Israel and Egypt – The Need for an Interpersonal Economy
Bein Adam
Le-chavero: Ethics of Interpersonal Conduct
By
Shiur #16: Israel and Egypt The Need for an
Interpersonal Economy
Introduction
In last weeks lesson we
began discussing Moshe Rabbeinus directives to the Jews before they entered the
Land of Israel, in which he contrasted their settlement of the Land with the
sojourn in the desert. He warned the people that they must continue to see Gods
hand in their sustenance even when the manna ceased to fall and they became
obliged to work for their bread.
Life after the conquest
of the Land would not be as it had been in the time of the Patriarchs. Indeed,
Avraham had previously planted the seed of the Jewish people in the Land of
Israel but his presence there had not been of a permanent nature. With the
words lekh lekha (go), God had removed Avraham from his home and
separated him from all he knew, to go and sojourn in the Land in a temporary
manner.
Lekh Lekha From Sedentary to Nomad
Rav Yosef Dov
Soloveitchik describes the command of lekh lekha as a directive to
Avraham, the charismatic personality, to disassociate himself from his natural
environment his previous home, his country, his childhood in order to forge a
new relationship with God:
The mission of Avraham
did not only concern the land he was to go to but the necessary detachment from
where he was. He would become an ivri, a yonderman, a nomad, in a land
which was initially alien to him. (The Emergence of Ethical Man, p. 150)
Mesopotamia, where Avraham was born, was a
civilized, urbanized society, while the Land of Israel was nomadic. These types
of societies often clashed, as
the house-dweller hated
and despised the nomad, the rover, the tent-dweller. Apparently, God preferred
the latter and chose the shepherd as his confidant. Moreover, he selected a
member of a stable society and converted him into a nomad. Severance of all ties
with an urban, closed environment was the condition sine qua non for the
realization of the covenant. (ibid., p. 151)
The nomadic charismatic
personality, says Rav Soloveitchik,
negates the authority of
conventional institutions and man-made mores; he is not an ethical conformist
who just subjects himself to an external authority which overpowers and enslaves
him
(ibid., p. 156)
In this way, Avrahams nomadic existence
allowed him to fulfill the godly directive, Rise, walk about in the Land, along
its length and along its breadth, for I will give it [all] to you (Bereishit
13:17). Avrahams travels enabled him to establish his presence throughout the
Land, but prevented him from fully settling in any one place. He thus was able
to throw off the societal mores of his day and forge a new bond with God.
Just as the time had not
yet come for a sedentary Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, the time had not
yet come for the agricultural economy characterizing sedentary civilization to
coexist with the shepherding that occupied the Patriarchs. The Rav discusses why
it is that shepherding remained the preferred profession at that time:
I believe that there is a
serious reason for the preference given to the pastoral over the farming
community. The land was promised to Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov in the form of
a covenant concluded between the Almighty and the patriarchs. However, there was
a stipulation in the agreement: its implementation was contingent on the sojourn
of Avrahams children in a strange land as bondsmen and servants. Prior to the
fulfillment of this stipulation, the gift was held in abeyance; the finalization
and the full consummation of the covenant took place after the Israelites met
the challenge of Your seed shall be strangers (Bereishit 15:13). Thus
their rights to the Promised Land were limited. The most they had was a
kinyan peirot, the right to use the land and enjoy its produce. Later, after
the exodus, they acquired kinyan ha-guf, full ownership. Therefore,
before the exodus they had no right to develop an agricultural economy, to dig,
to build, to destroy, to change the structure of the land. All they possessed
was the right to enjoy the fruit, and that is exactly what the pastoral
community did. It did not exploit the land as would an agricultural society. It
took whatever the land offered. (Festival of Freedom, pp. 127128)
Before the sojourn in Egypt, the time for
agriculturally building the Land had not yet arrived. After the exodus, as the
people made their way from Egypt to the Land of Israel, Moshe began to prepare
them for the new challenge they would face as they changed from shepherds into
farmers, and as the nation transformed from a simple, pastoral society into a
more complex, agricultural civilization.
Aside from completing the
acquisition of the Land, the shift to agriculture would allow the people to put
down roots, so that they would not easily give up their place even in the face
of adversity:
As an agriculturalist,
man will be connected to his environment. He will not willingly leave it in
famine, as Yitzchak who planted and did not leave Israel in the face of famine.
