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Third Time’s a Charm

A star physicist teaches us how to read the Torah, book by book. The second installment: Exodus.

by
Jeremy England
January 13, 2025
Editor’s note: This is the second of five columns by Jeremy England. England is an American-born physicist noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the extra energy absorbed and dissipated during the formation of exceptionally organized arrangements of molecules. He is also a rabbi. In this series, he teaches modern readers how to understand the Torah, one book at a time. 

The First Amendment, and the freedom of expression it promises without preference for one religion over another, has fostered American Jews’ love for their adoptive home for over a century, and rightly so. It is no accident that the United States of America has been the safest and most welcoming place for Jews in the whole, long history of diaspora, not only because of the protection for religious minorities enshrined in the Constitution, but also due to deep ideological affinities for the Hebrews and their Bible harbored by various Founding Fathers and other American greats.

In this context, the average American might be surprised—and possibly outraged—to learn that, in the free society of Israel, one religious group bears greater restrictions on its right to public worship than any other.

Last spring, I took my two eldest sons to visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The smooth paving stones felt cold under bare feet as our small, closely guarded group of Jews walked slowly around its perimeter before stopping to face the Holy of Holies and pray together discreetly. Perhaps I lifted my hands too much in supplication at some point, because the gesture caught the watchful eye of an Israeli police officer supervising our visit; he warned us that if we continued to pray too openly, we would be arrested.

My sons looked on, their eyes full of questions.

“Why?” one asked, the recurring question of a still uncynical child.

“Because it’s not legal,” replies the state, with neither Torah nor constitution to guide it.

As global outcry about the Zionist “occupation” strains for shriller notes, it has become ever more absurd to try to explain to an 8-year-old kid—or, for that matter, to the vanishingly rare disinterested observer—how it could be that the norm at Judaism’s most sacred site has long been one in which Jews are singled out for arrest for peaceful acts of religious expression. Since that spring visit, restrictions on worship by Jews at Har HaBayit have relaxed some, thank God, but so far the bizarro logic of the regime remains the same: Jews who pray too freely at the Jewish Temple will be treated as threats to public order by the Jewish state.

To an American citizen, the temptation to decry this situation by invoking the example of the Bill of Rights is almost irresistible. It would be easy, and casting all that righteous indignation in the face of the U.S. State Department—which hypocritically supports this deeply un-American status quo—might even feel good.

It would also require lying to ourselves.

There is one thing you cannot do: refuse to serve anything.

Most of us are familiar with at least part of what transpires in the Book of Exodus, but often with an emphasis on the early events. Omitting numerous details, we can sketch the text’s main arc from start to finish as follows: The Hebrews—that is, the Israelites—are suffering bitterly in Egypt as slaves to Pharaoh, and they cry out to God for deliverance. God tasks Moses with telling Pharaoh to let the people go free in order to worship God in the wilderness, and then punishes Egypt terribly with 10 devastating plagues because Pharaoh repeatedly refuses to comply. Ultimately, Moses takes the people out toward the wilderness of Sinai, and Pharaoh and his army get drowned when they try to chase the escaping Hebrews through the miraculously splitting Sea of Reeds. Moses then leads the fledgling Israelite nation to Mount Sinai, where God gives them a set of laws called the Torah that they commit to keeping forever more.

A clumsy reading of Exodus might lead us to think the current situation on the Temple Mount is an easy one to fix: We just need to make everyone (including Jews) freer to pray there and presto! Problem solved.

Except an Israelite who wants to worship the God of Israel where His temple stood presumably would want to know how to do so according to the Torah that God gave to the Israelites; otherwise, what’s the point, right? But once we start concerning ourselves with what the Torah has to say on the matter, various awkward details come to light. Canaanite pagans who wish to pour libations before their idols are forbidden to do so on our turf? Ritual slaughter must be performed by men from a caste of priests descended from Moses’ brother Aaron? Do you mean to tell me the Torah commands unequal hereditary privileges and obligations? That it doesn’t even promise to maintain that most “sacred” separation of church and state? Wait, did you just say “ritual slaughter?”

