Egypt as a metaphor for the historical oppression of the Jewish people

Thoughts for Passover.

Photo by shraga kopstein on Unsplash

The Passover Haggadah demands that each person see themself as having personally come forth from Egypt. It’s one of those demands that has always made me feel a little like the character in Chorus Line who sings about feeling nothing. For as good as my imagination is, I struggle to imagine myself living as a slave in Egypt in the biblical era or witnessing any of the ten plagues. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe I don’t need to literally see myself as having personally come forth out of Egypt. Maybe Egypt is a metaphor. 

The Haggadah asks if, before that time, Gd has ever taken it upon himself to remove one nation from the midst of another. In the context of this question, there is a suggestion that the oppression the Israelites have experienced and are now preparing to be liberated from was at least to some extent a result of their experiences living in lands that were not their own. If this is the case, then the experience in Egypt becomes less of a one-off. 

History is rife with examples of Jewish oppression when living as one nation in the midst of another. From rolling expulsions from European countries through the Middle Ages to the systematic stripping of rights in the lead up to the Holocaust and the Holocaust itself,  being a nation in the midst of another is something that generally hasn’t ended very happily. 

If Egypt is a metaphor for how easily the freedom of the Jewish people is at risk when we are without a land to call our own, then seeing ourselves as having personally come forth from Egypt is much easier. At many Seder tables around the world are parents and grandparents who did personally come out from oppressive laws restricting the rights of Jews to live as full and equal participants in society. 

If Egypt is a metaphor for what happens when the Jewish people lack self-determination in our Indigenous homeland, then when we think of ourselves as having personally come forth from Egypt, we can recognize that even in this time of increasing uneasiness at our safety as Jews living in the Diaspora, we are infinitely safer because of the existence of Israel. It has only been for an incredibly short window in the span of Jewish history that we have had a place to go where we could not be asked to leave on a moment’s notice. 

When it comes to the stories, lessons, and laws emanating from theology, we constantly find ourselves asking how they are relevant today; how we can interpret them to make sense in our modern world where very few of our problems concern herding goats or heads flying off of axes. The direction to view ourselves as having come forward from Egypt is a case where relation to the present is perhaps, not as difficult. 

In the cycles of history, Jews have repeatedly found themselves in Egypt. Life as a nation in the midst of another that in most cases began so harmoniously, has more often than resulted in either expulsion or attempted extermination in one form or another. While there may not have been a divine intervention in any of the metaphorical Egypts, the notion of having come forward from oppression into freedom is not confined to the story of the Exodus. Thinking of ourselves as having personally come forth from Egypt, may also mean thinking about the ways that we have faced oppression and expulsion repeatedly throughout the course of history and understanding that the miracle of our survival as a nation cannot and should not be taken for granted.