The farmer will defend his property because it is his lot, but the Torah teaches
the Jew how to be involved in the land while maintaining the kind and gentle
demeanor of the legendary shepherd. (ibid.)
Moshes Message
In view of the great
change that would come upon the return to the Land of Israel, Moshe pointed out
to the people that their transitory desert existence, which echoed the life of
the Patriarchs in the Land, would be short-lived. Upon entering the Land, the
people would be obligated to build not only a home for God, but a homeland.
While their behavior and actions would serve to consecrate the Land spiritually,
they would also have to create a model physical society in which they could live
a life of acquisition while maintaining a sterling character.
The nomadic existence of
the desert had helped the people to distance themselves from the unholy
philosophies of Egyptian society, in favor of developing a covenant with God and
becoming Gods mouthpiece to the world.
As long as the Jews were
nomads, roving and wandering from place to place and pitching their tent
everywhere, building houses nowhere, Gods sanctuary was just a tent the
ohel moed. When the Jews gave up their nomadic civilization and became a
settled, agricultural people, the divine tent was converted into a house
Beit Hashem:
For I have not dwelt in
any house since the time that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt,
even to this day, but I have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle (Shmuel II
7:6). (Festival of Freedom, p. 161)
Moshe was well aware that
the difference between the sojourn in the desert and the settlement of the Land
was not all the people needed to understand in order to develop a civil
agricultural society. At the time of the Exodus, the people had emerged from
Egypt while displaying, at least outwardly, only a small part of their unique
national character. The Jewish people could easily be physically removed from
Egypt, but obliterating their Egyptian mentality would take much longer. The
period in the desert did serve to mitigate the peoples Egyptian mindset, but
forty years was not enough.
When the Torah speaks
about yetziat Mitzrayim [the Exodus from Egypt], it is careful to say,
who took you out me-eretz Mitzrayim from the land of Egypt, not
simply from Egypt. What is the difference between the two?
Me-eretz Mitzrayim means from a certain geographical zone, from a
certain spot called the land of Mitzrayim. On the other hand,
Mitzrayim alone means the people, the Egyptians. There are actually two
exoduses. One is from the land of Mitzrayim; the other is from the people
of Mitzrayim, from their culture, their ideas, their philosophy, their
way of life, their mores
What took place in one
night was the liberation from eretz Mitzrayim. But leaving Mitzrayim
is a long road which the Jew has been travelling for thirty-five hundred years
without yet arriving at his destination. (ibid., pp. 107108)
Obliterating the Egyptian
culture and mindset to which the nation had become accustomed during the 210
years in Egypt would not be easy. In particular, there was one area that the
Jewish people would find especially difficult. The Patriarchs, though materially
successful, had not built an entire economy. The returning Jews, who were tasked
with creating an economy, settling the Land, and building it up, were familiar
with only one model for building a national economy: the Egyptian model.
A nation amassing wealth
might very well be tempted to mimic the Egyptian economy, to work the fields in
the way it knew only too well from Egypt. It was this Egypt, this agricultural
economy, from which Yosef had warned his brothers to keep their distance. Yosef
had dreamt of an agricultural future for the Jewish people, but he was well
aware that it must be built upon the principles of fairness and justice that had
characterized the lives of the Patriarchs, and not the corruption of the
Egyptian economy.
Egypt was an agricultural
land; Egyptian society was technically advanced past the stage of a pastoral
society. The Jew, a shepherd, went to Egypt and stayed there. Usually, in such a
case the assimilation process is quick and effective; the people with a less
developed economy assimilate with great speed into the more advanced economic
community. The Jews should have abandoned their pastoral traits and adopted the
way of life of the agriculturist, the farming tradition. This is not what
happened. The Jews continued to tend their flocks and remained attached to an
old tradition they had brought from Canaan many years before. (ibid., p.
126)
Although the Egyptians did not succeed in
transforming Yosefs brothers into acquisition-minded farmers, the brothers
children, whom the Egyptians later subjugated and who even took some of Egypts
wealth upon leaving, had a soft spot for the Egyptian way of life. During the
sojourn in
the desert for instance, in the episode of the Spies the people frequently
desired to return to Egypt:
Why is the Lord taking
us to that land to fall by the sword?
Would it not would be better for us to
return to Egypt?
They said one to another,
Let us head back to Egypt. (Bemidbar 14:34)
This attraction to Egypt was due not to a lack of
appreciation of Moshes
beautiful descriptions of the Land of Israel,
but to failure to recognize the Lands incomparable spiritual superiority, which
would make the difficulties of its settlement worthwhile (see Reflections of
the Rav, Chapter 11).
