Yitro: "There is no middle between two opposites"
On a mountain brimming with flames, with thunder and the call of the shofar ringing out, God declares, “I YHVH am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). Why does God, before saying anything else, remind the Israelites of the Exodus? Rashi explains that the phrase “who brought you out of the land of Egypt” carries a logical implication: “On account of this bringing out, you should be subjugated to Me.”1 God makes this claim explicit later in the Torah: “For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants: they are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt—I, your God YHVH” (Lev. 25:55).
What sort of freedom is this, exchanging one master for another? What better evidence of religion as an opiate of the masses (Marx) or an infantile desire for a powerful father (Freud) could there be?
Capitalism accustoms us to thinking of freedom as total agency: to decide our health insurance, our toothpaste flavor, our favorite TV show, our work. The veneer of freedom, of course, masks the ways in which our choices and our very desires are imposed upon us by forces beyond our control. In a slightly misanthropic, if haunting, passage, Theodor Adorno argues:
I would almost go so far as to say that even the apparently harmless visit to the cinema to which we condemn ourselves should really be accompanied by the realization that such visits are actually a betrayal of the insights we have acquired and that they will probably entangle us – admittedly only to an infinitesimal degree, but assuredly with a cumulative effect – in the processes that will transform us into what we are supposed to become and what we are making of ourselves in order to enable us to survive, and to ensure that we conform.2
When we imagine ourselves to be most free is precisely when we’re at risk of falling under the sway of forces whose subtlety masks their perniciousness.
Generations after the Exodus, the prophet Elijah stands at Mount Carmel and challenges the Israelites: “If YHVH is God, then follow Him, and if Ba’al is God, then follow him” (I Kings 18:21). “There is no middle between two opposites,” explains the Malbim.3 Or, as the Ba’al Shem Tov explained, commenting on God’s warning lest the Israelites “turn and worship other gods” (Deut. 11:16) that “as soon as one turns from God, one is worshipping other gods, and there is no in-between.”4
Of course, Marx and Freud are not wrong: religion has often been one of the forces that has sought to “transform us into what we are supposed to become,” and Judaism, too, has been used oppressively (though, until recently, only against other Jews).
But the Malbim and the Ba’al Shem Tov’s — and the Torah’s — insistence that “there is no middle” still carries a deep truth: we are always serving something, and the only question is who or what. We always find ourselves in a web of obligations, many of them not of our choosing, that shape us and our desires. The opposite of Pharaoh is not the total liberty to determine our lives, if only because such liberty does not exist, and when we imagine it does — as capitalism encourages us to — is when we are least conscious of just how un-free we are.
The Talmud states that at Sinai, God held the mountain over the Jews’ heads and forced them to accept the covenant. But generations later, in the time of Mordechai and Esther, the Jews willingly accepted it.5 Mara Benjamin writes:
This “coercion” of Israel at Sinai, in which the people stand under divine threat, also emphasizes obligation as a name for being always already in, bonded to, and responsive to a world… We always stand “under the mountain,” positioned only to respond to the conditionality of our being and of the others who constitute our being in the world.6
Perhaps this, then, is the true divine opposite to Pharaonic bondage: to accept our indebtedness to each other, our infinite obligations to the people whose faces we know and whose faces we do not recognize. If we turn away from those faces, we will find ourselves serving strange gods, who demand only that we close our eyes and shoot to kill.
Rashi on Ex. 20:2.
Problems of Moral Philosophy, 168. See also Capital Vol. I, where Marx describes a “free laborer” as “free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale.”
Malbim on I Kings 18:21.
Tzava’at Ha-Rivash 76.
BT Shabbat 88a.
The Obligated Self, 15-16.