There is a saying that the entirety of a relationship and its dynamics can be found encapsulated in just its first few hours, evenings or days. The first few moments of the biography of a people are hardly anywhere so vividly illustrated as with the birth and infancy of the Israelites in the story of Passover. The parting of the waves of the Red Sea, with a whole community rushing through, is nothing less than a birth canal toward a new life. These milestones of the passage from bondage to freedom are so indelible, so iconic that they served also as code for enslaved Africans in the United States, keeping the dream of freedom alive in their own personal language of spirituals.
Going out from Egypt was even more than the migration of an oppressed underclass from one land to another. The root of the word for Egypt in Hebrew (“Mitzrayhim”) is “Hatzar” הֲצָרָה meaning constriction, a narrowing of strictures. (For Egyptians themselves, aware they had been so naturally blessed, called their land black or Kemet, because of the richness of the soil.) Egypt was a world of boundaries, and freedom meant literally moving out of bounds, onto unforeseen broad frontiers. Even until today, Jewish people still challenge narrow confines of definitional categories, of nation or of religion. The Egypt of boundaries was also the wealthiest empire in the world at that time, with Pharaohs plated in gold. Any great fortune constructs boundaries around itself and ultimately hierarchies as well. That fortune was best symbolized in pyramids, the pinnacle of man-made construction. In the pyramids, we see ambition defying the heavens, befitting a culture that deified humans.
For the Israelite slaves, the pyramids were a symbol of their bondage and oppression. When they received the revelation of a path to self-realization, they were penniless, without even food, and at the foot of an imposing mountain, the creator’s most towering monuments, which humans could not hope to compare. (In Jewish legends, mountains are also a sign of the unredeemed state of humanity, having emerged, only after the waters receded from the Great Flood.) The shift from pyramids to mountains, also represents material, temporal wealth to timeless natural bounty.
Orthodox Jewish lore takes great pride that the revelation itself, the one and only time the sound of the almighty emerged on planet Earth, came from the top of a mountain. The singularity of this divine revelation at Sinai is in pointed contradistinction to later Abrahamic prophets, of John the Baptist, Jesus, Muhammad and the Bah’u’allah, as unmediated intervention of the Godhead occurred in public, onto a mass of humans, shaping a new collective all at once. This would indeed be their true liberation, when Israelites were brought to consciousness of themselves as people who required no mediator, as true emancipated humans. They would need no intercessor like Pharaoh between themselves and the divine realm.
Their prophet, Moses, was orphaned and disabled, his biological parents had probably been murdered, and his speech impediment ruled out any role as enchanter or seducer. As the biblical text makes clear, his wife was an African woman with dark skin, a foreigner from the Land of Cush. Moses risked and received xenophobia even on the part of his own siblings, while solidifying his solidarity and identification as and with the outsider and the marginal. Though raised in the palace as a prince, he ultimately discovered his adopted parents, the Egyptian monarchs, probably played a role in the murder not only of his true people, but also his real parents. Can one imagine a more jarring identity conflict? The leader of the Israelites was one who could scarcely feel at home in this world.
The head of the Egyptian pantheon was the bull-deity Apis, later adopted as Serapis in the Greco-Roman world. The bull, the largest and most valuable animal in the domesticated world, was used for energy, for cooking, for transport and when killed, all parts of it may be used for trade, (all factors why Indian religions renounce its consumption). So enthralled did the Israelites remain of Egypt that they constructed a Golden Calf and erupted into frenzy around it, in the desert, in a kind of hallucinatory return to Egypt, whilst Moses went up to the mountain. They may have genuinely believed Moses lost, which is also why Moses’ return back down from the mountain was just as crucial as his ascent. Goswami Kiryananda, a practitioner of Kriya Yoga (a practice based in the energies of the spine) himself spoke of the Moses analogy when explaining the crucial ascent and descent of spinal energies, “Moses came back down to apply his Enlightenment to the world, for the benefit of humankind.”
Moses departed from the Israelites in what may have seemed to them Death Valley. He returned to, what for him, may have seemed like Las Vegas in the desert. Lead by his brother Aaron, who did have the “gift” of the slick-talking carnival barker, Moses saw the Golden Calf for what it was, a sham, a snake master’s Oz, a plague Israelites inflicted on themselves. Freud would later claim that the Israelites were so passionately distraught by Moses role as “killjoy” that they refused his new ethical system, had him murdered, and buried the evidence of the crime.
Moses’ return from atop the mountain and the arrival of divine revelation was announced with the sounding of a ram’s horn. And after the relapse of the Golden Calf, it was a lamb onto which the sins of the community were displaced, the very first “scapegoat,” who was sent to wander out in the wilderness. The age of the bull Apis had definitively been severed. In the realm of celestial theology or archeoastronomy, the historical period when these events of Exodus were said to occur coincides with the transition from the astral age of Taurus, the bull, onto the astral age of Aries the ram. Moses also shifted the Hebrew lunar calendar to commence with the month of Nisan, representing Aries, rather than that of Taurus. The stationary, material power of the bull was replaced by the emotional riches of the gentle sheep, a spiritual wanderer. The Israelites left behind the earthly riches of great cities, especially the Ptah sanctuary at Memphis dedicated to Apis, into the materially barren, but spirit-filled, desert. It is fitting that the traffic jam of container trade shipping at the Suez Canal, once again constriction in Egypt via the pursuit of wealth, coincided with Passover this year.
In the anthropological realm of stages of human civilization, the Exodus also coincides with the so-called Bronze Age collapse, due in part to still mysterious marauding “sea peoples.” The oncoming Iron Age, which saw the reconstruction of civilization made more durable and defensible, ultimately furnished a stronger foundation for spiritual advancement. It was in this era that humanity would see the greatest of all flourishings of the axial age, of Socrates, the Buddha, Confucianism and Taoism, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets. This would ultimately culminate in the greatest of all Israelite spiritual revolutions, the early Jewish-Christians who would take that Paschal lamb, the symbolic shankbone that rested atop the table where Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Seder that would be known as the Last Supper, and elevate the notion of a lamb of God to cosmic and transcendental significance. And whilst Jesus battled the Roman Empire as the Israelites did with the Egyptian, ultimately the shadow side of what became known as Christianity and that same Roman Empire would become one and the same and continue to persecute his people.
Well into the 20th century, modern Jewish people would do battle, first with the short-lived Nazi Empire, and then the British Empire, and finally with their own demons and the phantasms of trauma that have kept too many locked into world-wariness and strife. It is the resultant dispossession and displacement of Palestinians which reveals above all the ongoing tragic nature of Jewish existence, that wandering continues even when seemingly "at home," and that vehicles meant to be liberatory turn again into tools of domination. Like only a handful of other peoples on this earth they remain a lamb in the wilderness, at odds, irreconciled with the boundaries, definitions and restrictions of this earthly world. We might ask ourselves whether the human drive to empire inevitably begets displacement, which in turn becomes a constantly renewing source of identity formation.
Adam J. Sacks holds an MA and PhD in history from Brown University and an MS in education from the City College of the City University of New York. Parsifal, an interpretive listening guide to Richard Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, is his first book.