The Tale of Two Never Agains

Exodus starts in Genesis with Joseph’s dreams, so I’ll start this exploration with a dream of mine. It’s October 7, 2023. I’m in my car. I see Hamas militants with green headbands storming into Israel. I see what seem to be Gazan civilians accompanying them. There’s a blindfolded prisoner, the blindfolded prisoner tries to escape, the blindfolded prisoner succumbs to a bullet. I hide in my car. Then I drive home. Gaza is alongside the wall of the living room. It’s almost like a Lego set in terms of its proportions, but it’s Gaza. South of Wadi Gaza is populated; north of Wadi Gaza is nearly empty. I, along with others in the living room, witness bombs smatter Gaza. One bomb explodes in a populated area. Real people are there. Or were there. One bomb doesn’t explode; instead, it bounces back into the living room. The living room is comfortable and warm. I’m sitting in a cushy chair. But the bomb spooks me, and I go outside of the house to get away from it. We don’t call bomb control. We go with the alternative plan of burying the bomb under a field near the house. It’s smelly. After the carnage, I try to sell the video I took of the Hamas raid. Someone offers me seven cents for it. You’d think it’d go for at least a dollar. But seven is a very particular number; six cents for creation and one for destruction?

Yuval Noah Harari describes liberal humanism’s supreme commandment as protecting “the inner core and freedom of each individual Homo sapiens.” Most Americans are liberal humanists in that we believe all people, regardless of language, creed, or nationality, have a sacred inner core of humanity and that countries, militaries, and NGOs have the responsibility to protect that sacred core in each human. Ringing in our heads is the statement that “all men are created equal,” the trauma of our country failing to realize this holy commandment, and myriad liberal humanist achievements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Obergefell v. Hodges. Of course, liberal humanism is at the end of the arc of the moral universe. We’ve learned what happens when we veer from this path: WWII, the Holocaust, Apartheid, slavery—all that bad stuff.

Many—probably most—international dictates governing liberal humanism are Western: The West wrote them, Western history motivates them, and the West largely (tries to) enforce them. And not everyone loves Westerners with a moral chip on their shoulders being bossy. China wants to reeducate Uyghurs, Myanmar wants to genocide the Rohingya, Sudan wants to genocide non-Arabs. As it turns out, genociding, segregating, and ethnically cleansing people due to their religious, ethnic, and national identities is quite popular. No country has proved to be as much of a bulwark against the international institutions beating the drums of liberal humanism (e.g., the UN and the ICJ) than a country whose creation is entwined with that of those institutions. While they sprouted from the same tragedy, Israel and UN & Company represent diametrically opposed ways of preventing it. Never letting WWII—and, paramount to Israel, the Holocaust—happen again has two faces.

I am an American Jew, meaning I deeply understand the psychology behind having a Passover seder at a pro-Palestine encampment. Commemorating Israelite slavery in Egypt and the Israelite exodus from bondage within the context of an anti-Zionist protest may seem as absurd as Cossacks fasting on Yom Kippur. Yet, it’s perfectly natural. The story of Exodus, after all, is that oppression eventually comes back to bite the oppressors. Pharaoh’s stubborn heart results in ten plagues upon Egypt, growing in severity from water turning into blood to swarms of locusts to God murdering each Egyptian firstborn. Then God frees the Israelites against the might of the Egyptian military. God punishes oppressors. God frees the oppressed. Thus, when any nation—be it Israel, the United States, or Saudi Arabia—carpet bombs another nation, killing the innocent with the guilty, then some of those bombs will bounce back to be buried in the midst of the bombers, haunting them and eventually freeing their captives. The Passover seder sheds light on these buried bombs, castigating Israel for becoming a modern Egypt, warning it of the perils of its oppressive acts.

If only. After God wreaks havoc upon Egypt and frees Israel, He delivers the textual and physical infrastructure of the Israelite nation. Nowhere in this infrastructures lies a liberal humanist manifesto. Firstly, God continually reinstantiates His covenant with Israel to grant them the Promised Land. To Moses He says, “‘And I have come down to rescue it from the hand of Egypt and to bring it up from that land to a goodly and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite’” (Exodus 3:8). In case there was any doubt about whether there’d be a two-state (or seven-state) solution with these people-groups, God says, “‘Little by little shall I drive them out before you until you are fruitful and inherit the land’” (Exodus 23:30). Besides ethnically cleansing the Levant for the Israelites, much of post-Egypt Exodus focuses on the minutiae of the Tabernacle and legal statutes. The focal point of the second half of Exodus’ drops of narrative is a dramatic betrayal the Israelites inflict upon God. The betrayal is not oppressing others as Egypt oppressed Israel; it’s worshipping a false God. Edifying a nation based on its covenantal relationship with God is Exodus’ proposal for preventing the Israelites from reentering Egypt.

And such is the tale of two Never Agains torturing our dreams and coloring our interpretations of Exodus: one liberal humanist and one nationalist; one universal and one local; one idealistic and one pragmatic. Before mourning a liberal humanist interpretation of Exodus, it’s worth noting that the Israelites’ tendency is not in favor of monotheism. They complain and drag their feet and worship a Golden Calf. Yet Exodus lays out how, with ecstatic liberation and divine purpose and strong leadership and ritualistic strictness, humanity can lurch toward the holy realm of imagining a world better than this one into existence.