At the school where I teach, our seventh graders had a couple of programs related to the Holocaust. So I was primed to listen to a Public Radio program devoted to an overview of interpretations of the Exodus myth on the weekly show, "Speaking of Faith." Host Krista Tippett helpfully included this passage in her on line journal about her remarkably thoughtful show:
But Exodus also qualifies lavishly for my favorite definition of "myth" — a word we've diminished, equated with things that are not "true." Myth, said the Greek statesman Solon, "is not about something that never happened. It is about something that happens over and over again." In a paraphrase I also love, Rabbi Sandy Sasso once said to me about the Exodus story, with its irresistible dramatic potential: "What happened once upon a time happens all the time."
Speaking of Faith http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org
The Exodus program reminded me of the Jewish tradition of "midrash," inserting alternative interpretations and speculations in gaps of Biblical stories. The featured scholar wonders at signs that God mourns the deaths of the Egyptians.
Also, Exodus called to mind current events in the USA, as I heard again the description of the immigrant laborers called the Hebrew - how they alarmed their employers by their vigor and fecundity. Too late, the Pharaoh attempts to stop the growth of Hebrew families that built Egypt up.
Moses, conceived a Hebrew, nursed by his (secret) mother, raised by the Pharoah's daughter as a prince, privileged, educated, changes when sudden violence by Egyptian guards wreaked upon slaves makes him aware of his people's suffering and his connection to them. The same pattern applies to some prominent figures:
- Gandhi was educated an English scholar, emulated the meat eating British giants, and enjoyed British privileges until he was thrown off of a South African train: new life followed, driven by recapturing of his culture of origin.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. was nicknamed "Tweed" because of his dandified clothes and ostentatious vocabulary. He scorned the emotionalism of traditional sermons in his family's church. Everything changes when he becomes aware of suffering of his people from which he had mostly been shielded.
Exodus, Holocaust, Immigration, and More on "Myth" | Category: Religion Commentary
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