Exodus: an historical event or an ahistorical narrative?

mascettiBy Yaacov Mascetti

A couple of weeks ago I sat in a conference hall on campus at Bar Ilan and heard an outstanding lecture given by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua. The central argument of his lecture was that the Jewish people possess a mythological conception of history – events are lived in a quasi-ahistorical dimension, in which wise interpreters of traditional texts dispute with one another across the ages, and in which we are always required to re-live those events in the present. In this way, stated Yehoshua, the past is not the past, and the future is never only the future, but most of all the present is impregnated with a trans-historical significance which is characteristic of a mythological historical sensibility.

It’s Pesach. It is a time of the year pregnant with symbolism, with significance of redemption and understanding. And it is in this time of the year that we, as Jews, are called to re-live those events as if they had happened now, hic et nunc:

Rabban Gamliel says – In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt, as it is stated (Exodus 13:8); “For the sake of this, did the Lord do [this] for me in my going out of Egypt.” Not only our ancestors did the Holy One, blessed be He, redeem, but rather also us [together] with them did he redeem, as it is stated (Deuteronomy 6:23); “And He took us out from there, in order to bring us in, to give us the land which He swore unto our fathers.”

In the trans-historical conception exemplified in Rabban Gamliel’s statement reported here above, quoted from the Pesach Haggada, every single reader of the text of the Haggada is required to see himself “as if he left Egypt” – thus by an act of volition, an individual can bring himself to perceive his present as an integral part of the past, as the past is not far from him but rather here, now, nunc. The act of Redemption performed by God is a collective one, in both the demographic sense and the chronological sense – all of Israel, across the ages too, is redeemed on this night. The historical instant is conceived as an expanded dimension, something one can experience even if not strictly related to the very generation that went through the traumatic events in Egypt – the instant is not a point, but an ahistorical concept.

In the West, this idea has not been easily digested by other thought-systems of the Mediterranean area. While Plato, in the Parmenides (156d-e) stated that the “instant seems to signify something such that change proceeds from it into either state,” and that the instant is “a strange nature” and “something inserted between motion and rest, and it is not time at all,” it appears to be that for Rabban Gamliel the instant of Redemption is every moment in history, it is all of time. For Aristotle (Physics, 222b 15-16), the instant is “what has departed from its former condition in a time imperceptible because of its smallness.” And Augustine, in his Confessions (11.15.20) stated that the present nunc is “that bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments” and which is therefore that we know was “present” – alas, lamented Aristotle, the moment in time, the instant in history “flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval without duration.” The instant is ultimately seen, in the messianic rhetoric of Paul in the Letter to Corinthians, as the “twinkling of an eye,” a momentary event which although imperceptible, yet it can bring the fullness of redemption and understanding.

From Rabban Gamliel’s perspective, that instant of Redemption from Egypt is a moment which we, as Jews, as human beings, are required to consciously and willingly beat to an airy thinness, in order to expand it from a momentary and fleeting spot in time to a collectively experienced event throughout the ages, from generation to generation.
And thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying: It is because of that which the LORD did for me when I came forth out of Egypt.

The narration of events, the experiential re-iteration of history for the sake of younger generations is where this beating of time takes place. Passover night is when the father tells the daughter and the son that the event in history took place, not simply as an archival fact (pace my beloved historian friends), but as something to incorporate, to assimilate. The matza is not mere unleavened bread – it is the actual experiential re-living of facts by our younger generations, as they learn, slowly but surely, and in an infinite variety of ways, that the instant is not a moment in time which we can no longer understand, no longer see, no longer participate in – the instant is there to be lived, eaten, consumed, digested, questioned, undone and then blessed.

This leads me to a conclusion which has already been reached by others – in the Jewish conception of history exemplified on Passover, the textual narrative of the Haggada does not take shape simply because the historical event took place somewhere in the past, for future generations to know and avoid forgetting. On Pesach we celebrate a forma mentis by virtue of which the historical event takes place for there to be a narrative – thou shalt tell thy son, you will construct a narrative with which you will turn his role from that of mere reader (thy son) to one of participating individual, who is required to live the moment of Redemption as a moment in HIS or HER life. History is not what we tell about in narratives – narratives are what we tell in order to fashion our present using (and converting) the instant of the past into a part of our present experience.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.