[I’m putting on a reading of the first act of my new opera this May! It’s got a rad cast, and I’m really proud of the music I’m writing for it. And there’s a livestream!]

We interrupt your regularly scheduled cycle of Torah readings to bring you: the Exodus, again.

We’ve been here before. But then, we’ve been everywhere before. This isn’t my first time reading the Torah, and G-d willing it won’t be my last. So: It’s the Exodus again. OK. Let’s go back to the beginning and dig in.

When the Israelites finally leave Egypt, G-d doesn’t take them along the standard route. We don’t always have access to G-d’s internal monologue, but in this case we do: In Shəmot 13:17, G-d decides to send the Israelites the long way around פֶּן־יִנָּחֵם הָעָם בִּרְאֹתָם מִלְחָמָה וְשָׁבוּ מִצְרָֽיְמָה | pen yinaḥeim ha’am bir’otam milḥamah vəshavu mitzráimah | “lest the people feel sorry when they see war and turn back to Egypt”. (Notably, this isn’t the reason G-d gives to Mosheh a few verses later as explanation for their circuitous route. Far be it from me to accuse the Holy Blessed One of lying, but the discrepancy here might at the very least lead us to wonder where else G-d tells Mosheh one thing while thinking another.)

This justification is often glossed as G-d fretting about the Hebrews’ timidity. The polities along the direct route, this explanation goes, were ferocious and bellicose, and G-d was worried that the recently freed people would lack the courage to press on into the frightening unknown, instead preferring to turn back to the known miseries of the Nile.

This explanation no longer satisfies me. I have grown leery of just-so stories that impute essentialized characteristics to broad groups of people, and have seen too many people marshal the Biblical specter of the implacably hostile Philistines (despite the three thousand intervening years of history) as a cudgel to dehumanize present-day Palestinians to feel at ease with this narrative handwave. And the story Tanakh lays out of the subsequent history between the Exodus and the consolidation of the Israelite state under the first kings isn’t a story about the Israelites being cowed by war; it’s a story where, following Divine commands, they commit numerous genocides in order to found their society on the lands of those they’ve slain.

G-d definitely knows that this is the plan [a]. So why not just get on with it?

[a] I hope I don’t need to clarify that it’s an evil plan. There’s some consolation in knowing that the actual history didn’t play out the way the book of Yəhoshú’a says it did (the archaeological evidence is pretty clear at this point that ancient Israelite society emerges from the exact same cultural context as their close geographic neighbors, an evolution from a common source instead of a scorched-earth conquest by some external body), but the texts remain troubling. I think we should resist the urge to smooth these difficulties over, to come up with reasons these seemingly troubling things shouldn’t actually trouble us, reasons to continue placidly thinking of everyone on “our side” in our sacred texts as blandly, flawlessly good at all points. Far better, it seems to me, to grapple directly with the violence of our texts. What does it mean that our ancestors preserved and celebrated stories like this? What can we learn from an account where the purported heroes do evil in the world? How might this make us reflect on our own notions of heroism, our own accounts of our past and present glories? (And before anyone gets on my case about accusing G-d of working evil in the world, everybody’s favorite prophet, Yəshayáhu, already beat me to the punch (45:7): יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹֽשֶׁךְ עֹשֶׁה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא רָע אֲנִי יי עֹשֶׂה כׇל־אֵֽלֶּה׃ | Yotzeir or uvorei ḥóshekh oset shalom uvorei ra ani [haSheim] oseh khol éileh. | “Fashioning light and creating darkness, making peace and creating evil, I, [haSheim], make all these things!” You can have a singular G-d responsible for everything or you can have an innocent G-d; you cannot have both.

To begin to suggest an answer, I want to draw attention to the specific verb G-d uses with regard to the Israelites. The Divine Internal Monologue doesn’t fret about the Israelites being afraid when they see war. Fear would be expressed with יִירְאוּ | yirə’u, a verb we get in the next chapter (14:10) when the Israelites are pinned between the Egyptian army and the sea. Far from worrying about the Israelites being afraid when faced with seemingly superior military force, G-d specifically engineers just such a situation for these recently freed people. Fear doesn’t seem to be the problem here.

Instead of fear, the text says “lest they NḤM”, which I translated above as “feel sorry”. NḤM is a root that may be familiar in a somewhat different guise: It is the root that rings out twice at the start of the famous passage of consolation in Yəshayáhu 40:1 — “Comfort, comfort My people!” But here it’s inflected differently, and has less to do with consolation than with regret. In the form used in Shəmot 13:17, NḤM/yinaḥeim means to feel bad, frequently because of your own actions. It also carries connotations of feeling pity or compassion for — we might even say solidarity with — others. Why should G-d be afraid of this?

The Divine Plan, again, isn’t for the Israelites to go up and be quashed by the inhabitants of the land. The Plan™ is for G-d to assist the Israelites in unleashing a wave of unstoppable violence upon said inhabitants instead. G-d is worried that the Israelites will feel bad about this.

G-d is worried, the text says, that if the Israelites go too directly from the experience of receiving destructive violence at the hands of the Egyptian state to the experience of meting out destructive violence to build a state of their own, the Israelites will balk, will be full of regret, will turn away from this plan, will say, “If this is what Your freedom means, we do not want it. Our lot in Egypt was better than this; make things be as they were before You intervened.”.

