comparable in its way to the first week of creation.
¶
And the grand choreography of the exodus begins with—a murder. The fires of liberation are kindled by an evil deed. The savior is also of the race of Cain, no mistaking it.
The episode is laconically set down, tellingly so. The hero must undertake a kind of personal exodus, crucial, a first step, a larger second, a third still more momentous—and so on.
This for simple start: Moses
“went to visit his kinsmen.”
Went from where? From a palace, one thinks; or at least from a place of secure comfort, if not luxury.
¶
And what meets his eye, as he issues, perhaps for the first time, in public? Misery, forced labor, the inhuman decrees of the pharaoh in bitter play. A lash, his people bowed to the earth in humiliation.
¶
Young Moses has been favored, privileged and apart, he has suffered nothing of duress and wounding. An innocent abroad. Then, as our author would have us know, a brutal sight met his eyes.
Education? One lesson, and he knew. His world exploded. Now he could say, and rue and rejoice at the knowledge, “These are my people.”
And a judgment fell like a hammer blow: “Those are not my people.” Inescapable; if a larger world is to be embraced, a former life must be rejected.
¶
Time too is changed. The imperial system, that immutable form of the future, is shaken.
Assurance has been seemingly invincible. Moses child, Moses youth. He is, always will be, well fed and housed, esteemed. The palace was a nursery, not a school. Or if a school, its curriculum aimed at the stalemating of moral maturity.
Done with all that, and no returning. Choose. You have been chosen.
¶
Verse 11 and following
One day, we are told, the youth walked out. And shortly, reality struck. He witnessed the corvée, the abuse. Overmastered with fury, he stepped over a boundary:
He saw
an Egyptian
striking a Hebrew,
one
of his own kin.
And
he raised
a weapon,
and
killed. (Exod 2:11–12)
He killed the decree as well, as it fell on “his brothers.” The decree fell on himself: he, the exempted, a Hebrew graced (or cursed) with an Egyptian name. Prospering, silent, a corvée of silence. Silence—the “forced labor” imposed on him.
Isolated, at distance from “my brothers.” Then he killed. He killed the decree as well, and its sway over his life. He killed, and
“buried (the corpse) in the sand” (Exod 2:12).
¶
And what of the mother and father, how do they fare, what shame is theirs, as Moses leaves for parts unknown, a fugitive? What of the pharaoh’s daughter, upon whom must fall the onus of his crime and the anger of her father?
Nothing of these grievous matters, not a word. The story is single-minded. The hero is the point, very nearly the only point. Parents, putative mother, no matter how tight the bonds, these are minor players in the Saga of the Hero.
¶
Moses recoils from the scene of death. And the story follows close. He becomes for a time a wanderer, a killer known to the authorities, a Cain with a price on his head.
Thus the inauspicious beginning, make of it what we will:
He saw
an Egyptian
striking a Hebrew,
one
of his own
kinsmen. (Exod 2:11)
Still, granted the provocation—what to make of the murderous start? What good can come of this?
¶
After Moses, the grand saga of patriarchs continues. Other personages appear. And violence, betrayal, envy, greed, murder—these are the dark motif, the anti-shekinah over all.
THE LAND OF THE FRANKS
It was at the worst crossroads of my journey;
on one path, venomous flames licking up from the abyss;
on the other, the shunned regions
where nausea swelled within me
at everything people praised and practiced.
I derided their gods, and they mine . . .
Then a fabulous call summoned me . . . of the unrecognized and hounded-out…
How often of late, when I had already gained ground
struggling in my gloomy homeland
and not yet certain of victory
a whisper has lent me new strength . . .6
—Stefan George, German poet
¶
Exiled, young Moses must bide awhile. An exile in Egypt, now he is a forced exile in Midian, a land of strangers not far from fabled Mount Sinai.
Finally a light breaks; the somber prelude yields to a pastoral dawn. The outcast discovers a lover and spouse, Sepphora. She bears him a son, Gersam.
¶
A wife and son, both Midians, outsiders—how will these be received among his own?
But who are his own? Are we not subtly being told—salvation will come through a radical outsider?
¶
Every hero must depart from home. The furious breakthrough of young Moses, together with the distance he must travel—far from privilege—this renunciation is a harsh measure indeed.
Cannily, the storyteller places the departure against another measure—his return, the worth of an appointed task, gradually revealed.
¶
Reaching so ideally high, adhering so adamantly to noble principles and what he called “purity of means,” Gandhi failed to achieve all he hoped for India. But the passion of his life was the legacy he left to his country and to the world, inspiring millions with the grandeur of his dream and some few disciples with an ardent love of suffering on their own painfully narrow road to martyrdom. In Gandhi’s passion lies the key to his inner temple of pain . . .
And through the multifaceted prism of his passion, Gandhi’s tragic weakness is revealed as the other side of his singular strength, helping to account for his final failure to win that for which he worked hardest and suffered most.7
—Stanley Wolpert, American historian
¶
A law is promulgated; it bears a double edge. It favors (and opposes) a spirit whom adversity will harden to Damascene.
And the law touches all. Ourselves.
We, and our near ruin, must be measured against young Moses. Our ruin? The Fall; our near incapacity that is, to overcome slavery, to shake off bondage. To walk away from the realm of Necessity, whose regent is a pharaoh, keeper of slaves. The one who, if his realm is to prosper, must ensure that the slaves be kept slaves.
He has death in mind. For sake of his system, he would have us destroyed—if not in infancy, later. But destroyed. Dignity, compassion, care for one another,