Nehama Leibowitz suggests that “the first exile of the Jewish people” in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus, is the “archetype” of “the recurrent pattern of exile” that Jews subsequently experienced over many centuries. Studying “the themes of exile and redemption in the book of Exodus” may thus “help us to understand the major role played by Exile in Jewish history.”
What attracted me in this week’s Torah portion, Va’era (וארא, Exodus 6:2–9:35), is the four expressions of redemption (Exodus 6:6–7):
I am the Lord.
And I will free you from the burdens of Egypt,
and deliver you from their bondage,
and redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments,
and take you to be My people.
Following Leibowitz’s premise, perhaps we may see in the four expressions of redemption the archetype of the Messianic redemption. That thought led me to Gershom Scholem’s famous essay “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.”
Scholem’s essay contains a fascinating discussion of the book Ra'ya Mehemna (“Faithful Shepherd,” referring to Moses the prophet), written by an anonymous kabbalist “in the last years of the thirteenth or the first years of the fourteenth century.” According to Scholem’s summary, the book presents the biblical symbols of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge as “types for the different status of things in the unredeemed world and in the Messianic age.” Scholem explains:
Since the Fall of Adam, the world is no longer ruled by the Tree of Life as it had been in the beginning, but by the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life represents the pure, unbroken power of the holy, the diffusion of the divine life through all worlds and the communication of all living things with their divine source. There is no admixture of evil in it, no ‘shells’ which dam up and choke life, no death, and no restriction. But since the Fall of Adam, since the time when the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was eaten, the world is ruled by the mystery of this second tree in which both good and evil have their place. Hence, under the rule of this Tree, the world contains differentiated spheres: the holy and the profane, the pure and the impure, the permitted and the forbidden, the living and the dead, the divine and the demonic….
The purpose of the law, which as it were constitutes the Torah as it can be read in the light—or shadow!—of the Tree of Knowledge, is to confine [the power of evil, destruction, and death] if not to overcome it entirely. But in the Messianic redemption the full glory of the utopian again breaks forth, although characteristically and in keeping with the idea of the Tree of Life it is conceived as a restoration of the state of things in Paradise. In a world in which the power of evil has been broken, all those differentiations also disappear which had been derived from it. In a world in which only the pure life still reigns, obstructions to the stream of life, which solidify it in externals and in ‘shells,’ no longer have any validity or significance.
How is this related to the four expressions of redemption?
The first two expressions appear under the aspect of the Tree of Knowledge; they release and deliver the Jewish people from the power of evil. Akin to Émile Durkheim’s negative rites, they separate the Jews from the power of evil in order to protect them from it.
In contrast, the last two expressions appear under the aspect of the Tree of Life. Rather than separate the Jewish people from the power of evil, they bring about their (re-)unification with the holy. The third expression, redemption, as Leibowitz points out, is “an action performed by one member of a family for another,” as in Leviticus 25:25. In this case, the Bridegroom redeems His bride. And the fourth expression—“the most intimate,” says Leibowitz—brings the Jewish people into communion with their God, restoring the “diffusion of the divine life” and the “communication” with the “divine source” that existed in Paradise before the Fall of Adam. (This restorative aspect is also suggested by the envelope structure of God’s address to Moses in Exodus 6:2–8, diagrammed by Leibowitz.) By virtue of the communion they establish, the last two expressions of redemption correspond to Durkheim’s positive rites.
