a social convention can the Israelite begin to realize the biblical ideal of freedom and the ambiguities entailed. Rabbi David Hartman offers the modern Jew a penetrating perspective on Exodus and its relevance: “The Exodus and the desert signify that only after the total need for unilateral grace and miracle has been left behind is the community ready to enter the Promised Land and begin to face the responsibility of building a covenantal society.”[5] Throughout the seder, one’s slave mentality must be shed and the covenantal responsibility for mankind internalized. Thus, the individual Jew must free himself from the clutches of dependency and make a choice: will he strengthen his self-conception by embracing the building process of moral development, or will he stifle himself with the security of indifference?
An afterthought-
The modern Jew can relive the experience of national Exodus in reflecting upon collective Halakhik Judaism as it stands today. One must ask him or herself: does the halakha keep pace with the historical process of freedom and continue to oppose the inequalities within Orthodoxy and beyond it? Or have exile and fear of extinction driven the Orthodox community to stagnate and deify the halakha, losing sight of the ethical telos driving the legal process? In Towards Historic Judaism, Eliezer Berkovitz powerfully asserts the latter: “The rigidity and inflexibility of Judaism, as it has been handed down to us since the conclusion of the Talmud, is not of the essence of Judaism.”[6] While Exodus begins the long and tumultuous ascent toward freedom and equality, it is ultimately contingent upon the Jewish community of today to actively realize halakha’s ethical directive.
[1] Exodus 14: 11-12
[2] Fromm, Eric. Escape From Freedom, 80.
[3] Fromm, Eric.
The Heart of Man, 148.
[4] Ibid. 104.
[5] Rabbi David Hartman.
The Living Covenant, 272
[6] Eliezer Berkovitz. Towards Historic Judaism, 30.