I grew up in New England, infrequently attending a Reform temple that, like so many other 20th-century centers of Jewish community across America, was populated by unenthusiastic congregants who knew very little about what, if anything, the Torah promises. What we did know is that if the Torah ever did disagree with the enlightened principles of our zealous American liberalism, then it was always the Torah that was wrong, and we therefore did not need to know more about it (so, generally, we didn’t).

It turns out to be disingenuous in the extreme to demand fairness for Jews on the Temple Mount of the sort that might have been handed down by the Warren court. Sure, equal treatment would be a step in the right direction, but at some point we are going to have to grapple with the fact that the Torah, which is to say, the blueprint for the entire system within which Jewish worship has any point to begin with, does not see every individual human being as having absolutely equivalent prerogatives, obligations, and roles. Instead, God tells the Israelites at Sinai (Exod. 19:6) they are meant to be a mamlekhet kohanim vgoy kadosh—a kingdom of priests and a holy nation—eternally set aside for the fulfillment of an exceptional mission that requires maintaining an exceptional status.

Most American Jews start to shvitz when hearing their chosenness declared aloud. Acknowledging exceptionalism complicates the American brand of Judaism that focuses solely on the most abstracted themes of Passover. The opening chapters of Exodus cast us as a ragtag band of liberated slaves, and what could be more fitting than enjoying the divine gift of freedom in the Land of the Free? The universal message of individual liberty on which America was founded jibes beautifully with being a religious minority who want only to flourish in peace as living testament to God’s opposition to oppression everywhere.

The only problem is that the actual demand made to Pharaoh was “Let My people go, that they may serve Me.” The mitzvah, or commandment, to count the days from the end of Passover (zman herutenu, the time of our liberation) up to Shavuot (zman matan toratenu, the time of the giving of our Torah) chains everyone’s favorite freedom holiday to the one where we remember standing beneath a fiery desert mountain as we were told to accept enslavement to God. Suddenly, we have a much harder time hearing our own story resound in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration.

Exodus does tell the dramatic story of how a slave nation slipped the bonds of captivity and servitude, but it goes much further than that. As far as the Torah is concerned, it is good to use the Israelite example to teach the world that God smiles when slaves escape their earthly master’s lash, but the text insists this lesson must be paired with the far more challenging notion that true freedom can only be achieved by serving God. For many, this second, complicating message is a tough one to handle. Having to obey a lot of rules sounds like the opposite of being free, at least to the ear of a child, or of an infantilized adult raised in Don Draper’s postwar cult of the individual pursuit of happiness (“Whatever you’re doing, it’s OK. You are OK!”). What the Torah’s deliberate linkage between the liberation from Pharaoh and the revelation at Sinai aims to argue, though, is that ultimately no one actually gets to choose not to serve someone, some thing, or some power.

Of course, the menu of options is large. You can serve Baal or Zeus, the Virgin Mary or your own carnal appetites, a higher ideal of peace, a personal lust for fame, or the fear of death and danger. You can devote yourself completely to the security of your country, or to the salvation of humanity through carbon capture and nuclear nonproliferation. You can give every fiber of your being to ensuring the health and success of your children, or else to making sure that every single thing you do is an act of love, charity, or justice. But there is one thing you cannot do: refuse to serve anything.

Some of us may do more or less to face or to hide from ourselves what we have chosen to be ruled by, but whether we acknowledge it or not, we will be ruled. It is with this anthropological observation about the complex relationship between human freedom and human reasoning that the Exodus narrative begins to make the case that exchanging enslavement to Pharaoh for enslavement to God is still a good deal. Granted, this is not an easy case to make; in fact it requires the whole rest of the Torah to drive the argument home. Dragging bricks around in the hot sun until you die may be unpleasant, but when you add up all the extra effort that goes into getting rid of leavened goods in the spring, building a fragile hut in the fall, plus forswearing cheeseburgers, certain kinds of sex, and a whole lot more, there are many who might plausibly claim that abiding by the whole of Halacha, or Jewish law, amounts to a heavy burden. What could possibly be liberating about hauling the extra load?

