Making Sense of the Sedra: Shemot

“A new king arose who did not know Joseph.” Thus is the proximate start to the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, as we read about in this week’s parsha, Shemot. Joseph, with humility, patience and an appreciation that his gifts were God-given, enabled the transformation of Egypt, giving the country the physical and psychological resilience to weather the forthcoming famine. Yet, given it was politically prudent at the time – after all, the Jews were “multiplying, flourishing, increasing, becoming stronger – the land is full of them!” – it did not take long for a new leader to arise with an agenda of ignorance.  The commentaries do differ – Rashi brings sages who say that the king was in actuality new, or that he merely “became renewed in his decrees” – but, either way, Pharoah’s ignorance was not incidental. National memory is part of national identity, and for a recent prime minister of such standing to be erased from the history books, the Joseph and thus Jewish story had to be erased from the founding myths of Egypt.

We are naive if we assume that memory is fixed; history is not merely the collection of facts that brought us through serendipity or the vicissitudes of time to where we are today, but the fabric of our being as individuals, communities and nations. There is no classically Jewish word for history; as Haim Yerushalmi describes in his seminal work Zakhor, Judaism is “as a technology of memory, a set of practices designed to make the past present.” Our Jewish life – most notably the Seder but that is one of myriad examples – is about inculcating the present with a living past, a communal consciousness in which even trivial acts become laden with the God-intoxication of our ancestors, and our values are guided by lessons learned from prophets and priests; sages and kings; the wise and the weak.

King Solomon, the wisest of all men, wrote: “The more knowledge, the more pain.” We live in an age when there is, seemingly, more knowledge than ever before – we are bombarded with a constant flow of information. Yet we seem to be in an age when it is easier to be ignorant, and this ignorance has in so many ways led to marginalisation, exclusion, suffering and worse.

Adam was not forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge; he had to eat first from the Tree of Life. Had he done so, the fruits of knowledge would have not been the elixir of death but of life. We may have been exiled from the Garden, but God leaves us still with access to the path to the Tree of Life. Ignorance is deadly, but a commitment to life is the path that will protect us all.