What a trip! Back to Egypt in search of the Exodus
Why is this Passover different from all other Passovers?
If you were one of the 32 people who traveled with Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman to Egypt in January, it’s the fact that you can’t read the Haggadah the same way this year. Because what you saw and heard there downloaded brand-new, three-dimensional multi-sensory images into your mind.
Rabbi Berman touched the kind of mud-brick storehouse that was built by slaves; the straw was still sticking out, “perfectly preserved since there’s no rain,” he said. It “really makes you think of Exodus when Pharaoh told Moses and Aaron, ‘We’re not providing straw anymore. Your people will have to find it themselves, but they’ll still have to produce the same quota of bricks.”
The rabbi’s full-time job is professor of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, but when not teaching the intricacies of Jewish law, the New York native regularly travels 3,300 years back in time to retrace the Jewish people’s steps in — and flight from — Egypt.
And he’s attempting something many historians just can’t fathom: connecting the dots between the Divine nature of the Torah and the historical record with its ongoing archeological discoveries. For Rabbi Berman, there is no conflict — the two dovetail perfectly, and there is no conflict between scholarship and faith.
This worldview pervaded the 10-day Bible-themed kosher tour of Egypt, captured in the iconic image of a minyan of kipah-wearing Jews reciting Mincha prayers before the pyramids.
As Pesach begins on Friday night, Jews will reflect on the miraculous release — “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” — of a people beaten down by more than 200 years of slavery and the heart-breaking murder of their infant sons.
That phrase — used nowhere else in Torah to describe G-d’s actions —shows a link between ancient Egypt and the Torah. Because it turns out that, in their historical records, Egyptians described their Pharaohs as having “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”
“That’s one way to steal their thunder,” says Rabbi Berman. “You want to know who has the real mighty hand and outstretched arm? It’s G-d almighty, not the pharaohs.”
“The tour “has already changed the way I read Torah, seeing how that terminology and imagery so closely reflect ancient Egyptian culture,” said Sandor Joffe, who took the tour with his wife Susie.
That, says Gayle Berman, who traveled with her husband, Harold, and their daughter Ilana, “clearly demonstrated how G-d communicates with us in the language and cultural context we can understand. And, being in Egypt, where it happened, I could better understand how it happened and appreciate that this is truly our people’s history … the rabbi made the Exodus so much more real for me.”
And the country itself had a message for the travelers. “Walking around Cairo in kipot, eating kosher food,” says her husband, “I was also aware that this wasn’t just ancient history. It was just a few years ago that Egypt was trying to wipe the Jews of Israel off the map.”
Rabbi Berman, author of “Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth and the Thirteen Principles of Faith” and host of the syndicated radio show, “The Teacher and the Preacher,” reports that this tour “would not have been possible before the Abrahamic Accords, no way.”
Thanks to warmer diplomatic relations, these kipah-wearing Israelis walking through the streets of Cairo received a warm welcome.
“It was perhaps not so much for the love of Zion as the love of mammon (‘money’),” he says with a laugh. “But warm nonetheless.”
Still, with everything they were seeing, it was impossible to ignore history. Celebrating Shabbat at the hotel, notes Rabbi Berman, “it struck me during the service that we were overlooking the Nile where the Egyptians drowned Jewish babies.”
By far the youngest of the travelers was Ilana Berman, who at 19 describes herself as “something of a history buff” and who leads tours at Jerusalem’s Herzl Center for her national service.
“The trip opened my eyes to how beautiful the Torah is, down to the smallest detail; it gave us so much visual evidence, like when puzzle pieces suddenly start fitting together and the real picture emerges.”
Such feedback is gratifying to Rabbi Berman, though he also understood the challenge.
“There is good evidence for the Exodus,” Rabbi Berman insists. “You just have to know where to look.”
There are dots aplenty begging to be connected. Among them: In the Torah when Potiphar appoints Joseph to be his right-hand man, he has a gold chain placed around his neck. In Egypt, murals depict the exact same gold-chain ceremony when someone achieves high station. Another mural depicts women waving tambourines, as Miriam did leading the women Egyptian-style in tambourine song after crossing the Red Sea. And the dimensions of the portable tabernacle the Israelites built in the wilderness during their 40-year sojourn are identical to the portable throne tent of Ramses II.