God did not bring the Jewish people out of
Egypt to mimic degenerate Egyptian society (see Vayikra 18:3), nor did he
want to recreate the Egyptian economy or outlook in the Land of Israel.
Therefore, Moshe detailed just how different it is from Egypt, so that the
people would understand that God had tailored the Land of Israel to facilitate
the formation of a relationship with God and a spiritually empowered physical
economy.
Moshes Contrast of the Land with Egypt
Three chapters after
Moshe uses a contrast of the Land of Israel and the desert to warn the Jews not
to forget God when they live prosperously in the Land, he contrasts the Land of
Israel and Egypt:
You shall observe all of
the mitzvot that I command you today, in order that you be strong, and
come and possess the land to which you are passing over to take possession of
it, and in order that you prolong your days upon the land that God promised your
Patriarchs to give to them and their seed, a land flowing with milk and honey.
For the land to which you
are coming to take possession of it is not like the land of Egypt, from which
you came out, where you sowed your seeds and watered with your foot, like a
vegetable garden. The land to which you are passing over to inherit it is a land
of mountains and valleys; it drinks water from the rain of heaven. It is a land
for which the Lord, your God, cares: the eyes of the Lord, your God, are always
upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. (Devarim
11:812)
The Land, Moshe points out, is irrigated in a
very different manner from Egypt, one that makes clear the need for God
constantly to tend to it. In the Land of Israel, creating an immoral,
slave-driven caste society would bring about not agricultural success, as in
Egypt, but total destruction.
This is not the first
instance in the Torah in which the Egyptian mentality and economy are contrasted
with those appropriate for the Land of Israel. The aura and attractiveness of
the Egyptian economy are already presented much earlier, albeit subtly, and
there serve to test the first member of the Jewish people, whose experience
foreshadowed those of his descendants.[1] Then, as in
Moshes day, resisting the lure of the Egyptian economy was not easy, but it was
essential for developing the correct outlook for building an economy in the Land
of Israel.
Avraham and Lot Leaving Egypt
Just as his descendants
had to go to Egypt and then strive to free themselves of it upon leaving,
Avraham was compelled to go to Egypt after fulfilling Gods commandment to
travel to the Land of Israel. Even this first time the covenantal community
stepped foot in that country, the temptation to mimic Egypt and live by its
rules plagued Avrahams family.
At Avrahams departure
from Haran, Lot is described as an integral part of his family (Bereishit
12:5). Yet when Avraham returns to the Land of Israel from Egypt, Lot is only an
appendage:
Avram went out of Egypt
he and his wife and all that he had, and Lot with him toward the south. (13:1)
Could it be that something happened in Egypt
that changed the perspective of one, or both, of them?
We might venture to say
that Avrahams stay in Egypt reinforced for him the need to create a different
type of society in the Land of Israel, whereas Lot was entranced by the wealth
of Egypt. Perhaps the experience of seeing people take what they wanted from
others as Pharaoh, who had to have the most beautiful woman, to the point that
Avraham felt justified in asking Sara to pose as his sister had captured Lot.
Four verses later, we are
again told of Lots separateness. In the following verse, we are told of the
inability of the two camps to dwell together:
And the land was not able
to bear them so that they might dwell together, for their possessions were so
great that they could not dwell together. (13:6)
While the most straightforward explanation of
the ensuing quarrel might be an inability to find sufficient grazing land for
the flocks of two extremely wealthy individuals (see Ramban there), there is
room to believe that the real cause of friction was a spiritual divide. Nechama
Leibowitz notes:
Our Sages of old did not
regard the quarrel between the shepherds referred to here as merely an economic
or political one. The Torah devotes space to this quarrel for a deeper reason.
Their strife symbolized the opposition between the world of Abraham and between
one who wished to be a part of it but did not wholeheartedly share the moral
principles and outlook of the Patriarch referred to
as He will command his
children and household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do
justice and judgment (Bereishit 18:9). (New Studies in Bereishit,
p. 124)
To support her analysis, Leibowitz cites two
midrashim that describe how Avrahams animals were muzzled, so that they
would not graze in others fields, but Lots animals were not. Avrahams
shepherds had internalized his value system, and therefore were apprehensive
when Lots shepherds robbed others.
