The Energy of Exodus
Few readers of Lamentations forget its dark incandescent beauty. Story of the Babylonian captivity—the first Jewish Diaspora—the poem cries out grief from opening elegy to final entreaty. “What can I match with you to console you, / O Fair Maiden Zion?” its writer wonders before proposing a figure of uncontainable catastrophe for answer: “For your ruin is vast as the sea.”1 The line is clear and supple as water, lucent even in despair. The waste conjured here absorbs space and time. Eternal rather than temporal, it is boundless as the waves that issue beyond the horizon to batter the shore at our feet.
How startling, then, to find the Bible’s foundational narrative of exile and enslavement replete with everything but mourning. Arguably the most important portion of the Torah, Exodus offers a paradigm for Jewish cycles of expulsion and return. Religious and secular Jews alike recite it every year at Passover. One of the most ancient liturgical texts in the Bible, its “Song of the Sea” remains part of the routine of daily prayer. But the language of this book shares little, tonally speaking, with Lamentations. No “Alas” sighs out from its pages. No wails sob into silence. No breathy flute or pallid lute strums quietly to the cadence of bereavement. Line after line resonates with energy, verve, and direction. One chapter in the book’s forty recounts the backbreaking work the Jews perform as slaves. The rest provide blueprints not for razing, but for building: instructions for constructing the Tabernacle—the Israelites’ traveling desert sanctuary—as well as the costumes of those who will worship within it.
If nothing else, the elaborate descriptions of construction materials that occupy the middle verses of this book (a liturgical owner’s manual many readers are understandably quick to gloss over) foreground both the energy of creation and its beauty. Genesis chronicles how God separates wind from water and populates Earth with its startling diversity of fauna, fruits, and flowers. Exodus recalls these generative acts using a human scale. Gilded wood, a hammered lamp, flower-shaped cups: scores of verses command the itinerant congregation to create. Make the Tabernacle cloth of “fine twisted linen, blue, purple, and crimson yarns,” they are directed; make its table of “acacia wood” overlain “with pure gold, inside and out”; make its lampstand “of hammered work” with “three cups shaped like almond-blossoms, each with calyx and petals, on one branch.” As for the priestly vestments: each should fashion a breast piece set with amethyst and emerald, chrysolite and crystal, agate, jasper, lapis lazuli—stones of Earth brilliant as the tribes they betoken.
This second book of the Torah is full of noisy activity and determined movement. Decisive and absolute, God’s voice rends the air as an earthquake shears through ground. Sound waves roil the sky and pound the earth, setting Mount Sinai to a violent trembling. The horn trumpets the Lord’s thunder, its pitch increasing to an earsplitting volume as God approaches. And the people subjected to this boom and blast? Forget keening (if not kvetching): during their Egyptian enslavement, their years in the wilderness, and their days encamped at the foot of Sinai, the travelers have too much work to do to spare time for sobbing. Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century memoirs of exile follow the pattern Lamentations establishes, adopting an attitude of stillness rather than struggle. But such sadness demands leisure to express. The displaced persons of Exodus do not reflect. They only follow along behind God as if they were small children skip-stumbling to keep pace with their father’s longer stride.
Each time I read this book, I trail along as they work and whine, listen and learn, rebel and resolve anew. Exodus is awash in blood and anger, but it is driven as well by a strong sense of urgency and purpose. I feel fear but also witness faith; I recognize dread but also register awe. Granted, the sixth chapter describes “spirits . . . crushed by cruel bondage.” But I cannot picture the Jews as a broken people here. Did they drop to their knees with the weight of their burdens? Did they tear their hair in sorrow at the hopelessness of their condition? Perhaps, but Exodus does not say so. With the exception of that solitary line, I find little of resignation or despair in the book’s language. Nor do I see the Israelites bending to the yoke. Disciplined and reproved, they remain, as their exasperated God attests, a “stiffnecked people.”
They are also not souls who suffer in silence, as the voluble among their descendants would be quick to admit. Reading rhetorical questions like this one: “Why did you bring us up from Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” recalls the unanswerable “Nu?” of these peoples’ Yiddish-speaking progeny. In their penchant for melodrama (they describe themselves less as famished than as constantly at the brink of extinction) I hear the expressive energy of their descendants. “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death,” they groan to Moses.
How often, growing up, were those reproachful accents drummed emphatically upon my ear? “I have had a bellyful of your complaining,” my father would begin, stretching the three-syllabled noun past its breaking point. “I’ve had it up to HERE!” his voice swelled as he continued, accompanying his diatribes by thumping a hand theatrically and percussively upon his heart. Moses’s response (“What shall I do with this people? Before long they will be stoning me!”) sounds so like the shrug-shouldered commentaries I hear in my head that I can only smile in recognition when I read these lines. Watch one of the early Woody Allen comedies or listen to a Seinfeld episode and you’ll be treated to interrogatives that culminate in a similar flourish.
