Community Torah Corner, January 19, 2024

Pharaoh is getting flustered, acting erratically and not making much sense. His servants have asked him, “Don’t you realize that Egypt is lost?” One senses that he is rattled by their condescending tone. Then he summons Moses and explodes, “Go, serve the Lord your God – who are the ones to go?” It’s a bit grotesque to watch. This powerful man suddenly has no power, but he hasn’t quite realized it yet. So he resumes interrogating Moses about who exactly is on the roster to worship God. This elicits one of the greatest lines attributed to Moses — “We will all go, young and old: we will go with our sons and daughters, our flocks and herds, for we must observe the Lord’s festival.”

 

In my movie mind, I imagine Moses standing up tall—looking Pharaoh in the eye, and making his proud declaration of intent. All-of-us-are-going. We love reading this text; it shows that Moses, and thus the Torah, and thus Judaism, has an inclusive ideal of worship. Regardless of gender or generation, all Israelites are required to worship God properly. At least that is how we like to read it. But Pharaoh is not stirred. In fact, his response sounds unhinged. He utters three phrases which don’t quite add up to a coherent statement.

 

JPS renders his confusing response as, “The Lord be with you the same as I mean to let your children go with you! Clearly, you are bent on mischief.” Each year I read this line and wonder what he is trying to say. I’m not alone, of course. Let us consider two Midrashic readings, one quite reasonable and yet incomplete, and the other far more expansive, not quite convincing and yet far more satisfying.

 

Midrash Shmot Rabba understands Pharaoh to mean, “worship is done by young men—once you mention children it is clear that your intention is flight, not worship.” Implicit is part two—"you also don’t need women to worship God! I see through your pious cover story and realize that your goal is not religious but economic and political. You want to steal my slaves!” This interpretation works pretty well as a contextual reading, what we call p’shat. Still, it doesn’t really account for the first clause, “the Lord be with you,” and it doesn’t explain the odd phrase at the end, literally, “look, evil is against your faces.”

A more fanciful reading comes from Midrash Yalkut Shimoni. As Midrash often does, this text connects a number of distant passages that all share an odd feature. In Exodus 32, after the golden calf incident, Moses pleads with God not to destroy Israel, “for the Egyptians would say with evil God took them out.” And in Joshua 5, there is a long passage describing how the Israelites did not circumcise their sons in the wilderness, but did so upon entry to the land, after which they observed Passover. Joshua says that in doing so, they, “rolled away the disgrace of Egypt.” Yalkut Shimoni links these texts, saying that Pharaoh’s astrologers noted a bloody star called Ra’ah, or evil (perhaps the planet Mars?) rising, and informed him that Israel would be marked by blood—presumably a reference to brit milah. This would protect them, but in this moment, Pharaoh also predicted that in the desert, the Israelites would not in fact practice circumcision. This is the “evil against their faces.” Only in the days of Joshua, when the Israelites reinstituted this mitzvah did they remove the “disgrace of Egypt”—that is, Pharaoh’s taunt that in the desert they would not worship God as promised.

 

This reading takes us far from viewing Pharaoh as an unhinged despot. Instead, he becomes a truthteller who is criticizing Moses for failing to live up to his vaunted principles. I’m not saying that this is “the pshat.” But I think it interesting that the Sages chose not to make a buffoon of Israel’s arch-enemy, even when tempted to do so. Instead, they built him up in stature, looked self-critically at the conduct of their heroes, and used this story to instill greater piety and integrity of worship.