It is almost absurd to believe that the stories told in the book of Shemot should be taken literally.
Who would believe that an entire people lived for generations under crushing slavery? That countless Jews were beaten, tortured, and worked to death? That Pharaoh decreed that every newborn male be drowned in the Nile — tens of thousands of infants murdered by state order? And that this went on not for years, but for centuries?
The Torah and the Midrash describe this cruelty in harrowing detail. Yet many modern scholars insist that it must be exaggerated. It is said to be historically implausible, unsupported by archaeology, psychologically impossible. No society, they argue, could sustain such systematic barbarity.
The same claim is made about the Exodus itself. The Torah speaks of six hundred thousand adult males leaving Egypt — which would mean a total population of around two million. And then there is the Midrash which claims 80% of the Hebrews either perished in the plague of darkness or were left behind in Egypt, meaning a population of about ten million people. “Surely this is fantasy,” we are told. “Ancient societies could not produce such numbers.”
But we have learned, in our own time, how dangerously naïve such arguments are.
Not so long from now, the Shoah too will be described as an exaggeration. Six million murdered Jews will be dismissed as a myth, a distortion, a political invention. Indeed, Holocaust denial already exists — not only among antisemites, but among people who find such evil too disturbing to accept as real.
Some go further: they accuse the Jews of manipulating history, of exploiting suffering for political or moral gain. They say that Jews “benefited” from the Holocaust — through the establishment of the State of Israel, or through sympathy and reparations — and that this discredits Jewish moral claims. Tragically, some Jews themselves believe this.
But modern history has destroyed forever the comforting illusion that human beings are incapable of such cruelty.
“There is no cruelty like that of the innocent,” wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, when describing how ordinary people participate in extraordinary evil.[1] The Torah already knew this. “Come, let us deal wisely with them,” Pharaoh says — and wisdom becomes a tool of genocide (Shemot 1:10).
The Sages taught: “Whoever denies the Exodus from Egypt denies the foundation of the Torah.”[2] This is not because the numbers themselves are sacred, but because denying them is a way of denying what human beings are capable of doing to one another.
We have discovered something deeply unsettling about ourselves: that there are truths we reject not because they are false, but because they are unbearable.
Charles Caleb Colton once wrote, “Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it — anything but live for it.”[3] One might add: people will deny evil not because it is untrue, but because accepting it would demand moral change.
Both the enslavement in Egypt and the Holocaust are “unbelievable” in exactly the same way: not because they did not happen, but because we desperately wish they had not.
The Torah insists that we remember not only the redemption, but the cruelty that made redemption necessary. To forget the numbers is to forget the danger. To deny the past is to prepare the ground for history to repeat itself.
Discussion Questions
- Why do you think people are more inclined to deny great evil than to deny great goodness? Do you think remembering cruelty is more important than remembering redemption? Why or why not?
- Why does the Torah emphasize numbers (slaves, plagues, people leaving Egypt) — what do numbers add that stories alone do not?
- What responsibilities does historical memory place on us ethically, politically, or religiously today?
Notes
[1] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
[2] See: Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, Bo, Parashah 1; cf. Pesachim 116b on remembering the Exodus as a core obligation.
[3] Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words, vol. 1 (1820), aphorism 125.
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo is the Founder and Dean of the David Cardozo Academy and the Bet Midrash of Avraham Avinu in Jerusalem. A sought-after lecturer on the international stage for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, Rabbi Cardozo is the author of 13 books and numerous articles in both English and Hebrew. He heads a Think Tank focused on finding new Halachic and philosophical approaches to dealing with the crisis of religion and identity amongst Jews and the Jewish State of Israel. Hailing from the Netherlands, Rabbi Cardozo is known for his original and often fearlessly controversial insights into Judaism. His ideas are widely debated on an international level on social media, blogs, books and other forums.