The Book of Exodus gives two intertwined answers to this question. On the one hand, it’s about idolatry. God is not merely about any one thing because He is One, and not counterbalanced by any other value or power outside of Himself. To worship wisdom, or money, or to seek only glory, beauty, purity, pleasure, or peace; all of these are simpler principles that may have some merit, but the empirically testable claim is that pursued independently, they always eventually lead down a crooked path, either to disillusion in failure, or else back to the bitterness of greater servitude to an ultimately cruel and unreliable master.

On the other hand, aside from warning against the perennial temptation and inevitable poverty of idolatry, Exodus offers a positive vision. We do not merely serve powers in order to get what we want from them; we also need to know what we should want, and a part of the human soul is always searching for something worth serving. The Torah provides a lifelong course in refining our understanding of what activities and performances in this world make our condition in it worthy of value—but only if we apply ourselves to becoming ever more worthy of it. As we will see, the Temple turns out to be the means to this end.

As relatively comfortable as it has been to be a Jew in America, the inherent tensions between Judaism and Americanism rear their head as soon as we take the Torah seriously.

The universalism of the New Testament and its open rejection of Judaic particularism had been a wellspring of the Western psyche for more than a thousand years by the time Jefferson put quill to parchment, and this aspect of Christian thought still remains the background against which his enlightened declarations retain moral force and meaning. “All men are created equal” conceives of each individual as a separate and independent recipient of rights from God in a way that leaves little room for the special national covenant of the Hebrews as an indivisible group. The Torah expects the nation of Israel to do peculiarly specific things like slaughter sheep on the Mount outside a sanctuary bedecked with woven, multicolored curtains and transport local produce up to Jerusalem during festivals to feast upon it before the Lord; according to plenty of Christian readers of the Bible, however, that whole party became obsolete, if not entirely wicked, as soon as the new word arrived in the flesh. As Bishop Robert Barron once explained to Ben Shapiro in an unintentionally ironic Daily Wire segment, when they discussed what the (anti-assimilationist, Temple-rebuilding) festival of Hanukkah means to Christians: “Jesus is the new Temple.” In other words, while keeping a few harmlessly weird customs is fine, Jews shouldn’t let on that being “chosen” has anything to do with borders, land, livestock or lineage. Otherwise, the U.N., the Hague, and a very special rapporteur will soon be stoking the pyre for an auto-da-fé in the name of universal human rights.

Am yisrael, the nation of Israel, is one tiny slice of humanity that has been tasked since its covenantal birth at Sinai to stand apart from the rest of mankind (Exod. 33) for the blessing and benefit of all. Jews like those I grew up with under the American cultural imperium are usually so scandalized by the self-importance and so alarmed by the apparent anti-universalism of this statement that they bolt for the exits before hearing any more. I submit that this is at least partly because they have never actually entertained the possibility that the Torah’s account of its own revelation is wholly true. What if you had stood at Sinai and heard the shofar blasts amid leaping flames? What if you had witnessed the world’s King and Creator hand His law to your nation? Would the mission, then, seem worth accepting despite having been given to just one particular people?

If so, then it is well worth noting that the Torah itself contains a map for how to get back across space and time, to Sinai.

The simpler point in this regard is made by the transforming, serpentine staff of Moses, which God gives to him as an explicit means to authenticate revelation. Try following Me, says the Creator of the world, and I will sometimes make miracles for you that help you to succeed when the task seems impossible. This heavenly backing first kicks in narratively with wonders like the splitting of the sea, but once the law has been given to the whole nation at Sinai, choosing to follow the Lord largely will consist of keeping mitzvot. In other words, you get to test the divine origin of the Torah’s commandments gradually, by obeying them and then watching how the story of your life, and that of your nation, unfolds over time.

As for space, the trick there is to build. Most of us tend to think about Exodus as a story about leaving Egypt, and not only because of what the word means in Greek or Latin. The epic clash with Pharaoh, accompanied by all the shock and awe of the plagues, is what captures the interest of children each Passover seder. When you sit down and read the book in its entirety, however, you quickly come to appreciate that Exodus is about three interlocking things that are not so easy to separate: the liberation from Pharaoh, the giving of the Torah at Sinai, and the building of the portable, proto-Temple structure known as the Tabernacle.