Moses may be the most revered man in the Torah, but his habit of complaint connects rather than distinguishes him from the unruly group who grudgingly attend his words. Grumbling is the hallmark of this mass who cannot resist puncturing each and every rhetorical balloon that threatens to inflate itself into pomposity. The “whole congregation” prostrates itself at God’s approach, bowing low before Him. But in my mind’s eye, even as their foreheads reach the dust, a man swivels his neck to the right, raises his eyebrows under his bent head, and rolls his eyes in exaggerated sufferance at a friend. Such imagined comedy—and I do believe Exodus offers not just plenty of puns but some actual funny moments—cannot but appeal to skeptics. The schtick we stumble across in this foundational text of the Bible as well as in stand-up points to an abiding knack for self-critique. Humor provides a saving sense of perspective, a making light and making small of those concerns that, looming large in our vision, threaten to hide the stones, tree roots, and broken sidewalks before our feet.
The chosen people are alternately selected for God’s special consideration and singled out for exceptional punishment. Such vertiginous swings between hubris and humility make for riveting drama. Equally impressive is this book’s plot. No surprise that Exodus has provided a plumb line for classic and contemporary cinema, or that its story of action and adventure demands as much from its principal characters as any blockbuster exacts from overworked stuntmen. Yet the special effects Exodus creates surpass anything dreamed up by George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. Moses walks past a bush that bursts into flame and waves a rod that slithers out of his hand as a serpent. Next, he communicates the “extraordinary chastisements” the Egyptians will suffer should their sovereign not bow to the Lord’s command—and not by way of a midlevel scribe ensconced in a dusty vestibule in the least-trafficked portion of the royal palace. Instead, Moses confronts the fleshly deity himself, Pharaoh glittering and fierce eyed in cloth-of-gold robe.
The splendor of this confrontation arrests me long after I close the book. I think back to Seders I have attended and see the drops of Manischewitz the tip of my index finger dribbled upon my plate, spotting its white ceramic, each small red circle standing in for a progressively more terrible plague. What imagination can resist the colored and impassioned vision of this story? In my mind’s eye, blood clouds the water of the Nile as the women collect their washing, the dank river smell in their nostrils mixing with the rust of blood. Aaron holds out his arm, staff in hand, and earth’s dust moves with the crawling legs of lice. The insects creep through hair and burrow into clothing and raise welts on bare skin. Soon the bodies of cattle and horses and sheep bloat and rot in the sun. After the soot from the kiln Moses throws toward the sky washes down in a filthy rain, boils as big as fists break out on women and children and men, and Pharaoh’s magicians are laid low. Next, the air thickens with storm, and hailstones streak to the ground, flattening trees and crushing the tender green of new growth. “Hold out your arm toward the sky,” the Lord says to Moses, “that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be touched.” And darkness comes in a swarm of locusts that blacken the noon air until it vibrates with the whine of their wings.
The death of children, fast as the onset of fever; the massing of refugees who stream past columns painted with lotus flowers and trot past gilded sphinxes trundling carts heaped with chipped pots and stained linens; the great wall of water drawing itself high over the heads of soldiers too mesmerized to turn and run—the marvelous descriptions in the Torah’s verse stir equal portions of fear and wonder. Here indeed is the language of shock and awe, a muscular idiom that shares nothing with the serene murmurings of more recent exilic stories whose nostalgia glows in sunset shades. Reading them, you might hear yearning twine around their quiet musings. But you will obtain none of the jagged angry energy that moves through the sentences of Exodus the way wind sweeps waves across water, the prose darkening as a sky thickens with thunderheads, the verses stabbing the air and coursing downward lightning-like in your imagination before they ground themselves in the paper your fingers turn.
Only at the end of this tumultuous book, when the air begins to clear, is it possible to feel something of the stillness kindred to Lamentations. “When Moses had finished the work, the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the Presence of the LORD filled the Tabernacle. . . . When the cloud lifted . . . the Israelites would set out, on their various journeys.” But the tranquility in this passage has nothing to do with dreary inactivity, that torpid immobility of conclusion. Nor should the Israelites’ “various journeys” be confused with modern memories of disembarkations, descriptions of ships that keel across the water while their passengers turn wistfully toward the cityscapes from which these vessels are pulling away. Instead, on this day in Exodus, the people simply pick themselves up, gather their children once more, and walk out again.
1 All citations from Lamentations are drawn from the Jewish Study Bible, edited by Adele Berlin, Mark Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).