The marginal man ... is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two not merely different but antagonistic cultures.Why did השם choose Moses to take the Jewish people out of Egypt? What made Moses especially suited for this undertaking? Perhaps Moses was best qualified for this task because he was what the sociologist Robert Park called a “marginal man.”
Robert E. Park
For Park, the “marginal man” was a distinctive personality type produced by contact and communication between peoples. He was a “cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now sought to find a place. He was a man on the margin of two cultures and two societies, which never completely interpenetrated and fused.” In his 1928 article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” Park identified the Jew in the modern era, “when … the walls of the medieval ghetto were torn down and [he] was permitted to participate in the cultural life of the peoples among whom he lived,” as the marginal man par excellence.
In this week’s portion, Moses appears as just such a marginal man. He is Jewish, descended from Levi (Ex. 2:1), but cut off from his people when his mother places him in a basket afloat in the Nile. This is a highly symbolic act. As Robert Alter notes, “Egypt is associated with water, almost everything there being linked with its central waterway, the Nile,” which is “an Egyptian deity, as Rashi notes, and the very source of life in Egypt.” Pharaoh’s daughter finds the baby and gives him the name Moses, “for I drew him from the water” (Ex. 2.10), again symbolizing his immersion in Egyptian culture and society. Indeed, the boy Moses grows up in an Egyptian household as a son to Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex. 2:10). However, as befits Park’s notion of the marginal man, Moses doesn't break with his Jewish past: he “went out to his brethren and saw their burdens” (Ex. 2:11). This means, according to Rashi, that Moses did not merely observe but “directed his eyes and heart to share their distress.” And when Moses sees “a Hebrew man, of his brethren,” struck by an Egyptian taskmaster, he leaps to the defense of the Jewish slave with deadly force (Ex. 2:11-12). As a result of this act, Moses finds that he is no longer accepted in the Egyptian society in which he was raised: “Pharaoh heard about this matter and sought to kill Moses” (Ex. 2: 15). As this conflicted upbringing demonstrates, Moses was “a stranger in a strange land” (Ex. 2:22) even before he left Egypt.
While Moses certainly fits the profile of the marginal man, how did this prepare him to take the Jewish people out of out of Egypt? Robert Park suggests that the marginal man is characterized by two related personality traits: he is both “enlightened” and “emancipated.” The marginal man is enlightened insofar as “he learns to look upon the world in which he was born and bred” with less prejudice and more objectivity. He is emancipated insofar as “energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition are released…. [H]e is not bound as others are by the local proprieties and conventions.” In contrast to Moses, both the Egyptians and the Jews were bound by customary modes of action and thought. While the Egyptians were unable to see the injustice of their ways, the slave mentality of the Jews deprived them of the courage to resist injustice. As a marginal man, Moses was liberated from both constraints. His ties to the Jewish people freed him to “see” the injustice of their burdens (Ex. 2:11), while his princely Egyptian upbringing (as Ibn Ezra pointed out) gave him the courage that Jewish slaves lacked.
These leadership qualities are most evident when Moses flees from Egypt into the wilderness (Ex. 2:15), undertaking on a personal level what he must later lead his brethren to do collectively. The wilderness, as Robert Alter notes, is a “liminal space” between Egypt and the Promised Land, “where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred.” Moses does not fear to journey into this symbolic space. Indeed, herding the sheep of his newly acquired father-in-law Jethro, Moses “led the flock to the farthest end of the wilderness” (אחר המדבר) until he arrived “at the Mountain of God, toward Horeb” (Ex. 3:1). Horeb, as Ibn Ezra noted, means “dryness” or “parched place”; it is thus the antithesis of watery Egypt. Here in the wilderness Moses is free from the fear of Pharaoh’s death sentence, which was a reiteration of Pharaoh's previous genocidal order to drown every Jewish son in the Nile (Ex. 1:22), and Moses incurs new obligations (“you shall take My people, the Children of Israel, out of Egypt”), prefiguring the receiving of the Torah by the Jewish people.
When an astonished Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should take the Children of Israel out of Egypt,” השם answers cryptically, “this is the sign” (זה–לך האות). To what does זה (“this”) refer? Perhaps to the marginality that has brought Moses to Horeb and prepared him for the task ahead.