“The Torah’s amazing awareness of Egyptian culture may be an early example of cultural appropriation,” says the rabbi. “The Torah takes the rhetorical thunder of our oppressors and throws it back in their faces to tell G-d’s own truth.”
And when the son of Ramses II wrote back in 1206 BCE, just after the Exodus, that “the nomadic people Yisrael, their seed is no more,” it’s old-fashioned spin, he adds.
“Discovering that the Torah is chock-full of these connections transforms passages we’ve read blindly for years and we realize ‘this really happened, you can’t make this stuff up’.”
And even after thousands of years, new evidence is surfacing. Including the recent discovery of what is thought to be the earliest proto-alphabetic Hebrew text, circa 1200 BCE — using two Torah-based names of G-d. Found on Mount Ebal in Samaria, the lead tablet bears the list of curses from Deuteronomy 11:29; a full report is expected soon.
Combing the historical and archeological record for clues, Rabbi Berman often finds his conclusions confounding biblical critics who typically take a more jaundiced view of Torah as historical document.
“Josh is unique chiefly because he’s a first-rate biblical scholar who’s gaining a reputation as a respected Egyptologist but who also thinks outside the box, something that’s refreshing in academia,” says Jeffrey Woolf, who teaches Talmud and Jewish history at Bar-Ilan. “The academic world is predicated on skepticism, but Josh is willing to break through the paradigm and give traditional historical records credence. And that,” adds Woolf, “is why he’s subject to criticism. He refuses to go with the herd, something that takes tremendous intellectual courage.”
Rabbi Berman’s thinking was impacted by an Egyptian tour he took with noted Egyptologist James K. Hoffmeier. “He’s a devout Christian and one of the top guys in the world for showing the historical connection between Egypt and the Bible,” says the rabbi.
“My question is and always has been: What can we learn through the study of ancient Egypt that can deepen our understanding of the Bible?” says Hoffmeier. “Looking through the archeological lens, there’s plenty showing that the Exodus is completely plausible. The problem is that, if someone makes the assumption that only that which can be historically proven is believable, their scientific worldview dismisses everything else, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
As persons of faith, the two men “share a grounding in the Bible’s authenticity that G-d acts in history, including the Exodus from Egypt,” says Hoffmeier.
And that makes the Jewish and Christian faiths unique, he adds.
“Why celebrate Passover? Because you believe the Exodus took place. Why not mistreat the stranger? Because you were once strangers in Egypt. The more we know about history, the stronger our faith.”
“Scholarship and faith, they’re the same path for me,” agrees Rabbi Berman, “because at the end of the day to be religious is to pursue truth, to bridge spiritual and intellectual integrity. Only when we’re willing to take a deep dive on both scores can we see the larger picture.”
Still, it’s not always easy to reconcile faith and the historical record. For Nechama Moskowitz of Chicago, “the trip opened my brain to something outside the scope of what I grew up with.”
So upon her return home, she dug into the topic including the rabbi’s book. “The rabbi kept challenging our assumptions.”
And every objection Moskowitz raised was answered with respect, she says. “As erudite as he is, the rabbi was extremely patient and humble. At the end of the day, I loved the experience. It certainly whets my appetite to learn more.”
Harold Berman of Efrat (no relation to the rabbi) had this takeaway: “The long view, to see the Torah as rooted in our ancestors’ world and not our own 21st-century sensibilities, but also to see it as eternal, for every generation to live by, that’s the gift the rabbi and this trip gave us.”
“We all view the world through our own little fishbowl, so it’s exciting when you take something they think they know … and show them a new dimension that they never saw before,” says Rabbi Berman, who is planning two more tours for next winter. “There’s nothing as inspiring as a total immersion in the unexpected — hearing our story as we literally walk in our ancestors’ footsteps.”
So at the Seder when the child asks the fifth question: “Why did I see on the Internet there was no such thing as the Exodus?” What’s the answer?
“Now, with everything we’re learning, as Jews around the world gather on the night of Passover to celebrate the liberation from Egyptian oppression, they can speak the words of the Haggadah, ‘We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,’ with confidence and integrity. After 3,300 years, you can’t ask for more than that.”
