Zeroes To Heroes

Parshas Shemos: Finding meaning in a materialistic world

In memory of my beloved grandfather ‘Papa’ Raymond Lyons (R. Reuven ben Boruch), a'h' to mark his shloshim this week.

Modern society faces a crisis of meaning. Since the dawn of the enlightenment, man's sense of the unknowable has sharply declined. We have conquered mountains, forged oceans, and roamed the heavens. The physical realm lies at our whims to explore or exploit. Yet despite access to unprecedented wealth and health, this generation feels hollow of purpose. "Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things", observed Psychiatrist Carl Jung "but in the meantime, our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair."

None of us are strangers to the distractions of modern technology or the numbness of everyday living in a material-driven age. As Jews, God has tasked us with detecting the divine in the humdrum of ordinary existence. And to lead lives steeped in spiritual significance. But what hope do we have when our culture is submerged in the synthetic and the finite?

Much like our current cultural climate, the Torah and our sages saw Ancient Egypt as being immersed in physicality. With its vast Nile river at the heart of Ancient Egypt's agricultural and commercial success. The Torah famously regards their heavy reliance on this water source as symbolic of their lowly spiritual stature:

The land you shall enter is unlike the one you came from in Egypt. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your labours like a vegetable garden. But the ground you are about to cross into [...] soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. 

 {Devarim 11:10-12}

This verse reveals a contrast between the qualities of Egypt and Israel. Biblical commentators understand the two lands' respective descriptions as manifestations of their inherent spiritual makeup. Whilst Israel is said to rely on God, who provides 'the rains from heaven', Egypt counts solely on its own' labours'. With the Nile as their vital water source, Egyptians understood agricultural success and failure as a by-product of irrigation techniques rather than a divine gift or largess. Furthermore, Kabalistic thought sees the Aristotelian element of water as symbolic of all physical pleasure. The fact that the Egyptians worshipped the Nile as a God sheds further light on the nation's materialistic bend. 

It goes without saying that this environment of unadulterated materialism was spiritually catastrophic for the enslaved Jewish people. Our sages teach that the nascent Hebrew nation was at the 49th level of impurity at the time of our redemption from Egypt. There they teetered near the brink of spiritual oblivion. So thorough was our integration into Egyptian society that Moshe later depicts our ascension from their midst as the extraction of one nation from the womb of another. Until the Jewish people left Egypt, they were essentially indistinguishable from their Egyptian taskmasters. 

All of this raises the burning question, "Why?". Doesn't it feel illogical for God to have directed our national genesis amid such insurmountable immorality? What possible purpose could there be for our nation's birth to occur amongst such spiritual scarcity?

As it turns out, the validity of our overarching inquiry is not limited to the national sphere. In this week's Parsha, we are privy to the individual rise of an unparalleled leader and teacher, Moshe. In many ways, his origin story is a concentrated microcosm of the nation he will someday guide. He is rescued from the Nile in his early infancy by Batya, Pharaoh's daughter. As we discussed, the Nile symbolically embodied Egypt's entrenchment in materiality. Nevertheless, it was from here that Moshe was saved. Subsequently, Pharaoh himself rears him to adulthood. If you thought growing up in Egypt meant a bad moral education, being raised in Pharaoh's palace was equivalent to a spiritual death sentence. Pharaoh's court was the epicentre of ancient impurity. Moshe would have been raised in an environment where idolatry and sorcery were the norms. 

Counterintuitively, the Maharal argues that Moshe grew up in Pharaoh's home precisely because it epitomised the essence of Egyptian impurity. Indeed, it was specifically in this moral void and atmosphere of futility that its very antithesis arose. Moshe manifested the polar opposite of Pharaoh's tainted followers – he was an uncorrupted spiritual seeker. Mystically speaking, it is the nature of purpose and truth to be attracted to the void of emptiness as it attempts to provide meaning to life. Because of this, ultimate redemption always emerges from the bottommost depths of an exile. This principle is true to such an extent that the two opposing forces of the exile civilisation and the movement towards freedom are tightly linked. An underlying vacuum of materialism and immorality always generates the necessity for something to supplant it. 

It is now clear why the Torah invoked the imagery of a fetus within the womb as a parable for the Jewish people's spiritual identity in Egypt. A fetus may owe part of its formation to its mother, even initially appearing to be an organ-like extension of her. However, after its inception into the world, it becomes retroactively apparent that it possessed a distinctive essence all along. 

The same is true with the Jews in exile. What appeared to be the Egyptian absorption of the Hebrew community was the incubation period that provided the impetus for a fiery new Jewish character. The nation that left Egypt was the finest assembly of Jews in history, known to our sages as the 'dor hadeah' or the generation of deep understanding.

The immensity of the religious challenge facing this generation is undeniable. Daily we encounter spiritual adversity that our ancestors wouldn't see in a lifetime. But this Parsha has a profound message for us. Famously Moshe encounters a thornbush that burns without being consumed by its flames. In the visual representation of the lowly thorn bush, the Baal Shemtov sees a metaphor for the simple Jew:

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His desire born of lack means the fire that burns within him can never be satiated. 

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Our society has largely abandoned the pursuit of higher meaning altogether. Yet this very absence of direction can ironically provide the space for us to allow God into our lives. The ingrained flaws of our era are not mistakes but messages. Its very superficiality screams there is something more than this. Pervading culture may be a spiritual desert. But if we recognise the meaningless that permeates our surroundings, we could just be the ones to light the inextinguishable fire of redemption. 

“Underneath every revolution lay a zero – and an infinity", notes mathematician Charles Seife. We may start at zero, but with God in mind, we can all become heroes.

Good Shabbos, and Keep Pondering!