For a curious reader, it is the last item on the list that seems out of place, as those of us who expect the plot to keep running hot find ourselves mired in the instruction manual to a communal arts and crafts project. Specific colors of woven fabric, a dozen different minerals embedded in a ceremonial placard for the high priest, and countless other minutiae are required to erect God’s tent and altar (Exod. 25-28). Relative to the rest of the story and to more obviously ethical mitzvot, how could this possibly warrant so much space?

Fascinatingly, the Torah views the Temple (and its precursor, the Tabernacle) as the stronghold of Judaic particularism that will be needed to hold a certain kind of supersessionist challenge at bay. The nation of Amalek first appears in Exodus (17:8-16) shortly after the Hebrews escape from Pharaoh, and is born from the grandson of Jacob’s brother, Esau. Across the Bible, these Amalekite cousins seem to pop up every time Israel takes a step toward sovereignty, from the first attempt to enter the land in force, up until the rise of David.

The Torah expects our struggle against Amalek will last “from generation to generation” because it anticipates a perennial need to refute new attempts at violent usurpation by one or another competing ideology plucked from the Abrahamic family tree. The exact way this victory is supposed to be won is telling. Moses sends Joshua to wage the actual war, while he climbs atop a nearby hill with his serpent staff, along with one helper for each hand in order to hold the staff aloft for all to see. We are told that Joshua’s success in the battlefield tracks how well Moses succeeds in raising his hands, aided by Aaron (father of the priesthood) and Hur (grandfather of the builder of the Tabernacle).

Moses needs help because something in the miracle-working staff on its own is brittle and inadequate: too tangled up in the uncertainty of subjectivity, too much like the parlor tricks that Pharaoh’s magicians themselves could perform. Was the conquest of Jerusalem by the IDF in 1967 really so unlikely, or might we make the case that there was nothing wondrous at all about the event? Walking through the Old City with my sons after our time on Har HaBayit, I pointed out the columns of the Roman cardo in order to remark that the Jews have outlasted the caesars and their legions, but millennia are too lengthy, too abstract to impress a child whose life began less than a decade ago. It is wondrous—that is, truly a wonder—that Jews today can dance again in the streets of Jerusalem, as the prophets once foretold; but by what more tangible means are we meant to enrich the faith, and strengthen it enough from generation to generation that we maintain our resolve each time a new enemy raises the Amalekite banner?

Aaron’s and Hur’s image of priesthood and Tabernacle up on a hill suggests the answer—it is the Temple. When a whole nation makes burnt offerings of roasted meat to atone for a mistake or to give thanks for deliverance, when a people beholds the spectrum of woven colors and sparkling gemstones while offering first fruits of the harvest to the laboring sons of Aaron, when they pray for the end of drought or for the abatement of disease, all on a hilltop covered in a cloud of fragrant altar smoke to remind everyone of the smoldering darkness of Sinai, they do not offer some kind of forensic proof that God gave the Israelites the Torah those many years ago. What we do is create a material experience at an epicenter of arts and craftsmanship commemorating the Exodus and revelation so as to reinforce the core principles of the Torah.

In the end, all this avodah, all this service or commanded work, enables an encounter with God in a reenactment of Sinai that invites all of Israel, and indeed all the world, to our eternal capital to experience the most elevated application of earthly wisdom and to witness its truth like a unique aroma, instantly remembered and recognized. The Book of Exodus begins by listing the names of Jacob’s family members who came down to Egypt, and its Hebrew title is Shemot (Names) as a result. By the end of Shemot, we can add the Lord’s name to the list, for as the Torah teaches, the Temple is the place that He will make His name dwell (Deut. 12:11). It is fit-for-purpose to be a sanctuary where, simply by visiting, we may learn something about who God is and how He wants to be known. A great many interests around the world are currently arrayed in domineering opposition, determined to stop us from seeking God by building in this way. To behold them is to comprehend how profoundly we will have broken free from bondage when, with His help, we finally succeed.

Jeremy England lives near Tel Aviv, where he works in industry as a machine-learning researcher. He is also a visiting professor of physics at Bar-Ilan University.