And so G-d leads them on a path where they will be terrified, where they will be attacked from behind, where G-d can announce them barely worthy — perhaps we should look with more scrutiny at the convenience of the generation who directly experienced the violence of a state dying out so that the next generation, having known only the stateless wilderness, can be tasked with laying the foundation of a new government. It seems G-d has no fear that they will feel regret.

We are living in a moment when many of Israel’s children feel no such regret for the actions they take on behalf of their state. Israeli soldiers gleefully film themselves tormenting Palestinian civilians and destroying their homes [b]; Israeli politicians at the highest levels of government make no apology for their genocidal rhetoric against Gaza’s inhabitants [c]. If G-d sent the Israelites the long way round to inure them to pity, surely here is such a people: We see war and feel no regret. We level houses and erase entire families from the earth. Who needs to return to Mitzráyim when you can build it anew right where you are?

[b] For the torment, see here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-soldiers-film-themselves-abusing-humiliating-west-bank-palestinians/ For the destruction of civilian property, see here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-idf-soldiers-war-social-media-video.html I obviously do not have direct access to the inner life of these soldiers, but I feel confident suggesting that posting celebratory TikToks of yourself committing war crimes — and do note that the accusation of violating the Geneva Conventions isn’t coming from me, it’s coming from scholars respectable enough for the New York Times, a bastion of staid centrism if ever there was one — is hardly behavior consistent with feelings of deep regret over what you have done.
[c] Prime Minister Netanyahu’s references to Amaleiq (https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-south-africa-genocide-hate-speech-97a9e4a84a3a6bebeddfb80f8a030724) feel especially noteworthy in the context of a discussion of the Bible’s various exhortations to genocide.

What’s the alternative? Just going back to being enslaved?

Well. G-d doesn’t actually say that in Shəmot 13:17. The worry is just that the people will go back to Mitzráyim. We never get explicit confirmation of what they’re going to do there. Perhaps the worry is that once the people start questioning one part of the Divine Plan, they’ll start questioning other parts, too. We know that the last plague killed the children of people who were enslaved or held in prison, people who clearly didn’t have any direct control over Hebrew manumission. We know that a mixed multitude left Mitzráyim along with the Israelites — is it such a stretch to imagine some of them had family left behind? What if G-d’s worry is the perpetual worry of those at the tiny top of the social pyramid: that the populace they control will realize the power of numbers and organize in solidarity across their differences? Kings love to consolidate power by pitting potential rivals against each other; bosses love to disrupt union formation by dividing their employees. Should we expect the King of Kings, the Boss of Bosses to behave any differently? Can’t have the Israelites start to feel compassion for the Other; they might start to develop meaningful international solidarity, and where would that leave a G-d of War?

This isn’t the sort of G-d I usually mean when I mention the Divine, but it feels very in keeping with G-d as a literary character depicted in Shəmot. That G-d is a G-d obsessed with reputation, a G-d Who strengthens Pharaoh’s resolve to not let the Israelites go specifically so that G-d can send ever more spectacular and catastrophic plagues against the entire Egyptian people — not because such plagues are necessary to get the Israelites free, but because they’re necessary to cement G-d’s reputation as the Best And Most Powerful G-d around. Later, in the wilderness, Mosheh talks G-d down from wiping out the Israelites by essentially telling G-d to think about what the neighbors would say — it would be pretty bad for G-d’s reputation if everyone knew the Exodus ended ignominiously with G-d killing all the people that had just been so laboriously freed.

Literarily, this is fine. G-d as a character as depicted in Shəmot kind of sucks, and that makes for an interesting and complicated story. But there’s a gulf between that G-d and the rhetorical G-d I often invoke. It’s a gulf that a lot of people have felt for a long time — one famous early midrash has G-d rebuking the angels who sing praises when the sea collapses on top of the Egyptian army (“My creations are drowning and you would celebrate? How dare you!”) — and that probably isn’t fully resolvable without severe compromise somewhere along the way. But it’s also a gulf that feels very pertinent here.

It’s easy to say that what the State of Israel is doing in Gaza is a gross desecration of everything Judaism holds most sacred. And it is! There are a lot of texts in our tradition you can marshal to condemn this onslaught. And, also, there are a lot of texts in our tradition that command genocidal conquest of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. You can make a strong argument that this is exactly what G-d wants. Sure, it commits you to an evil G-d, but it’s very strongly rooted in the texts. Walt Whitman has nothing on the Jewish tradition’s capacity for self-contradiction.

I can condemn the destruction of Palestine as a gross offense to G-d as forcefully as I want, and it won’t stop the IDF from bulldozing another school. The pro- and anti-war sides may both have elaborate theological arguments, but only one side has tanks. At a certain point that must surely be the bigger concern. What is there to say about this that hasn’t been said at nauseating length?

The story of the Exodus, the story we read and celebrate all this week, is a difficult one. It is difficult in the way the world is difficult, full of people you want to root for doing things you can’t support in the name of a cause that must succeed. Struggles for liberation are often like that; history is not a morality play. There are a lot of truths in it, but they’re rarely easy ones. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we have to keep coming back to it.

Here’s the best I can do right now: This year, let’s defy Shəmot’s G-d. Let’s look war straight on and know its bleak horrors, even if that fills us with sorrow and regret. Let’s not shy away from emotions that feel bad, but instead let everything well up in us as it will, unsettlingly, unstoppably, devastatingly. And then let that drive us to build the world this bossy G-d fears, a world of inseverable solidarity, a world of unbiased justice, a world of abiding peace.

Next year in freedom!

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]