The Passover Story: Where are the women?

by eldan Posted on April 13, 2012

By now, the astute reader may have noticed something a little worrying about the story I’ve been telling this week: a distinct absence of female characters. We’ve had Moses, Aaron, Jethro and Pharaoh, and not one named woman. It’s not quite that there are no female characters in Exodus, but they do almost no speaking, and I don’t think there’s one who would pass the Bechdel Test: in every case their significance is that they help, rescue or otherwise interact with a significant male character. This isn’t exactly unusual for books of the Bible, but it particularly disturbs me very early in the story:

Exodus I:15-17 “And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrews’ midwives, of which the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah: And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it be a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.”

Read that again and parse it fully. These two women risked their lives by defying their despot’s orders to conduct genocide. Their counterparts in the last century were honoured with the title “Righteous Among The Nations”, a special section in Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and this rather nice park in Tel Aviv:

Square of the Righteous Among the Nations

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The Passover Story: The cultural importance of hosting

by eldan Posted on April 12, 2012

Every contemporary Middle Eastern culture I know anything about places a high value on being a good host, and what I’ve read of the Torah suggests to me that this has always been so. In Genesis we have the story of Abraham feeding the three strangers who show up without warning, and in Exodus there’s the character of Jethro, who before inventing the seed drill and flute-rock shows up as Moses’s benevolent host early in the story and honoured guest later. In chapter 2 he is the stranger who gives Moses a place to stay safely out of reach of Pharaoh’s overseers, and in chapter 18, having heard about the escape from slavery, he comes and pays Moses a visit. In exchange for having hosted Moses a long time ago, he gets two rewards. The first is to be welcomed as one of the Israelites:

Exodus XVIII:12 “And Jethro, Moses’ father in law, took a burnt offering and sacrifices for God: and Aaron came, and all the elders of Israel, to eat bread with Moses’ father in law before God.”

It’s not expanded upon, but this strikes me as a pretty big deal. He’s not just fed and given shelter, but actively invited to take part in his hosts’ rituals, which he does. His second reward is not so much bestowed by Moses as by whoever wrote the Torah, in that he, rather than God himself, a priest or an angel, gets to be the voice who introduces the giving of the law:

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The Passover Story: Wandering

by eldan Posted on April 11, 2012

So far, our heroes have fallen into slavery and escaped. All well and good. We’re about a third of the way into the Book of Exodus, but most of the action has already happened; it really gets kind of slow from here on. There’s just one single verse that makes clear that 40 years have passed:

Exodus XVI:35 “And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat manna, until they came unto the borders of the land of Canaan.”

Then in chapter 17 we have a rather brief description of a battle with Amalekites, and some of the earliest literary descriptions of what is now known to many Anglophones by its Yiddish name: kvetching.

Exodus XVII:1-3 “And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no water for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?”

Beyond that, the remaining 20 chapters tell us about the giving of laws, and go into incredible, excruciating detail about the precise specifications of altars, sacrifices and priestly garments, but they aren’t really telling a narrative any more. The 40 years of wandering in the desert aren’t exactly accounted for, and yet what little is said about them makes it clear that they were difficult, so why such a long period?

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The Passover Story: Exodus

by eldan Posted on April 10, 2012

Once Moses accepts his commission and persuades the Israelites to listen to him, he is fairly well prepared for the difficulty of actually winning freedom. In chapter 7 God warns him quite clearly that Pharaoh won’t listen, and there’s going to have to be a drawn-out process of attrition: the 10 plagues. It’s all portrayed as rather well orchestrated, which makes this one of the less interesting parts of the story to me.

The next part I’m really interested in is the moment of departure from Egypt. After a fairly quick succession of plagues 1-9, the whole of chapter 11 is devoted to warning Pharaoh of the ultimate plague, and chapter 12 verses 1-28 spell out the rules of the Passover observance in some detail: both what the Israelites were to do in preparation for the 10th plague and what we their descendants are to do to commemorate it. But when that long-trailed plague comes, it strikes in the middle of the night and terrifies the Egyptians so intensely that they don’t merely let the people go: they throw them out, in an enormous hurry. This is where the business of the matza comes from: after all that scheming, the actual departure is presented as too frantic to allow for proper preparations like baking bread or packing any other food. One of the reasons this detail is commemorated so prominently is to serve as a reminder that we don’t always get to wait until we’re ready and have everything planned out: sometimes we just have to work with what we’ve got and improvise.

The theme of unreadiness and inadequate planning continues. Moses has no idea where he’s taking everyone. Or at least, that’s what I read into:

Exodus XIII:17 “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not by the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said: ‘Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt.’ But God led the people about, by the way of the wilderness by the Red Sea…”

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The Passover Story: Redemption through gift giving

by eldan Posted on April 9, 2012

For today, have something I wrote a couple of weeks ago and sent to Andrew:

I’m re-reading the beginning of Exodus, in preparation to write a piece for the Occupy Judaism Haggadah. The piece will be about the practical impossibility of using no slave labour in the modern world, but along the way I’m rediscovering other wonderful (and sometimes awful – this is one of the worst sections of the Torah for having crucially important but nameless female characters, for instance) details.  This one reminded me of you [specifically: of things he had written about gift-giving]:

Exodus III:21-22 “And I [God] will give this people [the Israelites] favour in the sight of the Egyptians. And it shall come to pass, that, when ye go, ye shall not go empty; but every woman shall ask of her neighbor, and of her in whose house she sojourneth, articles of silver, and articles of gold, and raiment; and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your daughters; and ye shall save the Egyptians.”

I found this one of the more opaque passages, so the commentary was crucial to making any sense of it. Continue reading →

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The Passover Story: Moses the unlikely leader

by eldan Posted on April 8, 2012

I think Moses is the most important character in the Bible. He not only leads his people out of slavery, but he somehow keeps them together and alive through forty years of wandering through the desert. And yet, while he’s introduced as a virtuous character, he’s also introduced as an unlikely, unwilling leader. Here’s his first response to being called:

Exodus III:11 “And Moses said unto God: ‘Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?’”

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