Bo: "To be undone by another"
“Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another, and for three days no one could move about; but all the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings.” (Exodus 10:22-23)1
The book of Exodus begins with the Egyptians’ experience of the Israelites’ strangeness. According to Pharaoh, they are “too numerous” (1:9); they are not to be trusted, and in the event of war might side against Egypt; they are bizarrely and unstoppably fertile. For Pharaoh, The Israelites’ strangeness is what makes them dangerous: who knows what they might do? Who knows who they really are?
When Pharaoh instructs the midwives to kill the Israelite boys, the midwives secretly disobey, and explain the plan’s failure by way of that strangeness: “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women: they are vigorous. Before the midwife can come to them, they have given birth” (1:19).2 Though the midwives are lying in order to save the Israelites’ lives, the image they conjure up is unsettling: there is something different about the Hebrew women — they have some strange, excessive “vigor” that distinguishes them from Egyptian women.
Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, argued that the fundamental premise of politics is the distinction between friend and enemy: a collective cannot be defined without simultaneously defining those who are outside of it. These terms are, for Schmitt, non-moral:
The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien.3
It is the outsider who gives structure to our own identity: we are “not-them.” The Israelites’ strangeness lies in the fact that they are not Egyptian, but here what it means to be Egyptian is defined — at the limit — by not being an Israelite. Pharaoh doesn’t claim that the Israelites are “evil” or “ugly” — he simply states that they will look out for their own interests, which may be contrary to Egypt’s.
Such rhetoric has obvious echoes today in the rampant ethno-nationalism in the US and across the globe. Nationalism is perhaps the most blatant example of what it means to define oneself by those outside of the collective: ultimately, a nation can only be defined by reference to those nations it is not. Ironically, the nation — the object that appears most loaded with meaning and significance — is a purely negative signifier.
In opposing such a politics, many are tempted to invert the claim and insist that they are just like us. In such a framework, I can accept the other because they are fundamentally identical to me. While such a politics is less obviously antagonistic, it too is coercive: if my acceptance of another person is premised upon our similarity, I will ultimately only accept the parts of them that are similar to me. Appeals to include Jews in European society argued that Jews were — or could be — fundamentally like Christians; in order to be accepted, then, Jews had to become as much like Christians at they could. Such a politics also reifies the sense of us: if they are like us, it is because we are all similar, which is in turn because someone else is not like us. In attempting to reject Schmitt’s terms, this sort of rebuttal ends up reaffirming it.4
Perhaps, then, the plague of darkness is not a plague but an opening: for three days, the Egyptians are unable to see each other or the Israelites. They can neither define themselves by their friends nor their enemies, and each person is stuck with themselves: with their brokenness, their grief, their yearnings, and their strangeness — a strangeness that even they cannot explain. For three days, they are bereft of the clear, normative boundaries that have shored up their own fractured selves. As Todd McGowan argues, “When one identifies with the community and takes up a position within it, the problem of alienated subjectivity seems to dissipate.”5 We can imagine that when they reemerge, even if they try to revert back to those identities, the illusion has been irreparably shattered: they know that at the end of the day, even they aren’t fully and truly Egyptian — no one is.
Maybe this is why one position in the Talmud states that the earliest time one may say the Shema is when there is enough light to “see one’s fellow at a distance of four amot and recognize them.”6 In rabbinic law, four amot is a zone of individual responsibility and autonomy: you cannot carry more than four amot in the public sphere on Shabbat,7 you can acquire an object simply because it falls within your four amot,8 and “since the destruction of the Temple, God Godself only has the four amot of halacha.”9
When there is only light to see someone at a distance of two or three amot, I can see them by virtue of them being close to me: I see them insofar as we have overlapping concerns, obligations, interests. In metaphorical terms, I can see them because I can see how they are like me. But at a distance of four amot, I am forced to recognize that the person in front of me is not me: they have their own agency, responsibilities, relationship with God. They are a stranger.
At first glance, this would seem to take us back to Schmitt: I recognize the other as a stranger, and now I know who I am. There is, however, a critical difference. When I admit that I don’t know who the other is, my own identity can be destabilized. If I recognize that I don’t exactly understand who they are — if there’s something strange about them, something beyond what I can put into words, something I can’t quite pin down — then I can’t define myself in opposition to them. I’m forced to admit that I can’t quite recognize myself, either: I, too, am strange.10 And it is only once I can recognize that stranger as a stranger — as someone standing at a distance with their own four amot — that I can recite the Shema and call out to God, the ultimate stranger — “For My plans are not your plans, nor are My ways your ways” (Isaiah 55:8-9). “A believer in God knows that all kingship belongs to God, and we are all strangers and residents alongside God,” wrote one 18th-century Jewish thinker. “Any person who joins us from the nations for the sake of God is equal to us.”11 What makes us equal in our relationship to God is our shared distance from God, ourselves, and each other. We are all God’s strangers.
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler declares:
[E]thics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me… and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession.12
To allow ourselves to be undone by each other is to be responsible for one another; to be responsible for one another is to open ourselves up to our shared strangeness, and it is that strangeness that might free us all — the gaps between us across which we reach, in the gaps inside of us, the white fire flickering between the black fire of the letters of the Torah, the void between the two cherubs from which God’s voice would call out in the vastness of the desert.
JPS translation.
See Shadal’s discussion as to the identity of the midwives.
Carl Schmitt, On the Concept of the Political (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27.
As philosopher Todd McGowan writes:
Despite the political opposition between liberalism and nativist movements, the same dynamic holds true for liberalism. The liberal community can only exist as a community insofar as some entity threatens it… the ideal of bringing everyone inside — achieving total inclusivity — is a liberal fantasy that requires someone to play the heavy and continue to threaten the liberal community.
Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation (London: Repeater Books, 2004), 124.
Ibid., 113.
BT Berachot 9b.
BT Shabbat 96b.
BT Bava Metzia 10a.
BT Berachot 8A.
These ideas are indebted to McGowan, as well as Eric Santner’s On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life.
Naphtali Herz Wessely, Gan Na’ul 1:9.
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 136.