Simply stated, by
choosing to live elsewhere from Avraham, Lot parted ways with his uncles moral
compass (see Rashi on 13:11).
This idea is further
developed by Rav Soloveitchik:
With Avrahams departure
from Egypt, Lot was a new individual. Avraham had reared Lot and certainly
tried to implant his Weltanschauung in him .
Egypt was the worlds most
advanced country, and Avraham was a shepherd. Lot was completely overwhelmed by
the stupendous Egyptian culture, civilization, and technology. He could not
resist the influence of the environment .
Here is the acid test of a Jew: can
he resist environmental pressures, can he withstand the impact of a culture that
is materially great, but morally and ethically very primitive? (Abrahams
Journey, p. 119)
In short, Avraham lost his disciple while in
Egypt. Lots acquisition of the Land involved leaving Avraham and what he stood
for. When he lifted up his eyes, he saw the pasturelands of Sodom (Bereishit
13:10), unlike Avraham, who lifted up his eyes to see Mount Moriah (22:4; see
Abrahams Journey, p. 125).
Yet, we might wonder, why
did Avraham have to go down to Egypt at all? The Rav explains that the famine
that led Avraham to Egypt served as a test to see how he would react to Egyptian
culture. The test was repeated when Yaakov had to go to the alien culture of
Haran, and again when Yosef went to Egypt. The Jew had to show that he could
live in exile and still retain his spiritual identity.
Avraham not only passed
this test, but emerged with an even greater disdain for what Egypt stood for,
and a greater appreciation of God. Lot, on the other hand, was mesmerized by
Egypt, and his desire to live that type of life, with that approach to wealth,
meant that he could no longer live together with Avraham. He took his flocks to
the Sodom region, later (19:1) becoming a Sodomite dignitary, seated at the gate
of the city.
The Fertility and Destruction of Sodom
We can take this concept
even further. The Ramban (Hassagot Le-sefer Ha-mitzvot, shoresh 2)
refers to Avrahams trip to Egypt as the Exile of Avraham. Perhaps by
returning from Egypt without being enamored of its Egyptian culture, Avraham set
the stage for the Jewish people to do much the same thing at the time of the
Exodus. Lot, meanwhile, served to illustrate the danger of trying to recreate
the Egyptian economy in the Land of Israel.
As Lot searched for a
place to settle, he specifically sought to recreate Egypt in Israel. Despite
knowing that the people of Sodom were very evil and
sinful to God (13:13),
Lot lifted up
his eyes and saw that the entire plain of the Jordan, all the way to Tzoar, was
extremely fertile
like the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt
(Bereishit 13:1011)
This verse establishes a fascinating new set
of equivalencies: Sodom equals Egypt; Egypt equals the Garden of the Lord (i.e.
the Garden of Eden).
The juxtaposition of the
evil of Sodom with its prosperity, and its comparison to Egypt, seem intended to
warn the Jewish people of mimicking the Egyptian economy. Fertile Sodom was the
recipe for a merciless society that refused to share its wealth and openly
battled hospitality (Bereishit
19:5; Rashi on 18:21, 19:26; Sanhedrin 109a). The ultimate
destruction of Sodom for the utter lack of fairness and justice that
characterized it is indicative of the moral decay of a prosperous society that
is unwilling to share with others. Much as the Garden of Eden was not maximized
by Adam, the prosperity of Egypt was not good for the spiritual needs of
Avrahams descendants.
The Land of Israel, Moshe taught the Jews, is fundamentally different from Sodom
of old, whose physical makeup was one cause of its destruction.
Sodoms fertility kept its people prosperous
even as they became more and more evil, to the point of destruction. There was
no hope of rehabilitation, no hope for Avrahams prayers to save the city, where
even ten righteous individuals were nowhere to be found. The fertile valley,
which was not conducive to a moral, righteous economy, became a wasteland.
Moshe warns the people to
follow Avrahams lead and not to attempt to recreate the Egyptian wealth regime
in the Land of Israel. The Land is indeed beautiful and fertile, but its
geography, uniquely suited for spiritual growth, requires a certain kind of
work.
In the next lesson, our
final one on the interpersonal elements of the mitzvot ha-teluyot ba-aretz
(mitzvot that are dependent on the Land of Israel) and the Torahs model
for a just economy, we will examine the contribution of geography and the
interpersonal mitzvot to a just society where one can relate to God while
building a beautiful land physically, spiritually, and interpersonally.
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