Zecher Leyetziat Mitzrayim: What are we remembering?
I was originally planning for the post title to be "Zecher Leyetziat Mitzrayim or Zecher Leyetziat Mitzrayim?" but you can't emphasize words in post titles, so I nixed that.
This post is a callback to one of my very first posts, almost a year ago, here. I was troubled then by the implications of claims made by various people that basically the whole Torah was based on the culture and religion of other ancient nations, Egypt in particular. Well, actually, I wasn't really troubled by the implications. B"H my faith is strong. I was more troubled about the fact that more and more people were coming to accept this notion as though it was the simple, clear truth. The main problem I see is that not only it makes out Hashem to be a copyist and unoriginal, but it also seems to remove from the Torah its eternal aspect: How could it be eternal if everything in it came to reflect some such civilization that the Israelites had happened to come into contact with and decided to borrow some of their stuff?
I didn't have enough of a clearly-defined answer at the time, though the subject was boiling inside my gut. Well, some water has passed under the bridge since then, and I've seen some more sources and heard some more classes, so I thought I'd give another shot at writing on the matter.
I would like to offer up two approaches to this issue (one of whom I will also be siding with):
Approach 1:
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a friend, and the subject of similarities between Judaism and the ancient Egyptian culture came up. He paraphrased an idea he heard from one of his lecturers: One example of similarities between Judaism and Egyptian culture is tefillin. Many people argue nowadays that these were copied from the Egyptian crowns, such as this sort:
Approach 2:
I was fortunate to have discovered in my grandparents' basement the first three volumes of Rabbi Philip Biberfeld's universal Jewish History. I had read most of the first volume online (available here) and as I enjoyed it tremendously, I wished I could read the rest of the series. Visiting Bar-Ilan's library over the last summer led me to finding volume 2 there, but - somewhat amazingly, considering the vast collection of books they have there - not volume 3 or 4. Fortunately, as I said, I chanced upon the first three volumes in my grandparents' house and promptly borrowed the latter two.
For those not familiar, Rabbi Biberfeld attempted to explain how archeological discoveries until his time (circa the 60's) fit with the historical and religious data the Torah supplies us with. Nowadays this is a slow-growing but established sub-genre of Tanachic commentary, books and classes, but in his time - people like him were rare and few. He was one of the pioneers in his field. Another pioneer in the field was a rabbi I enjoy bringing often - Rabbi Ahron Marcus (who will one day, b"h, get a well-deserved post of his own). In fact, I discovered Rabbi Marcus while reading volume 1 - Rabbi Biberfeld based quite a lot of that volume on Rabbi Marcus's fantastic book "Barzilai". What's special about Rabbi Biberfeld's series is that he put an enormous amount of time and research into writing the books. He used hundreds of sources as references. It was a massive-scale project, and it's unsurprising that only four books were completed.
More to the point, Rabbi Biberfeld argues in volume 2 that originally there was a kind of centralized monotheistic religion in the world. This religion began to degenerate in the time of Enosh, preserved only by one line of righteous individuals. Noach, after the flood, revitalized this central religion and this was preserved by his descendants for a certain period, until the return of idolatry led to the re-degeneration of the religion. The result? All over the world, echoes of the original religion can still be found (by the way, a much nuttier version of this idea was put forward in Godfrey Higgins's "Anacalypsis" (vol 1 and 2 available online - and in case you're wondering, I only skimmed these two enormous volumes). Higgins argued that originally there was one central polytheistic religion which he called "Pandeism"). However, one particular group of humans managed to preserve the original religion in the purest of forms: The early Hebrews. Never mind now who exactly were these early Hebrews (Rabbi Biberfeld holds one view; I've also seen views by Rabbi Dr. Yoel Bin-Nun and Dr. Yitzchak Meitlis on the subject and I myself have also been working on a theory for nearly two years now. Hopefully one day it'll also get a blog post). The main point is that any concept that we find both in Judaism and in other cultures does not signify that the Jews or Israelites or whomever copied from the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, Hittites or whatever, but that both received these concepts from the same primary source. This proto-religion was then set in stone within the Jewish people in covenantal terms in the Sinai event, demanding they not stray from it, as other nations did: We were and are to be the keepers and preservers of this one true religion, and we must make sure that one day, the rest of mankind follow suit (this brings to mind the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook in his book Orot Hateshuvah (Lights of Repentance) on how the fullest sort of repentance will be on a universal scale).
Going back to the first approach's example of tefillin and the Uraeus crown, we may now say, per Rabbi Biberfeld, that originally, there was a notion in mankind that worship should include a kind of amulet strapped to the forehead. What did this amulet include? Scrolls, possibly. I can't say what was written on them, but presumably they reflected an early covenant with Hashem. This concept was then perverted by idolatrous ideas that entered various cultures over the generations. Rather than an amulet that was to remind one of a covenant with the One God, it became a symbol of self-elevation to godhood. The Egyptian pharaohs, those that typically wore these snake-crowns, were considered manifestations of deities. From something that reminded you that you were bound (in a positive way) to the one higher power in the universe, it suddenly was you who had become the higher power.
Then came the Exodus. When we left Egypt, we became free to worship Hashem once again in the purest way possible. That meant a revitalization of the original religion, the proto-Avodat Hashem. The one practiced by the Patriarchs, by Noach and Shem and Ever, and before them, by Noach's ancestors, all the way back to Adam. No longer would we have to bow down to those that used forehead amulets as a sign of self-elevation. We could now return to the original amulets, the covenantal ones. Better yet, we received new ones, signifying our own personal covenant with Hashem. This covenant put an emphasis on the leaving of Egypt. The emphasis was on the "Yetziat" part of "zecher leyetziat Mitzrayim" - in memory of our leaving Egypt, i.e., leaving behind the shackles of the Egyptian religion and culture and our having returned to our roots in the original proto-Avodah. Remember that you are leaving behind you all of the wrongful egotistical and idolatrous notions and are returning to the path of truth.
Well, those are the two approaches I've been thinking about in recent weeks. As you can tell, I prefer the second one. I can't tell you (yet?) how up to date all of Rabbi Biberfeld's archeological proofs and theories are, being that the archeological world has changed, but I think that the idea in general is correct, even if in terms of details, it might need some tinkering around and/or modernization.
Happy Sukkot and Moadim Lesimcha!
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