Where Was God in the Egyptian Holocaust?

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Shemot 22:20)

It is an extraordinary thing, nearly beyond human capacity. How can the Torah ask us to celebrate—even to reframe—the most horrible experience, other than the Holocaust, in all of Jewish history?

According to the Midrash, during the hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt, many were killed, molested, and deliberately wounded. Innumerable baby boys were thrown into the Nile to drown.

According to tradition, when Pharaoh demanded that the quota of bricks be increased, and the Israelites failed, the Egyptian taskmasters took the infants of the Israelites and immured them (walled them up) within the structures they were building. Other sources tell us that Pharaoh, inflicted by leprosy, bathed in the blood of the Israelite infants.

Only a fifth of the Israelites left Egypt while the remaining 80% did not survive due to extreme persecution. (See Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, Midrash Rabbah and Yalkut Shimoni.)

This poses a challenge to Jewish memory no less disturbing than the Holocaust of the last century.

It seems that this was by far the longest-running attempt at genocide in Jewish history.

And yet, all the Torah asks of us is that, year after year, on Pesach night, we retell the story of how we were rescued and granted our freedom.

Just as the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, the Israelites in Egypt did not hear from God for all those years—not the dozens of years of German oppression, but the hundreds of years in Egypt. Countless were killed before salvation finally arrived.

No doubt, they must have asked: Where is God?

One might have expected the Torah to turn the week of Pesach into a period of mourning for the myriad who were murdered. But instead, it commands joy at liberation. Why does it not allow us to dwell on our victimization in Egypt? Why only the celebration?

Even more stunning is the fact that this attempted genocide against our people is used to teach us that we must be extraordinarily careful in how we deal with strangers who live among us.

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This is the most frequent prohibition in the entire Torah. It appears forty-nine times, in one form or another.

Why does the Torah add insult to injury in this way? Do we not have the right to mourn and remember what was lost? Is this the only comfort —that we must think about the stranger and retell the story of the Exodus?

That oppression that we experienced, instead of embittering us, should generate an obligation to identify with anyone who has become an outsider  is astonishing. It is as if the Torah is guilty of rewriting history—deliberately sweeping under the rug hundreds of years of misery, murder, and God’s silence in the face of it all.

This is sui generis. There is nothing like it in all of human history.

Surprisingly, the Israelites never complained about this centuries-long oppression in Egypt. Even during the forty years in the desert, when they complained incessantly about their conditions, they never complained about the Egyptian experience. On several occasions, they even told Moshe that they wanted to return to Egypt!

Only a people of the highest moral and religious standard could be expected to act this way. Despite everything that had happened, the memory that remained dominant was the moment of celebration at having left Egypt, and the commandment to care for the stranger.

Nor did the Israelites build Egyptian-style Holocaust memorials once they entered the Land of Israel. They instituted no Yom HaShoah, no formal Holocaust studies to analyse what had occurred.

There was only one story: the Exodus from Egypt, as told in the Torah and later in a booklet, the Haggadah. This story traveled with them and has been studied for thousands of years.

What they seem to have realized is something we are only now beginning to understand in our own day: that “one cannot build the future of the Jewish people on the ashes of Auschwitz” (David Hartman, A Living Covenant).

In our time, to repudiate God is to continue the Holocaust. It is to grant Hitler a posthumous victory. This, after all, was what he wanted to achieve: Jews giving up on Judaism, Jews vanishing from the world once and for all.

Jews may argue with God, even put Him on trial for His silence, but they do not give up on Him. Instead, they build. They search for a new awakening, a renewed concern for the living God, and a deeper attachment to Judaism.

Despite God Himself.

While building memorials today may be important, they will not keep our children Jewish. Not even Zionism alone can achieve this. “One hour at the Western Wall,” said Yaakov Herzog, “did more for the Jewish future than all Zionist organizations together” (A People That Dwells Alone).

The only way to ensure that our children wish to remain Jewish is through the message of the Haggadah and the commandments, which imbue Jewish life with a profound sense of mission.

We are commissioned to be a holy people. We carry the hidden treasure of God in our souls, and we must ensure that our children unearth its grandeur. We are God’s stake in history. We cannot afford to go astray. We owe it to ourselves—and to all of humanity—to remain faithful to our mission.

In Europe, we were blinded by the brilliance of European civilization. We compared our rabbis and teachers to Russian and German intellectuals and decided that the latter held the future. Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche became our heroes. We preached universal human values—socialism, communism, capitalism—and in the process, we lost our Jewish vision.

We were dazzled by the great lights of the metropolitan cities and no longer wished to see the incomparable beauty and eternal light of Judaism, which had illuminated Jewish history for millennia. In the end, we became increasingly impoverished.

The most dangerous lie is not the one imposed by force, but the one a population repeats to itself in order to avoid the effort of seeing clearly. This has become one of the great challenges for Jews in modern times.

It is a sad sign of our age that today the Jewish spirit no longer imposes obligations. We extol spirituality, but it enters our books and conversations rather than our lives. It floats above our heads instead of walking the earth among us.

The only safeguard against this impoverishment is constant vigilance: seeing Jewish duty as the greatest of privileges. What our forefathers understood in Egypt was that our very existence is a refusal to surrender to normalcy, a commitment to live by the majesty of the mitzvot—

Despite God’s frequent silences.

Questions to Ponder

1. Why do you think the Torah tells us to remember that we were strangers in Egypt so many times? What do you think the Torah is worried we might forget? Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like an outsider or a stranger?
2. Rabbi Cardozo suggests that the Jewish people chose to focus on building the future rather than memorializing the suffering of Egypt. When does remembering the past help us grow, and when can it hold us back?
3. The Torah seems to say that our suffering in Egypt should make us more sensitive, not harder or more bitter. Do you think difficult experiences usually make people kinder — or tougher? What helps make the difference?

For Deeper Study

Herbert Spencer wrote: “If the poor man is not sufficiently capable to live… he dies, and it is best he should die” (Social Statics). Peter Kropotkin responded: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization” (Mutual Aid).  The Torah’s central lesson from the Egyptian enslavement seems to be that we must not do to others what was done to us. This aligns more closely with Kropotkin than with Spencer, and runs counter to the ancient—and modern—ethos that “might makes right.”

1. What do you think lies behind this radical counter-cultural stance? Is it merely a reaction against Egyptian values, or does it reflect something more fundamental about the Torah’s vision of humanity?
2. Do you feel that a society is strongest when it selects the fittest, or when it protects the vulnerable?